Archive of Our Own

Alastor still recalls a time when he hadn’t expected there to be weekends in Hell. He had arrived late on a Friday, with anything rightfully called evening far behind him. Not that he’d recognized it as night, at the time; it was equally plausible back then that Hell was a place of permanent darkness.

By dawn, he learned otherwise. And soon after that, Rosie had tracked him to one of the first fantastic disasters he had caused in Pride, and then... She had been unexpectedly gracious about the novelty of everything. If sometimes gratingly amused.

Ninety years later, and there is hardly a single novelty left to be mined from this ring.

Vox is certainly trying, however.

Alastor wakes late on a Saturday—a habit of nearly thirty years of life and over seventy of death, interrupted by the hotel (of course) and then by Vox’s horrible nature as an early riser—to unusual silence, a now-unusual lack of another demon pawing at his body, and a faint red cast over the entire room. The latter is on account of Vox still being here: he’s awake, propped up against the headboard and perusing some sort of surveillance footage on the enormous television that Valentino has repeatedly complained about Vox mounting in his bedroom.

(There is a statistic—if Valentino is to be believed—that couples with televisions in their bedrooms have less sex. When Valentino repeated it to Alastor, the immediate implication sent him into a minor hysterical fit.)

For another thing, it’s incredible that Valentino hasn’t trained his frequent bedmate better than to wake up so early. The only times that Alastor has seen Valentino before nine o’clock in the morning have been against both of their wills.

He glances up at the glaring light of the television only for long enough to recognize that it appears to be casting from a number of different livestreams. Then he turns over to repossess his monocle from the nightstand. He is not particularly interested in whatever is satisfying Vox’s latest urge towards voyeurism, but he is even less interested in succumbing to a headache in the first waking hour of his day.

“You know it’s almost ten a.m.?” There’s fond humor in Vox’s tone. A few, short weeks ago, Alastor would have been able to go an hour before hearing anyone else’s voice so close.

Ugh, his own thoughts reek of Rosie’s influence. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be helping that sweet Princess?’ 

He can’t stand to let her win. 

“Mm?” He hums at Vox, and shifts to sit up against the headboard some two feet from his side. 

“You know the rest of Hell has been up for hours?”

Ah, that’s what he’s watching. Surveillance from any number of his little drones, no doubt multiplying now that Alastor hasn’t made himself available to strike down any near his airspace. 

“Do I have a busy day ahead?” he asks, dry as bone. 

Vox snickers.

“Yeah, fine,” he says. “You’re a cute sleeper, anyway. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

He resents the implication, just a little, that Vox was watching him. But then—of course he was. He hardly ever stops.

“What’s this?” Alastor says, settling in to observe the screen. One of them, at least; he’ll admit he’s more interested in the events on Vox’s face than whoever he’s spying on.

“Oh, you know, just most of Hell.” 

It’s likely meant to impress him; a shame, then, that Alastor can’t bring himself to care. He does, however, enjoy how his complete non-reaction makes the smile droop off of Vox’s screen.

“You know I see everything that happens down here?” Vox adds.

“I can’t imagine wanting to,” Alastor says. “It’s mostly terrible.”

Vox glares at him, sidelong. Alastor has no choice but to snicker. 

“So there’s nothing you want to see,” Vox says. Alastor raises a single brow. “Don’t want to check on Rosie? Mimzy?”

“Vox,” Alastor warns. Vox exhibits the small wisdom necessary to heed it.

“How about your old Hotel?”

Alastor briefly closes his eyes.

“I was just pondering my good fortune not to wake up there,” he says, flat. But Vox is staring at him, doubting it. Surely it’s too early for this kind of jealous jag.

After a moment, Vox’s voice rings out, demanding. “Are you managing me right now?”

Alastor’s brow pulls tight. Vox takes it upon himself to turn halfway towards him, pulling one leg into a bend.

“Look, I know you…had… something with those freaks,” Vox says—obviously not understanding even what he thinks he knows, but carrying on nevertheless. “You don’t have to pretend it didn’t happen to make me feel better.”

Alastor stares openly at Vox, which is ordinarily enough to get this sort of thing to stop.

It doesn’t, though. If anything, the ridiculous creature leans in.

“I mean, at least you’re not still bitching about them now,” Vox adds, and something clicks.

“Oh,” Alastor says. “This is about Valentino. I see.”

“Wh—No!”

Vox flusters, though. It’s actually sort of charming; Alastor spares him an earnest grin.

“I wouldn’t worry about his commitment,” Alastor says truthfully, “or whatever you’d call it. He seems infatuated.”

He would have to be, to put up with half of the shit Vox has been pulling on a near-daily basis. Unless of course Valentino is also plotting his way out of a soul deal, in which case, the more the merrier.

“That’s not—I’m not worried about Val,” Vox seethes. Alastor leans over to pat his arm in a show of support and condescension.

“Of course not, my dear,” he says. “And you’re very pretty, too.”

Vox lunges at him. Alastor goes willingly, cackling as his skull cracks against the headboard. But the sound of it brings Vox to a stuttering stop.

“Shit,” Vox says, not actually retreating from where he is now straddling Alastor. “Are you alright?”

Fifty years of torture, was it?

“I’m an Overlord, Vox,” he says dryly. “It will take far more than that.”

“I mean—not technically,” Vox retorts. And, surprise surprise, Alastor actually feels an unproductive little tendril of offense.

Arguing this point with Vox would be incredibly stupid.

“I know that Valentino hasn’t shared your bed in days,” Alastor says instead. “Would you like to go double or nothing?”

Vox raises his hands in surrender. A particularly pathetic move, given that Alastor quite literally doesn’t have a choice. 

Then again, Vox has made abundantly clear, of late, that he isn’t actually interested in dragging Alastor by force into his bed.

“He’s just being a brat,” Vox complains, shifting out of Alastor’s lap to throw himself dramatically against the pillows. “And that stupid whore is distracting him.”

It would be unreasonable, Alastor is sure, to ask which one. 

“He knows how important it is that we put on a united front right now.”

Although that isn’t exactly what Vox wants from Valentino, is it? Less ‘unity’ and more ‘falling in line,’ Alastor thinks. Which is all the better, of course. He can hardly complain about that.

Vox’s eyes have been on him for too long.

“You literally don’t care about this at all, do you?”

Alastor smiles placidly.

“What was your first clue?”

Vox shakes his head, huffing a laugh, and presses himself back to a slightly less mopey seated position. 

“Fuck it,” he says. “Let’s see how the hazbins are doing.”

Alastor rolls his eyes. And he is expecting a camera feed, despite all of his better knowledge—god knows no one is stopping Vox from sneaking one into the Hotel right now. Last he checked, Charlie went so far as to let him install a television in the lobby.

But then Vox’s eyes go wide, and Alastor realizes his mistake as he watches the man’s own text messages scroll across his screen.

not at the hotel

Where are you right now?

In the best of all possible worlds, Alastor thinks, Angel will have been passed out in an alley or some such. In which case, Alastor would neither have to contend with the outcome of another intrusion on the Hotel, or with Vox’s…

A poorly-lit image of Valentino’s bedroom fills the entirety of Vox’s screen.

With profound exasperation, Alastor taps the back of his skull against the headboard.

“Can you fucking believe him?!” Vox explodes, his face blinking back onto his screen.

(Alastor can, in fact.)

“To the best of my understanding,” he says, which is understating it a bit—Valentino discusses his relationships often— “isn’t this a usual part of your arrangement?”

“This isn’t about that,” Vox protests. “He’s not supposed to—he’s doting on him, Alastor. Like he likes him. Like he even cares.”

Well, Heaven forbid. What in the world are they even talking about?

“He’s just a stupid fucking whore, and I’m—” Vox is squeezing a pillow with evident difficulty; his claws threaten to breach the cotton lining underneath. “He’s just a contract! He shouldn’t be sleeping in our bed!”

It’s no wonder that Vox has had so much trouble approaching his level, if this is how he spends his quiet hours.

(If it were Alastor’s issue—setting aside how he would come to be jealous of Valentino’s dalliances with Angel, of all people—he would simply find a way to undermine their contract. Angel would readily leave, he would swoop in as a source of comfort, and ta-da.

Vox is an excellent manipulator; it’s incredible that he hasn’t thought of this.)

“Should we really be throwing stones, my dear?” Alastor says instead. It catches Vox off-guard, shaking some of the impotent rage out of his expression.  

“That’s—you’re not a contract,” Vox says, in an adorably small voice.

Which is demonstrably false, in fact, but the earnest way that Vox says it almost makes Alastor feel bad. 

Alastor snickers at him.

“How sweet,” he says, and catches the pillow that Vox tries to throw at him with ease. He sets it aside and pats it gently. “But you are, technically, doing the exact same thing.”

Vox glowers at him. Alastor smiles wider, pleased.

“Yeah, this is not what Val is doing,” he says, gesturing to the foot of space between them. Alastor has to snicker to himself again. “…unless?”

Vox performs a miraculous recovery from emotional turmoil to open lasciviousness. Alastor doesn’t know why he’s at all surprised. 

“I’m not going to fuck you,” he says bluntly.

“Technically not what Angel Dust is doing.” 

Alastor smiles sheer incredulity across the bedspread until Vox tries again.

“Fine, we don’t have to do that,” Vox says, still creeping forward. Alastor heaves an open sigh—frankly, he’s a bit theatrical about it. It does little to deter Vox from coming to straddle him again.

Nor to reach between his wrists, and—

Fuck. He’d almost forgotten about that. Vox’s claws pluck at their deal chain, suddenly heavy and tangible where it hangs like manacles from his wrists.

“But you did mention something about this, the other day,” Vox croons, in a tone that Alastor has heard him use with Valentino several times. “Want to play ‘contract?’”

Alastor assumes it would be a bridge too far to freely admit that he was lying.

“Vox,” he says instead, leveraging a more subtle show of resistance. “It’s nearly eleven in the morning. Don’t you have a schedule?”

“It’s a Saturday,” Vox answers, the grin huge across his screen. Alastor casts his gaze to the side, strategizing his retreat. But there isn’t one, is there. At least, not that he thinks he would actually prefer. 

His eyes track back slowly to face front. When he reaches out a claw to tap the bottom of Vox’s screen, Vox does nothing to arrest him. 

“What did you have in mind?” He asks, and Vox responds by coiling the length of chain tighter within one fist. 

Alastor’s heart thuds cold irritation. Rosie used to do this to annoy him—never to tittilate. And why would she? Even if he were the type of person who did this sort of thing, it’s not desirous to feel a demand on one’s whole being.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Vox says, and leans ever further in.

He means to kiss him. Alastor knows that look, and he was not inspired by Vox’s first performance. 

So long as they’re ‘playing contract,’ Alastor ducks down to bite at Vox’s neck like the poorly domesticated thing he is.

Alastor would know just how to handle such behavior, because Alastor is not a crude businessman—like Vox, with his ledgers and his ‘employees.’ Alastor’s souls aren’t tallies on a chart or numbers in a payroll; they’re a menagerie.

Vox chokes and sputters hilariously, and loses an unappetizing combination of blood and oil to the confines of Alastor’s maw before he leverages his cables to wrench Alastor away.

Alastor grins at him like a cat with feathers in its mouth. 

“You are a nightmare,” Vox says, breathless.

“Thank you!” Alastor chirps.

“You’re going to pay for that,” Vox growls. 

And then Vox tosses him back to the bed with all of his chains and cables. Alastor laughs about it, grinning his delight, even as Vox braces his weight on both of Alastor’s legs with furious purpose. That much is interesting. It’s a bit heady, even, a rush in the same way as the blood and oil on his tongue—

But then Vox goes and ruins it.

Alastor’s heart drops like a stone when Vox yanks the chain above his head—and it isn’t even rational, he doesn’t mind this much when Rosie does it—

He’s smiling. But there must be something in his face that makes Vox stop.

“Hey, wait,” Vox says. Both of his hands are occupied, either with the chain or bracing himself above Alastor on the bed—which means that he takes the completely ridiculous step of stroking Alastor’s cheek with a cable, in a misplaced effort to check on him. “What’s the face?”

Alastor broadens his grin, skeptical, but it does not make Vox carry on.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Alastor says, eventually.

“It’s like,” Vox says, and shifts his weight. The chain jerks; Alastor feels it down to his fucking soul. “That.”

Alastor casts his gaze to the side, at war. And he rolls the words over in his mouth to admit this ridiculous discomfort—to give Vox the honesty that he does not want to give—before Vox casts through the issue like a runner cutting tape.

“You know you don’t have to like it just because you thought you would,” Vox says, awkward in his thoughtfulness. He’s out of practice, Alastor assumes. “Is it the whole idea, or?”

Arguably, just enduring Vox’s best attempt at torture would be more pleasant than talking about it. Alastor regards Vox warily, waiting for his own silence to make Vox ramble on. But apparently he has begun to catch onto that trick, as he only watches in silence. 

“The chain,” Alastor admits, with useless shame carding through the words. Vox has the gall to drop the thing as if it burns.

“There, see?” Vox says, coaxing him like some sort of frightened animal. And Alastor resents it, even as he curls slightly against the same discomfort that Vox is obviously seeing, pulling his arms down to his chest. “We don’t have to use it.”

Alastor squints at him.

“I did tell you,” he begins, and Vox immediately waves a hand.

“So?” He says. “Fuck, I told Val I thought I’d be into watersports.”

At this point, Alastor has seen just enough of Valentino’s work to follow the meaning.

“You did what,” Alastor utters, with gleeful disbelief.

“—look, it was—” Vox stammers. “The point is, sometimes something only sounds good in theory, and then it sucks.”

“Nevermind that,” Alastor says. “I’d really like to hear more about you and Valentino.”

Vox groans exasperation, leaning back to sit on his knees.

“You’re never letting this go, are you,” he says after a moment.

“Absolutely not,” Alastor agrees.

“Even though I only told you to make you feel better about your thing?”

Alastor’s grin broadens. “Are you trying to appeal to my conscience?”

That, of all things, makes Vox’s whole face fall. Literally—he pitches his screen forward in a way that Alastor imagines must not be good for his neck.

“Right,” he says. “I’m in love with a maniac. Great. Can we go back to the part where I was putting the moves on you?”

Alastor’s hands are still tucked near his chest, when Vox determines to try again. He’s not easily discouraged, Alastor reflects—or just insuppressibly aroused even in the wake of his own embarrassment and Alastor’s discomfort. That seems more likely, all things equal. Anyway, Vox hardly hesitates to wind a set of all-too-familiar cables around Alastor’s wrists in separate parts, coming together to form an apparent mimicry of the deal chain that he just dismissed.

Perhaps the association should still bother Alastor, but it doesn’t. At bottom, it just feels different: a wholly physical restraint. 

“There,” Vox says, chuckling his awkward recovery. He fists a hand in the length of cable braided together between Alastor’s wrists. “Feeling better, dear?”

He rolls his eyes at the endearment, but decides not to resist. He should reward Vox’s good behavior, for one thing, and for another—well, curiosity be damned, but he’d like to see what Vox is plotting now. 

He goes more or less willingly when Vox presses him onto his back. And though he’s more than a bit skeptical of the way Vox takes advantage by immediately straddling his hips, he’s adequately distracted by the way Vox begins to wrench his wrists above his head.

There’s a heady sensation of helplessness. And, as Vox presses the cables high up towards the headboard, a punishing stretch.

And then something pops audibly in his spine—awful, sweet expansion—and Alastor literally whines relief at the decompression of his vertebrae from, oh, just shy of a month of being carted around in an office chair.

Vox gapes at him in shock and disbelief.

Alastor shifts slightly, trying to negotiate the stretch into something that will reach his lower back. He pays no mind to the way it makes Vox shiver above him.

“You can’t seriously be that cute,” Vox says, as if offended. But then he stretches out to wrench the cables higher, and Alastor’s arms nearly slip out of their sockets before he gives in and arches his back. It pulls at the sorely compressed muscles branching down to his tail. Something that he will never acknowledge as a squeak escapes him. 

His lashes flutter with relief. His smile is, he’ll readily admit, easier than Vox has seen in years.

Vox appears to be drooling a little. 

“I’m not,” he informs Vox, without a hint of outrage. “You just have incomprehensible taste.”

The words do nothing to discourage him, thank Hell. Vox’s hands stray from the braid of cable to his wrists, which enables him to tug one wrist slowly higher than the other, with Alastor the beneficiary of a fantastic stretch down the sides of his waist.

His ears have gone lax against the pillows. He does not particularly care that Vox is looking at them.

“…okay, new plan,” Vox says, and tugs his left wrist higher. Alastor shivers open delight. “No torture. I know exactly what I want to do with you.”

He’d accuse Vox of going soft, if that weren’t visibly inaccurate.

“You,” he says instead, and cuts off in favor of absorbing the sensation as Vox stretches him again. “Are very easily swayed.”

“Yeah?” Vox says, his grin broadening. “Are you sure that’s me we’re talking about?”

Alastor has time to furrow his brow before Vox drops the cables over a hook built into the headboard. 

Vox’s claws pluck open the first button of his pajama shirt. 

“I have no idea what you’re trying to accuse me of,” Alastor says, watching with something bordering on intrigue as Vox exposes the healing wreck of his chest in slow progression.

(He wonders, with a little thrill, if Vox is sadistic enough to do anything about that outside of active combat. But then again, ‘no torture.’ Boo.)

“Right,” Vox snorts. He can’t seem to resist tracing the tips of his claws over Alastor’s skin as it’s revealed—and not even to touch the ragged edges of his wound. As he thought: going soft. “The big, bad Radio Demon is going to resist and brat at me until the bitter end. No sweetness for anyone who gets you under contract, right?”

He’s so ridiculously wrong that Alastor almost snorts out loud about it. Sometimes, he thinks, he would almost like to be the myth that Vox has made of him. It’s quite flattering.

“Why would I punish you for doing something that feels good, Vox?” He says instead, deliberately needling.

“Aw,” Vox says, casting the two sides of his shirt fully from his chest. The arms can go no further than the cables, but that seems to be of no moment to Vox. “Finally admitting that your Master knows what’s good for you?”

Oh, no; he can’t take it. Alastor snickers with literally insuppressible hysteria, and then guffaws out loud when his reaction makes the grin fall off of Vox’s screen into a scowl.

He can’t even give Vox the mercy of letting him in on the joke. And it’s hilarious.

“Seriously making me want to torture you instead, Al,” Vox snipes. Alastor trembles with humor.

“I’m almost certain that’s your prerogative,” he informs Vox, which makes Vox grip his sides in a petty show of force. Alastor lowers his eyelids, an overreaction so blatant as to border on coquettish. Unsurprisingly, Vox’s eyes grow larger on his face.

His claws sink in, a threatening tease, and Alastor is already a bit too warm not to let himself shiver with it.

“It’s like you want to be hurt,” Vox huffs, squeezing tight enough to draw pinpricks of blood.

“It’s like that, is it,” Alastor says, and breathes in deeply to flex his torso into the abuse.

The thing is…

Well, the core thing is that he does want this. It’s painful, but it feels nice, in the same way that the exertion of exercise and the relief that follows being done with it feels awful and terribly good. And he’s hardly gotten even that, lately, so horrendously misused by months of nannying and hotel management for a group of overanxious do-gooders who would balk if he so much as casually attacked anyone worth fighting in the street.

“…you just want to fucking pick, don’t you.” Disbelief dawns across Vox’s face. Alastor can’t imagine why; it’s not as though he’s subtle.

(It’s not as though he ever has to be, to cast Vox about like a puppet anyway.)

“Perhaps I’m just surrendering,” he suggests.

“Yeah, and I was born yesterday,” Vox huffs, and withdraws his claws with unsatisfying haste. He hooks one around the cables, pulling Alastor down from his slight suspension towards the headboard, and Alastor exhales soft surprise when he’s flipped onto his front.

His wound aches at the pressure. He grits his teeth about it, more or less cooperative even as Vox settles to a low kneel over the backs of his thighs.

A precarious position, to be sure, but… well, he isn’t stupid enough to trust Vox, but curiosity nags.

He sincerely blames no one but himself for being surprised when Vox’s claws rake over his tail. It’s actually the first thing he should expect Vox to do at all times; he has no idea what he was thinking.

“Vox,” he complains, twisting his head to glower disapproval over one shoulder. 

“I thought you were surrendering,” Vox mocks. 

(Well. He walked into that, didn’t he.)

Alastor pins his ears in irritation and directs his gaze towards the pillows again, feeling unjustifiably caught. It does not help at all when Vox clearly takes his reaction as a victory, groping sharply at the base of his tail in a way that bullies a shiver up his spine.

The wise thing to do, he thinks, would be not to react. But even Rosie, who is annoyingly prone to pet his ears when in a teasing mood, has never taken this sort of liberty. 

It’s just—oversensitive, and a wildly unfamiliar sort of touch. Which is probably why Vox is doing it, obsessed as he is with staking claims however he possibly can.

“This really winds you up, doesn’t it?” Vox says—which is an asinine question at best, as there is nothing stopping him from seeing how tensely Alastor has drawn his back in an effort not to react. (He’s almost certainly staring. But if Alastor looks over his shoulder to check, it will feel a little like he’s lost.) “I might help you out with that, if you behave.”

Alastor snorts out loud.

“And what if I don’t?” he retorts, because Vox has already once failed to commit to torturing him. Alastor could chase him around this ring all morning.

Vox’s palms splay, warm and unexpected, over the thin skin of his low back.

“You know what,” he says, leaning down. Alastor can feel it without looking, increasingly pinned underneath Vox’s bodyweight. “I don’t think I care. I’m just gonna do whatever I want anyway.”

…oh. 

There’s no telling why that makes him feel so warm. But it does, anyway, diffusing an absurd thrill of helplessness through his entire chest.

He thinks he might be melting. He doesn’t know.

“…Fuck, is that what you like?”

It’s not ‘you like that,’ the kind of ridiculous dialogue he’s heard more times than can be believed on workdays with Valentino. No; it sounds like an actual question, mixed up in a tone of abject disbelief.

Alastor can’t say he knows what ‘that’ is, so he doubts that his input will be helpful here. But he’s certainly more invested now in what Vox is doing, so he does Vox the small favor of glancing hopefully over one shoulder at the man.

By the time he does, Vox’s expression is greedy, a downright ominous grin subsuming the lower two-thirds of his face.

Chilling!

“No, Alastor.” Vox’s claws are sharper, at his scalp. As he still has yet to figure out that Alastor can’t resist his direct touch, he’s delightfully mean about the way he shoves his head forward again. “No cute little doe eyes.”

Cute! Doe eyes!

How dare Vox say things that are absolutely true.

The claws in his hair trace the base of one ear, drawing an involuntary twitch. 

“Just bite the pillow and take what I give you.”

Out of profound kindness and a willingness to play along, Alastor tries to snicker quietly. 

And then to be obnoxious, he says—still laughing—

“Vox. Does Valentino know that you’ve stolen his script?”

The unfortunate thing is that it absolutely throws Vox off: there is no art to the mean way he grabs Alastor’s ear and pulls.

It hurts, though, a biting pain that is so unfamiliar that he actually tries to bend backward to resist. Vox twists the delicate cartilage between two claws, contorting it until a wince escapes Alastor’s throat.

“I’m trying to be nice, here, Al,” Vox growls.

“Hardly very successfully,” Alastor retorts, which he assumes is exactly when and why Vox resolves to electrocute him.

It doesn’t seem premeditated. He’s only just gotten the last word out; he almost bites his tongue. And whereas Vox had been playing before, teasing, this—the vicious, full-body pinch of a live current—sends Alastor briefly out of his mind.

(Out of more than his mind. He’ll never tell, but it’s the only thing that makes even the sixth sense of a signal go absent, feel shut down or out of reach. Electrical interference—he should never have been surprised.)

When the pain wears off, he’s trembling. 

“You just had to keep pushing,” Vox says, like some disappointed caregiver. Alastor would find it more ridiculous if his heart weren’t still palpitating. “Had enough?”

He presses his face into the pillow, wondering why Vox is dangling that there, tantalizingly in reach. Surely he knows that Alastor can’t help himself.

He wants it too much. What comes out doesn’t even pretend to be a taunt.  

“We have an appearance tomorrow,” he tells Vox hazily. “You should make it show.”

Vox is too inclined towards gentleness, lately, when he isn’t being a degenerate. The latter plays well enough as a show of dominance—the only thing Hell’s population appreciates more than violence is pseudo-sexual violence. 

Still, there will be actual, serious Overlords in attendance at the next of Vox’s little rallies, so an uncomplicated show of force would be better.

(And, if Alastor is already battered on arrival, he’ll be able to direct his undivided attention to sniffing out who looks the most pleased about that!)

“I don’t have anything to prove, Alastor.” Ridiculous. As if that isn’t all that he’s been doing, scrambling for weeks. “Everyone in Pride knows who you belong to.”

It’s not that Vox is trying to be funny, but fuck if Alastor doesn’t have to laugh.

“Mm—as what, exactly?” Alastor goads. “Velvette calls me your security blanket. Is that the image you were hoping to project?”

Vox’s claws prick at his ear: promising. He digs in.

“Or were you intending it to show that you’re doing all of this for love? It worked for Charlie, I suppose—ah!”

Alastor sinks into the mattress, not needing to be pushed. A bead of blood tickles the shell of his ear from where Vox’s claw pierced it; its twin pins flat against his skull.

There is a quiet moment where Vox just holds him there. Watching, Alastor is sure, the dark blood bend and pool around his fingertip.

“Enough?” he says, again. 

(Fuck, is it ever?)

“Why?” he needles, twisting his neck enough to watch. He barely manages that much; Vox’s grip is inescapable. “Scared you’ll hurt my—” 

Alastor cuts off, biting back a real wince as Vox digs into the fresh puncture. He’s shivering, he thinks, drawn tight and thrilled and focused on the throbbing ache. And then he goes tighter, stiller, when the tip of Vox’s claw withdraws. He bleeds freely. Vox realigns to drag a knife-edge sharpness in a keen diagonal across the tip of the same pinned ear.

He captures the aching, trembling thing between the razors of two digits. And Alastor drags in a sharp breath, thinking even as he does that—surely, Vox doesn’t intend to. Surely, he won’t.

“How about this,” Vox says, through a mouth that is wide and greedy and threatening to eat him whole. “Lift them up so I can make it look good, and I won’t take your whole fucking ear.”

And fuck if Alastor knows if he believes him, but the thought makes him whine out loud. 

Vox lets him have that. Vox lets him shut his eyes and shiver, luxuriating in the godawful, searing helplessness and the terrifying uncertainty of his threat. Blood drips, smearing along the line of Vox’s claws.

It’s fucking impossible to comply. Because his better instinct is to hide and whimper, because Vox’s grip is almost stopping him, because even as he forces one ear up in trembling, stop-and-go flutters of motion, he wants to pin it right back down again, like trying to stay put when something is about to touch your eye.

“Alastor,” Vox chides. He does whimper then, out loud, a wretched, staticky sound that buys him several seconds of patience as Vox presumably grapples with the knowledge that it’s a noise Alastor is even capable of emitting.

It’s like bearing the weight of a building to get his wounded ear upright. He doesn’t try to watch. He’s scared to turn his head.

Vox’s claws have the feeling of a blade, the way he’s handling them now. He lingers there for moments, slow and languid, as if Alastor isn’t warring with himself to remain still. It goes on long enough to make him think that Vox was never going to do it, that at best it had always been an empty threat—

Vox’s claws are so sharp that he hears it happen before the feeling comes to pass. There is a guillotine snip like the sound of scissors cutting hair. And then a burst of electricity, bright and startling and scalding before he can even wrap his mind around the first shock of pain.

His breath catches, loud and trembling. His ear throbs with all the force of a second heartbeat when he pins it back again. And his heart is going to explode, he thinks, if his head doesn’t let him give up and pass out first.

He badly wants Vox to touch him, when he does. The hand at the base of his scalp makes him shudder, but he needs it there, utterly unmoored. 

Claws comb through his hair. The clean ones. Nothing is wetting down with blood.

“Better?” Vox asks—a completely incoherent question to Alastor’s ears. Alastor shudders about it, barely thinking with words. Vox scrapes kindly at his scalp for a while, and then rubs in slow points of pressure at the back of his neck.

His ears creep up, by inches. He’s even more aware of it than usual, with the searing, biting ache of his left one so profound. 

“There you are,” Vox croons. Alastor doesn’t think he’s anything, frankly, but his vision is less blurry and the high-pitched note repeating through his head has finally gone quiet. He whines into the pillows. And then he turns his head just enough to look up at Vox through one bleary eye. “Fuck, you look so… it’s like I mauled you.”

Vox’s claw frames his ear. Instincts be damned, but Alastor flinches at the touch.

“Oh, baby.” It doesn’t feel as—he really was not fond of being called that, at some point. It rings differently now. Or he’s just delirious, latching onto anything affectionate in Vox’s voice. “Are you done? Gonna let me be nice to you now?”

The shudder that elicits shakes his fucking soul.

“Please,” he utters, without the first clue where it comes from. At least Vox doesn’t know either, judging by the startled look on his screen—it’s like Alastor had beamed him with something physical, right between the eyes. 

He turns his face back into the pillows. Vox’s palms press between his shoulders, and Alastor winces as the pressure inevitably agitates his chest, but then there is a jolt of relief as his back cracks like cheap plastic. 

Vox pets down the length of his spine kindly. Alastor resents himself a little for enjoying it—he resents himself much more when Vox follows the sentiment by hooking claws into the waistband of his pants.

He’s almost certainly not… He did say that he wouldn’t. And that isn’t ‘nice,’ and he said—but Alastor would have to be a fool to actually trust Vox when he says anything.

It isn’t his intention to go tense with anticipation, but there isn’t any helping it.

“No fight?” Vox croons.

(The mind boggles. Does he still want one?)

For the Hell of it, Alastor tests the cables. Unsurprisingly, he can’t even put real strain on their length.

“With what power, Vox?” he says—a little nastily, leftover fear straining the words. 

“Aw, are you finally admitting you don’t have any?” Vox teases, and there is really no accounting for the way that sends a shiver down his bare back. 

His tail stands at taut attention, providing no cover as Vox begins to bare the rest of him.

And yes, of course, it occurs to him to protest, but—ugh, what if Vox reacts by going gooey, saccharine and tender in the way that never fails to make Alastor’s skin crawl?

And what if he gets mean again? What if he’s cruel, and Alastor has to live with actually finding that interesting?

Vox’s palm splays, warm, on the furthest point of his unprotected low-back. He’s bracing himself again, reaching off to one side in a way Alastor can feel, although not see, and then he settles back to a kneeling perch over Alastor’s thighs.

And then there is a sharp, plastic click, recognizably the sound of a bottle opening, and—

He isn’t nervous. But he also isn’t about to expect Vox not to do something violating or depraved, because that would be as idiotic as trusting him.

It could be anything that makes his ears pin, sending an awful jolt of pain down to his skull. It’s probably just the sound of whatever Vox thinks he’s doing back there, loud as a fucking gunshot in his silent bedroom.

Vox’s hands, slick with something slightly cold, press into Alastor’s mid-back until his spine cracks. He exhales just this side of too sharply, strained with relief.

“Fuck, Alastor, you’re tighter than Val,” Vox remarks, which would be completely ridiculous dialogue if he weren’t just—but he is, in fact. He’s only digging his thumbs into the overtaxed muscles that Alastor has been using to maintain perfect posture despite being tied to an office chair most days, and dragging them in aching, downward strokes. “And he has six shoulders. What’s your excuse?”

Alastor opens his mouth to answer. Instead, something like a wince comes out. When Vox has the good sense not to call him on it, he tries again.

“Four,” he corrects, feeling pedantic, “not six.”

“Yeah, okay. Walk me through how you think Val’s wings are attached.”

He means to come up with a clever retort, but Vox punctuates his sarcasm with another stroke of painful, perfect pressure, and Alastor feels a knotted mass of tissue in his back give way.

He drops his head, boneless, to the pillow.

Vox works his way lower, feeling for new points of tension to abuse.

“There was, like, a fifty percent chance you’d hate this,” Vox tells him cheerfully, digging his knuckles in along the sides of Alastor’s spine. “Lucky me, huh?”

A little tendril of indignation surfaces.

“And of course, you didn’t think to ask.”

“Already covered that, babe.” On the third pass, the aching pressure makes Alastor arch his back. “I can do whatever I want with you.”

He can sort out what the Hell Vox has done to him to make that kind of claim sound tempting when Vox is done doing this. Because he likes this. He’s enjoying it far too much to worry about a little thing like possibly losing his mind. 

Vox cracks his spine again. Alastor loses his breath in a trembling sigh, and then feels Vox shift self-consciously up from where he’d almost sunk to a seated posture. 

“Fuck, you sound like I’m…”

Almost certainly not, Alastor thinks—but, as he’s told Vox at least once before, the fantasy undoubtedly outstrips reality.

He doesn’t care enough to argue the point. Vox is rolling his knuckles along the vee of muscles that connects to Alastor’s tail, and they are strained taut as piano-wire from pinning the damned thing still under a coat every day.

It’s a punishing amount of pressure, but he’s finding that he trusts its utility, now. 

“C’mon, Al,” Vox croons. “Relax for me.”

Alright, well, that sounds unjustifiably indecent. Nevertheless, he does try, in an undeniable mindset to play along and with his wiser instincts having taken an unexpected sabbatical. His tail twitches. He’s blessed not to be in any position to see Vox’s reaction to that. 

He does witness it, though, in that Vox immediately repeats the same roll of his knuckles, bullying another flutter of movement from the least cooperative part of Alastor’s body.

His face burns. But Vox can’t see that, of course—and even less so when he presses his nose into the pillow.

“Yeah, okay, so that’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” Vox says, rolling bone-dense muscle under his hands a third time. “Are you shy?”

Alastor’s ears pin back in open agitation, blended incurably with a shock of pain—it’s as if he’s being punished for the reaction, and that does something to him, in and of itself. 

He reveals a sliver of his face to glare at Vox, because his words have taken on the feeling of a dare.

“I am not.”

“Holy shit, you’re blushing!”

Fuck.

“It’s a sensitive area,” he deflects, as if that is in any way his core weakness to Vox’s damnable attention.

“Yeah?” Vox says. He levers what must be his entire body weight into the next slow press, and the release that follows it—the way some godawful, long-ignored bit of tension dissolves under the firmness of Vox’s knuckles—is so nice and unexpected that Alastor can do no more than collapse and whimper. “Is that why you’re wagging your tail for me, too?”

He is doing no such thing. It isn’t even anatomically—taxonomically—but ugh, is he supposed to really care? 

“Vox,” he complains, and says no more. He shouldn’t have to; it’s a generic complaint, which should be understood to apply to Vox in general.

“No, Alastor,” Vox says, patiently. He’s uncharacteristically patient, today. It must have something to do with having his hands all over Alastor, if not Alastor tolerating them there. “You’re mine, remember?”

It’s no less ridiculous now than the first time he said it. But now, Alastor shudders, enduring some utterly bizarre sense of warmth that has nothing to do with the wide splay of Vox’s hands.

Vox rubs his sides, gentler.

“Honey.” Really, such small things get such an overreaction out of Vox. Affection drips from his voice—affection, and an uncharacteristic lack of mocking. It makes Alastor want to whine. “Did you forget?”

Well, that’s hardly playing fair. But Vox has no idea just how unfair it is, nor is he ever going to. Alastor twists his neck to look at the ridiculous thing he’s sure Vox’s screen is doing, but an oiled hand stops his progress, a large set of claws cradling the slope of his skull and pressing him incessantly back down.

(He hates this; he’s always hated this. So why, now, would it feel so…)

If he hadn’t spent the past half-hour staring at little more than Vox’s set of sheets, Alastor would seriously suspect hypnosis.

“Alastor,” Vox says, with no less warmth.

He closes his eyes. Perhaps he should feel some shame for that, but it actually helps.

“I didn’t,” he utters, without even the first idea why he’s doing that instead of making Vox fight for the privilege.

Claws stroke along his scalp, down the nape of his neck. That sort of treatment wouldn’t stop him from lifting his head, of course. He just doesn’t.

Then Vox’s attention skips right past his upper back, slick palms casting lightly downward until they pressure near the very bottom of his ribcage. He fully, truly does not think of any reason that might be. 

“You didn’t what?” Vox croons.

Alastor isn’t fighting, he decides, because he does not want to jeopardize the way his back is melting like sugar from this treatment. Vox kneads at him slowly—waiting but not withholding, working as steadily as Alastor is at wearing down some stubborn streak from both sides.

(It feels nice. It feels nice, and Vox is being nice, doubtlessly for his own motives, but still—)

“I know,” Alastor mumbles, hiding his face thoroughly between his own bound-up arms and the pillow. “I didn’t forget.”

And then.

“We are never speaking of this again.”

Despite the utter glee in it, Vox’s laugh is uncharacteristically soft.

“I won’t make you,” Vox agrees, which in fact means nothing, so Alastor has no defense at all for shivering about it.

Vox works ever downward. And Alastor is beginning to appreciate why Vox felt compelled to strip him nude—there is nothing objectionable about the way Vox begins to knead below his waist, save for the fact that quite literally everything Vox touches goes greasy from the oil. To say that there’s nothing untoward would be a stretch... But he’s not of a mind to care.

Alastor closes his eyes, lazy. And he doesn’t make a decision, exactly—he doesn’t have to do that right now, Vox has all of the decisions well in hand—but he doesn’t complain when the warm breadth of Vox’s palms skate down over his rear.

“You’d let me do almost anything right now, wouldn’t you?” Vox remarks after a while. He’s had to shift himself downward—perched above Alastor’s knees to accommodate the way he’s kneading one of his thighs. 

“Mm?” 

Nothing prompts him to be more coherent. Certainly not Vox, who reacts to the sound by dragging his thumb precariously across the smoothness of Alastor’s inner-thigh. He absorbs it impassively, on account of the fact that he thinks his bones started dissolving about fifteen minutes ago.  

“Alastor,” Vox croons. “Want me to stop touching you?”

Notwithstanding the question, slick claws work over his hamstrings with pleasant focus. Alastor huffs a sigh.

“Didn’t think so.” He’s always so smug about these things. Though it’s usually more bothersome, and less of a distraction than the words are now to the way that most of his muscles have gone to jelly. “You want to return the favor, sweetheart? Help me feel nice?”

Point in fact, he wants little more than for Vox to finish working over every square inch of his body and then, perhaps, to take a bath. But…

Vox pinches a band of muscle between his fingers and rolls it in a languid, aching press.

“You want something perverted, don’t you,” Alastor mumbles into the pillowcase, feeling just slightly unjustified. 

“That doesn’t sound like a ‘no.’”

He ought to…

He doesn’t know what he ought to do. His mind has gone too hazy, and Vox’s attention has been peculiarly kind, and he doesn’t—he’d just like to stay here. For a while. That seems like reason enough.

“Fuck.” There is the quiet shuffling of clothing; something flies halfway across the room. Alastor snickers helplessly into the pillowcase. “Yeah, baby, I just might. And if you don’t want me to, all you have to do is ask.” 

He stops laughing when Vox’s hands are on him again: twice as slick, dripping oil, and beginning to feel remarkably obscene.

“But you don’t want to do that, do you?” Vox teases. For some unfathomable reason, his face is burning. And then Vox gives him a real reason, hiking up his hips without a word of warning until he is propped up on his knees, and—it hadn’t really occurred to Alastor what he had looked like, before now. He is suddenly deeply conscious of the image.

“Vox,” he starts, and immediately runs out of words. 

Vox makes it peculiarly easier, coming in close enough to all but drape himself down the sharp slope of Alastor’s back. Not staring, then, but...

“Aw, begging for me already?”

“That was not,” he starts, and has to cut off, quite abruptly, at the press of something hot and wet and rigid against the slicked-down fur of his tail.

“Shh,” Vox says, as if he hadn’t already stopped talking, on his own. Two thumbs rub deeply at his low back, a teasing reminder of the ache Vox soothed from it. “Don’t overthink it. All you have to do is stay right there.”

Vox presses his legs together. And Alastor doesn’t have the wherewithal to consider why as Vox shifts, easing backward, and thrusts his cock between his thighs.

Something like a gasp escapes him.

“Still isn’t sounding like a ‘no,’” Vox says—almost panting, really, and in the span of a moment. He lingers, waiting for something unknown. His palms knead temptingly at Alastor’s back. 

It feels so much more exposing, not in motion, propped up like a doll and weathering Vox’s gaze upon him, Vox’s cock throbbing between his legs. 

“‘Cause you’re not gonna say it, are you, Al?” He draws back, thrusts, and Alastor shivers, embarrassed by the sound it makes. Vox doesn’t pause again; some distant bit of Alastor’s mind, thoroughly buried under the queerly satisfying helplessness, notes that he was probably halfway gone just from looking before he started.

“How about this,” Vox pants, rolling his hips in quick, needy strokes. “Tell me you’re mine, and I won’t cum on that cute little ass to prove it.”

Fuck, he wants to whine about it. He wants to hide. And Vox can tell, somehow, even in his ridiculous state, because he’s gloating. 

“Alastor,” he teases. “What? Do you want me to?”

He shudders, shaking his head in wordless protest. And Vox pets him—gentle, proprietary, good and bad and exhausting and intriguing and—he doesn’t know, he’s lost his mind.

(It does not feel enormously important to find it.)

Vox’s hips stutter. For a second, Alastor thinks—well of course he wouldn’t have any stamina, not when he’s been more desperate for Alastor than anyone in Hell has ever been desperate to get out—and then a wave of keen embarrassment takes over when Vox peels back, and a crass, slick sound calls to Alastor’s attention that he was not dealing in empty threats.

He truthfully has no idea why he doesn’t just roll over, or scrunch away, or even say what Vox is so desperate to hear. There’s this awful little instinct that tells him to stay, to fawn, and when he does it it just feels—

(He can’t stand helpless feelings. But he likes this one, this pitiful weakness that doesn’t make Vox pity him.)

Vox’s spend is hot and wet and oddly odorless. It makes Alastor shudder on impact, that same desperate desire to hide surging up with no outlet except to press his head down needlessly.

And he fears for a moment, actually fears, that Vox will loiter there to stare. 

Almost immediately, Vox drapes over his back, heedless of the mess. Alastor collapses to the mattress in a boneless heap, his heart pounding as if he’d just sprinted some distance. There is—if he lets himself turn to it, a little wary just to do so—a soft edge of arousal. Not that he wants Vox to do anything about it, let alone to notice, but just—part of the helplessness, he thinks.

He closes his eyes. Now that Vox has finally stopped talking, he’s undistracted, absorbing an overwhelming blend of bodily sensations.

His ear throbs. Worse, he thinks, because everything else feels so much better; there isn’t a strained muscle left to distract from that sharp edge of pain. He’s filtering slowly through arousal, easier now that there is nothing of Vox’s making him react. He’s growing colder by the moment.

He feels profoundly sticky. And unaccountably weary, which—well, not to credit Vox’s teasing, but it’s not as if he’s done anything to exert himself.

His best instinct is to wriggle barely out from under Vox, to find the nearest corner of a blanket he can reach for with bound hands, and to give the whole ‘waking up this morning’ thing another try.

He makes it as far as reaching for the sheets when his progress is arrested by an arm cast like a seatbelt around his waist.

“Al, nope, hang on—you’re not going back to bed.”

Alastor’s first reaction is ridiculous. Probably on account of his head being full of weeds.

“It’s a Saturday,” he says, as if that means anything. Vox regards him with far too much affection to bode well.

“So true,” he says—condescending, asinine, “but you’re about to subdrop halfway to the wrath ring. And I really don’t want you to never let me do that again.”

He has no idea what any of that means.

Naturally, Alastor breaks away from Vox’s hand—which he had foolishly stroked down his side instead of holding him, as Vox is apparently still clueless as to the ease with which he can be restrained—and reaches for the blankets again, which is all fine and well until Vox uses his actual powers to pull him back into a veritable net of cables.

“I don’t care,” Alastor complains, because it probably doesn’t matter and he doesn’t feel like admitting that he doesn’t know something, just now.

He just wants to be left alone. He wants to hide, he wants to—

“Yep, very familiar with your sense of self-preservation,” Vox chirps, conducting a ridiculous facsimile of gathering Alastor up into his arms in stupidly excessive bondage. “I care, though.”

He trembles with agitation. And the vestiges of adrenaline, most likely, as the hot-blooded everything filtering out of his system leaves him freezing cold.

But Vox’s gills vent hot air against his chest and side. And Vox holds him close, carrying him to the bathroom and not releasing him even to run the tub. By the time that he’s gotten around to doing that, an incessant sensation is nagging at Alastor to lay his cheek on Vox’s shoulder. Which he can’t do, of course, because…

Well, he won’t. He won’t, so he can’t.

The tub fills. Vox acquires a washcloth. He should probably at least put up a fight about that, but he’s not feeling up to the task.

“I may not let you do it again anyway,” Alastor says absently. His whole ear flicks at Vox’s screen—unintentionally, but it clearly annoys him, so that is a small victory—as Vox mops his mess up with the cloth.

“May, huh?”

Vox’s grin is abominable. If Alastor had a hand free, he would seriously consider trying to literally wipe it off his face.

“You can put me down, now,” Alastor says. “I’ll take a bath, if you insist.”

“Are you going to bite me if I join?”

Alastor levels Vox with his least affectionate smile. Which, inexplicably, makes Vox grin so widely that the edges clip off of his screen.

“Get you a snack, got it,” Vox says—which was not remotely his meaning. But.

But also, he would eat. 

The cords slip loose as Vox trots off, and Alastor becomes unfathomably cold for no apparent reason. But his body has done stranger things before, so he shoves the sensation to a far corner of his mind and sinks into the bath for good measure.  He resolves to draw no conclusions when his mood has the nerve to be improved by Vox’s return.

He’s found pants, evidently. And also a plate of what appears to be sashimi, except that Alastor has it on good authority that one of Vox’s contractees sent him on a spiral recently over Hellish audits and payroll. 

“This is a thoughtful bribe,” he tells Vox, and leans back heavily against the lip of the overlarge tub to receive it. 

“I’m not bribing you, Al,” Vox says, counter to the way he immediately perches within reach, all but goading Alastor to pluck a morsel from the plate. “…is it working?”

Alastor snorts, derisive. But he does lift one hand from the water to steal a piece, tracking Vox’s complicated expression with open skepticism as he chews.

It isn’t…

He doesn’t mind Vox being here. But he’s still feeling unaccountably grey.

“Fuck,” Vox says, out of nowhere. “It’s making me sad just to look at you. Did I fuck up?”

Well, there’s an unbelievably loaded question. Vox may as well have handed him a gun.

Alastor considers it with approximately that sort of gravity. Perhaps a little less; he does still eat another piece of ‘fish.’

“Which part?” He asks eventually, which makes Vox’s entire face desaturate at breakneck speed. He would like to say that he pities Vox for it, but that would be a lie.

Vox passes the plate off to a trio of cables in favor of pressing his palms to his face. One of his hands is still bloodstained, Alastor observes.

After a moment or two, it goes from amusing to annoying. Vox is no use to him like this. 

“Vox,” he says, and watches the man peer up from between his fingers, as if that is doing anything to obstruct the cameras that Alastor knows are not part of the visual of his eyes. “My ear hurts.”

The words are matter of fact—barely a complaint. Still, Vox looks at him as if he’d ripped his heart out. 

(Actually, there’s an idea. He’d like to know, at some point or another, if the thing is edible or not.)

“I—let me fix it, Alastor, I’m such a fucking—” Vox’s claws prick into the sides of his own head. “Fuck, I’m such an asshole.” He stands, and his eyes track off to one side; Alastor alights with recognition at the fact that he’s about to use his head to make a call. “Velvette can probably still sew the tip back on.”

He reaches out of the tub to snag Vox by his pant leg. Vox goes as still as if he’d slapped him. 

“Vox,” Alastor repeats, growing slightly exasperated. “…first of all, that wouldn’t be ‘you’ fixing anything.”

The face Vox makes would barely be appropriate on the likes of Charlie. And even then, Alastor would still consider it a bit pathetic.

Alastor contemplates his leverage with leisurely ease.

“I don’t want you to fix it,” he decides. “I would like a strong painkiller, a stronger drink, and to direct some of your little cameras tomorrow.”

Vox makes to follow the first two orders before he’s even heard the third—and then sort of stumbles, stutter-stepping on his way towards the bathroom door.

“You want to… what?” Vox’s eyes are round and enormous. “Why?”

Well, it’s a fair question, he’ll grant Vox that.

“I’d like to see the public’s reaction,” Alastor says, turning his ear with experimental caution. Fuck, that hurts.

The other thing he would like to do involves the remainder of his plan—but oh, what the Hell. Vox has been unexpectedly entertaining today; he’ll give him a treat.

“And then I’d like you to cast whichever of your new allies seems to have enjoyed my distress the most back down from Heaven, in the end. Whenever the opportunity presents itself.”

Vox’s screen grows brighter, and his mouth forms a devouring sort of grin.

“I can do that,” Vox swears. Not that it matters, of course, but it is a sweet sound nonetheless. “I’ll be right back.”

Alastor can’t help but sink into the tub as Vox departs. His mood is still completely unidentifiable. And mercurial, at that, pleased and weary and grey in dizzying turns. At an absolute minimum, he needs a drink. And he’s already beginning to regret not demanding a cigarette.

He doesn’t think he’s waiting long. It’s enough time to rest his head on the lip of the tub and close his eyes, and enough to go a little foggy from the warmth. At least whatever was making him tremble has subsided.

Vox returns with a large bottle of water, a handful of pills, and a Sazerac. 

Alastor ignores the bottle entirely, takes the pills dry, and then accepts the cocktail.

“You should really have something to drink,” Vox nags—to which Alastor does the obvious, taking a pointed sip. 

That Vox looks at him with big, sad eyes about it nets Vox exactly nothing, but it does make Alastor feel lighter. 

“You know, I’m being very reasonable,” he tells Vox. “I’d have asked for a pound of your flesh, but it might make me heal too quickly.”

Curiously, Vox shudders at the implication. 

“Do you—would you want that?” 

Alastor laughs. “Has it even once occurred to you to quit while you’re ahead?”

“Quitting is for suckers,” Vox says, the anxious cast over his face lifting as he twists the bottle cap loose. “I’m going all the way to the top.”

He truly thinks he is, doesn’t he. Poor thing.

As if to prove his arrogance, Vox plucks a thick sliver of accountant from the plate he’d set aside. Alastor smiles with open skepticism.

“I bite,” he says. As the words don’t deter Vox in the slightest, he makes a point of scraping teeth over the claws that feed him. 

“You know you’re talking to a guy with pet sharks, right?”

Alastor rolls his eyes with such fervor, it’s a wonder they don’t get stuck that way.

“It’s almost charming that you think I’m only as dangerous as those creatures.”

“Shok.wav isn’t a creature.” There is actual, hilarious offense in Vox’s tone. “He’s my son.”

Alastor has to close his eyes to keep from laughing.

“Well, then,” he says. “I shudder to imagine his mother.”

Vox’s face goes even flatter than usual. And Alastor laughs—an irrational sort of fondness that wears him down to the point of allowing it, when Vox offers another morsel to his lips. 

Alastor chews, swallows.

“Nannying doesn’t suit you,” he says, matter-of-fact. And then he does reach to snag the water out of Vox’s hand, more inclined to needle Vox than to actually resist. “But I suppose it’s just as well. If you’re to be a god, what does that make the sort of being that he waits on?”

The remark earns him a blush, hilarious humility casting the white of the tub in cool cyan. Alastor uncaps the loosened bottle, takes a sip, and then tilts his head, awaiting the answer that Vox doesn’t seem to want to provide.

“I’m going to be the God,” he says eventually—profoundly ridiculous, from the half-dressed creature still bearing a serving tray and blushing over Alastor’s meager attention, “not a god, Alastor.”

“Your partners aren’t aware of their demotion, I assume?”

Vox snorts, derisive. If Alastor were a kinder person, he might find it in his heart to pity.

“They just want to hitch a ride to Heaven,” Vox complains.

“As I recall, they’re doing more than half the work.”

“Not the important shit,” Vox says. “Velvette keeps bothering me about outfits. Do you really think anybody cares if I wear the same thing to more than one event?”

Alastor hums his indifference.

“And Val,” he huffs. “He’s not serious, Alastor. He’s never been, it’s not even his brand—he probably wants me to take the lead, deep down.”

He could likely needle Vox more about this. He could press him on the precise nature of ‘important shit,’ or ask him if he doesn’t think Velvette’s endless font of influence has helped him swing the masses. He could point out that Valentino isn’t serious because none of what Vox is doing rings of a serious plan.

Literally how does he plan to reach Heaven? As a physical matter? Alastor still hasn’t gotten a clear answer on that count.

He sips his drink placidly, watching Vox from the quiet stillness of the tub. 

“In Valentino’s defense,” he says after a moment, “it does have a certain appeal.”

Vox’s little rally goes off without a hitch. What’s more, it nets Alastor some valuable information. Carmilla Carmine wears the curious and—perhaps, in the future, fortuitous—expression of a woman who did not intend to unlock a lion’s cage, when she first sets her eyes on Alastor’s mutilated ear. Maestro, on the other hand, turns out to have an unexpected vindictive streak, judging by the way his skull smiles at the sight.

And to think, Alastor didn’t eat him, all those years ago. He ought to have known better; the trappings of a gentleman rarely make one.

The new injury comes with one further benefit that Alastor hadn’t anticipated: it’s as good a marker of Vox’s supposed perfect domination as being interminably tied to a chair. A better one, perhaps. The sight even makes his partners pause, bringing an unexpected uncertainty to the cant of Velvette’s eyebrows and something that looks very interestingly like empathy in Valentino’s face.

Vox has never raised a hand to Valentino, as far as Alastor is aware.

In any case, he’s turned loose as far as the confines of Vee Tower, upon their return, and Hell if he isn’t going to take advantage. It’s literally been weeks since Alastor has had the opportunity to take a walk at his own leisure, which makes the activity sorely satisfying.

“Oh fuck—Alastor?”

As a general rule, souls in service to the Vees do not to speak to Alastor unless ordered to. It’s a wise approach. It speaks to more of a wisdom, in fact, than he gives most of them any credit for, given that just about everyone working in this tower (along with an outsized share of those who are just passing through) have signed away their souls for money, fame, or the second Hell of a steady job.

But no one could ever mistake Angel Dust for wise.

Angel casts an anxious glance over one shoulder even as he’s crossing the hallway in long strides, as though the person that could interrupt them is not literally Vee Tower’s security system, and in all likelihood already riveted to the drama about to play out. Well, no one has ever remarked on Angel Dust’s superior intellect, either. 

Charlie has always said that he has a good heart. Which has always struck Alastor as rather like telling a tourist to Cannibal Town that they have excellent marbling.

“Whatever weepy sentiment you are about to come out with,” Alastor says, neither retreating nor encouraging the way that Angel is bee-lining towards him, “I assure you, I do not want to hear it.”

Angel does not slow in his approach. He never slows, in fact—he exercises a wholly unexpected audacity by seizing Alastor’s elbow, using that leverage to spin him in place, and casting another arm about his shoulders to steer him in unpausing motion down the hall.

“This is fucking sick,” Angel mutters, not weeping even a little bit. His gaze, instead, is critical—a careful tracking of eight eyes from the cropped tip of Alastor’s ear to the latest suit Velvette has gifted him. “Alright, Smiles, I’m in. What do you need?”

Alastor nearly misses a step.

“You aren’t serious,” he says, about the most serious affect he has ever seen Angel Dust adopt. And for fuck’s sake, he’s seen Angel prepare to battle Heaven. 

Angel slouches to speak quietly to his ear. It’s a charming effort, but Alastor is almost certain Vox can hear them anyway. 

“There’s a plan, yeah? You’ve been stuck here for a month, don’t tell me you haven’t come up with an angle.”

Well, a critical part of the angle involved none of this happening. And it still will, because Alastor might literally never recover from the full-scale reputation demolition that would come from being rescued, from Vox, by Hell’s most infamous porn star.

Even thinking those words in sequence sounds like the punchline to a joke.

He squints at a passing security camera with prejudice. He can only imagine the look on Vox’s face right now. 

(This would be easier to contend with if there were pity in Angel’s expression. That would be wildly offensive, of course, but it wouldn’t be so….)

“You can’t help me, Angel,” he says, flat.

“Fuck you, I can’t,” Angel retorts. “Just say what you need. Is there something I can tell Husk?”

“‘Congratulations,’ most likely,” Alastor says. “Husker must be having a field day, if he hasn’t already gambled away all of his possessions and gone to live under a cardboard box.”

Notably, Angel does not contest any of that.

“Alastor.” Hearing Angel say his full name, god-given and dire, feels a bit like witnessing a crime in progress. It’s almost as if he should do something about this. 

Worse yet, Angel stops them right there in the hallway, seizing him by both shoulders and giving them a shake.

“Fucking—snap out of it. What’s the plan?”

That Vox hasn’t interrupted them yet—despite holding more wildly misplaced ire towards Angel Dust than Alastor could have ever anticipated—can only be evidence that he is enjoying the spectacle immensely.

“The only plan,” Alastor hisses, “is to wait for the inevitable day that Vox actually catches the car that he’s chasing. And realizes that it’s going to run him over.”

Angel’s grip tightens on his shoulders.

“That’s not a plan,” he snaps. “It’s a dream.”

Well, fuck. Angel has literally never spoken to him like this before. Nevermind that—Angel hasn’t spoken this way in his earshot.

He may not have been giving the man enough credit.

His ear flicks in blatant discomfort. Which makes it ache, now, dull pain still radiating from the missing tip.

(And Angel, to his sincere credit, doesn’t even glance at the thing. His eyes remain on Alastor’s, searing and committed to his goal.)

Alastor makes his shoulders sink under the hands gripping them. 

“Angel, there’s a contract,” he says, letting slip a hint of exhaustion.

“Yeah, but—”

“Do you really believe, if there were anything to be done, that I wouldn’t have already done it?”

A completely incomprehensible expression crosses Angel Dust’s face. Alastor has no opportunity to interrogate it, because the nearest camera is crackling with a groundswell of electricity.

“Wow.” Vox drops with casual ease from the grid, casting off sparks as he strolls down the hall. You can’t buy that sort of confidence; it can only have been given as a gift. “This is fucking adorable. Val should use it for our Sinsmas card.”

There’s no mistaking the aggression in Vox’s tone, even if Alastor could overlook in any way that his grin is hateful: all teeth. Angel has the good sense to take his hands off of Alastor’s shoulders. Vox repays him with an open sneer.

He doesn’t have to tell Angel that he’s in danger, he thinks. He’s aware.

“Listen, Vox,” Angel says, taking a step past Alastor to directly confront Vox—which is remarkable, actually. What the Hell is going on?

“Oh.” He recognizes the look on Vox’s face quite well: as if he’s just cast a guppy into the same tank as the monstrosity of his favorite pet. And he does not care at all for the step Vox has taken towards Angel, meeting him stride for stride. “I’m listening.”

“You already won, alright?” Angel bites out, caught between dual impulses of peacemaking and rage. “We all saw the parade.” 

Angel casts out his arms like the sort of idiot preparing to take an unearned bullet. 

“Do you think it’s doing anything except making you look like a desperate loser to keep doing this shit to him?”

Vox’s eyes go wide, and then darken. He makes it one step closer before arresting in place. 

Because Alastor has taken one of the arms that Angel has so helpfully flung within his reach, and he uses the leverage to wrench the kind fool clear off of his feet.

Angel lands in a heap across the hallway, flung far enough from Vox to nearly have hit the wall. 

Alastor stalks forward, putting Vox at his back.

“Do not—” his voice resounds through a screeching filter. The screams underpinning it are not his own. “—condescend to protect me, you useless, miserable wretch.”

Vox’s contract may as well be a wisp of thread, for all that it doesn’t do to stop him. He grows tall enough to cage Angel Dust in a thicket of limbs and antlers. And Angel—who Alastor otherwise does not truthfully regard as a particularly impressive performer—does his part to look utterly terrified.

He may actually be that. So be it; needs must. 

“I—Al, I didn’t—” Angel stammers, raising four hands in a show of universal submission. It’s likely not enough. Vox looked quite upset.

Alastor seizes one of those outstretched wrists and squeezes. Slowly, of course. Existential terror takes time.

“If there ever comes a time,” Alastor says, grinding the carpal bones of Angel’s wrist together until he whimpers through his teeth, “that I need a pathetic whore to help me—”

Nevermind that he’s never in his afterlife used that word to refer to Angel. But Vox does, and with enormous frequency.

“I will buy one.”

There are tears in Angel’s eyes.

And then there is a sharp sensation—a startling jolt of electricity from the cable he hadn’t noticed winding around his wrist.

“Alastor,” Vox clucks, in a tone dripping with fond indulgence. “Drop it.”

It. 

He glares over his shoulder, shrinking down in stages as he releases Angel’s arm.

“Val is never going to let me hear the end of it if you eat his favorite toy.”

The cable grows no looser, for however much the circumference of his wrist has decreased. Vox gives it another tug, with playfully grating persistence, until Alastor has let himself be coaxed into a full retreat.

Angel has gotten a couple of his limbs beneath him. But he’s still panting, eight pupils pinprick from the same terror that is causing him to tremble.

Alastor does not risk regarding him for even a moment. Cables wind in like a fishing line as he goes, with a show of open agitation, to Vox’s side.

“Aw.” Vox does not possess the wisdom not to touch him, now. Or perhaps he’s just bragging, reaching a claw out to cast over the stubborn branches of Alastor’s antlers—he’s unreasonably confident that it won’t be bitten off. “You really want to kill him, don’t you?”

“Vox,” he lets himself snap. What he won’t do is retreat.

“I know,” Vox says, bordering on wistful. “Me too. But let’s get you something you can eat, huh?”