ceruleancynic

if only people would say what it really was what it really was, what it really was that they wanted

so tell me where it hurts to hell with everybody else all I care about is you and that's the truth they don't love me I can tell but you do, so they can go to hell

--Garbage, Tell Me Where it Hurts

________________________________

At first he thinks it’s the cigarettes.

Since the half-staved-off apocalypse, since Adam’s fucking angel-spawn came down and laid waste to some of the city, since fucking Charlotte Morningstar and her father

(and Alastor, don’t let’s forget Alastor, his mind fills in, gleefully)

had triumphed, ish, no one’s given a single flying fuck if Vox gets caught on camera smoking. He’s missed it. The burn in the back of his throat, the heaviness as nicotine races through his veins, the way it makes him feel sick and motivated all at once. It’s not the same as Valentino’s poisoned incense-smoke, it doesn’t dull the senses and send him witchwalking through red dreams; it makes him think of the good parts he can recall about being alive, the way he’d enjoyed riding a catastrophe curve just at the very edge of control, living on coffee and unfiltered Luckies and bourbon, never so alive as when he was a hand’s breadth from total ruin. It had made him cough then, too: first the little dry cough everyone shared who put away two packs of Lucky Strikes (it’s toasted) every day, and then something harder to hide, something harder to ignore, embarrassing and then mortifying and then the kind of painful he could not ignore.

(He’d tried, though, hadn’t he, and that had gone poorly, but he’d tried, and when the fever started he’d ignored that as well, and --)

Vox pushes the thought away, with the ease of long practice. He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s an overlord in a Hell that still exists despite Heaven’s best efforts, he knows what he’s doing. He knows what he’s doing and if he sounds a little raspier than usual, if he gets caught with a cigarette smoldering between two cyan claws, if someone catches him clearing his throat over and over and asks Mr. Vox, are you quite well, isn’t he? Isn’t he?

(Alone, in his circumscribed kingdom, in the quiet calm of his shark-walled inner sanctum, he can cough and no one will question him. It’s the cigarettes, or it’s the dust of the wreckage the exterminators had made of half Pentagram City, or it’s both. It’s nothing more than that.)

The day he sees Alastor back on the air, joining in with his erstwhile compatriots in rebuilding the fucking hotel, Vox coughs up blood, bright scarlet blood, sudden and all down his front: it feels as if something in his chest has let go in a warm painless trickle. He is appalled at the brightness of it in the blue dimness of his inner sanctum, at the stickiness as it drips down his wrist.

Nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing, he tells himself, spitting into a tissue, wiping away the blood. Just irritation, who wouldn’t be irritated, it doesn’t hurt, if it doesn’t hurt he’s fine, he’s an overlord, he’s survived fuck knows how many terrible physical insults, and when the blood stops he thinks there, see, it’s nothing and swallows a couple of morphine tablets with something sufficiently high-proof to put himself to sleep for thirteen hours and is fine when he wakes up. Fine except for the blood dried at the corners of his shark’s mouth, the stained circles under his rendered eyes.

Alastor’s back. Alastor’s back and his little group of comrades have rebuilt their stupid fucking hotel and Vox could swear to it he’d seen Adam, douchefuck extraordinaire, slice Alastor to the bone with his idiot guitar-axe thing and leave nothing but a puddle of dark blood behind when the Radio Demon vanished into his own shadows, so why is Alastor back --

#

He thinks it really had been just the cigarettes until without warning he has to cough again, badly, he has to excuse himself from a fucking meeting to double over in the hallway and hack miserably into a handkerchief and realize it isn’t just blood he’s bringing up, now. It isn’t just blood, and blood would have been better; blood would have been cleaner.

Now it’s blood and tiny rags of vegetable tissue, battered to transparency by their sojourn in his respiratory tree: he unfolds one on his palm, careful with the tip of his claw, and discovers that it was probably once white, or palest pink, with red streaks. The size of a fingerprint, with tiny serrations on its widest curved edge.

Flower petals.

He stares at it in horror, and the feeling of clogged thickness in his throat, his chest, is suddenly overwhelming; he pictures sodden petals jammed tight, solid, wet and horrible, and all at once he cannot breathe at all: can barely stagger down the hall to the safety of a stairwell, and gather sufficient of his power around him to slip away in a brief shower of sparks into a light fixture, and then to his own quarters, where he can fall on his hands and knees on the floor and choke horribly, violently, pounding himself on the chest until some of the awful wet thickness detaches itself and comes up in a tearing painful spasm that ends in him vomiting up the little he’d been able to force down all afternoon, and somewhere in the middle of that Vox goes determinedly away.

#

And now it’s days later. Alone in his rooms Vox sits in the blue-lit shadow of moving sharks, in rumpled shirtsleeves, his tie undone, his collar open as if to ease breathing that can no longer be eased. The petals come in slow handfuls, when they come. He can have hours at a time when nothing seems to be too very badly wrong, and then all at once he’s choking and gasping between wet, sodden clumps of foliage. It’s better when it’s wet, the stuff clumps together, he can bring it up without so much miserable, violent effort; when the petals come one by one, five by five, it’s like having fragments of paper-tissue caught in his throat, making him cough in dry retching hacks that hurt. He hasn’t answered anyone’s emails since yesterday. It doesn’t seem like a good use of anybody’s time.

He takes another gulp from his drink, ice cubes clinking. The colder it is, the more it seems to kill the pain in his chest, even if the ice dilutes the whiskey. It doesn’t stop the awful, endless tickle, the rasping wheezing fibrous sensation of something putting forth roots into his lungs. Nothing can. He thinks perhaps that maybe he doesn’t have too terribly much longer to worry about it, and that should bother him, and it does not. Another few petals tickle his throat and he coughs, fine pale pink ejecta caught in his teeth, in his cupped hand, settling into his lap. There is blood, there is always blood, now, but he thinks he minds it less, and takes another swallow of whiskey.

He’s thought about this. He’s thought about all of it. Since the petals began he’s known what it is: sure, he’s never actually seen this, but who hasn’t read the stories? Val’s even done a porno with this as the central conceit; Vox can remember him complaining about having to make Angel Dust work extra hard at somehow rendering coughing up flowers sexy. It isn’t. It’s impossible, and it’s fucking disgusting, and it hurts.

The worst part isn’t even the pain. The worst part is knowing why it’s happening, other than the standard fuck his life: something he’s never been able to admit to himself for over seven years, something he’s managed to ignore, to pretend wasn’t real, right up until reality changed with the death of Adam and the triumph of Hell. He can trace it back to that. Vox hasn’t had a day’s serious illness in Hell right up until that moment when he’d seen the first man slice Alastor’s chest open in a gold slash of burning destruction that he’d known had to be fatal and hadn’t been able to stop thinking about, ever since.

(No: if he’s being scrupulously honest he can trace it back more specifically to the point where he’d realized that Alastor wasn’t dead. Before then he thinks the cough truly had been nothing more than cigarettes and stress; it was when he’d seen the radio demon live and on air after that fatal blow that something idiotic deep in Vox’s id had realized there was something yet there to pine for. And Hell is nothing if not driven by narrative causality: he’d woken up one of the most powerful arcs in any storyworld you could care to name, and now he was reaching the end of it.)

Of course it’s fucking Alastor, it had to be Alastor, Vox has never carried a torch of any kind for anyone else that could be worth this kind of dramatic irony, and why would Alastor ever, ever, ever give the slightest of fucks about his old ex-friend’s demise, other than to throw a party in his repaired shiny-ass hotel? Probably the type of flower -- pink-white carnation, striped with red -- has some sort of tiresome valence to it, some added gloss of meaning beyond you love something you can never have, and you must die of it, tough titty said the goddamn kitty. Vox doesn’t want to think about it; he just wants it to be over.

(There is something stupidly, counterproductively arousing about the way the pale delicate petals look against his skin, his claws, in the blue darkness of his only last safe space: he thinks they are beautiful, in a dim distant sort of way.)

You win, he thinks, and coughs, and tastes his own blood on his tongue. You win, Alastor. It’s such a pity that you’ll never know about it; you’d appreciate this, I think.

He’s made sure no one can get in here. Not that they’ll try. He’s made sure no one will bother to come looking for him for -- hours, yet. Maybe he’ll rally, and be bright enough to be on the air, briefly, later. Maybe he won’t. All he can think about is how fucking sad everything is, and how tired he is, and how much he wants to lie down and stop trying to breathe through lungs clotted with flower-petals, to simply be done, and over, and gone.

The way he feels, perhaps that won’t be too terribly long from now. He thinks he can feel things letting go inside his chest, a sort of spreading liquid warmth that might be blood, and is grateful for it when the dizziness he’s been barely fighting for half an hour rises up to close over his head. He is dimly aware of the empty glass slipping from his fingers and shattering on the floor, and then there is -- finally -- nothing left for Vox to think.

#

did they ever give you a reason to believe in something different if you're looking for love, for what it's worth I have plenty of it lying around here somewhere

____________________________

you idiot!

you idiot, wake up from your stupid fucking office couch deathbed and listen to me!

A long way away, pain. He’s floating, somewhere calm and dim and quiet, and whoever is banging on his door is a very distant annoyance, not something Vox must attend to --

VOX! FUCKING LISTEN TO ME!

Someone grabs him by his shirt and hauls him upright, shaking him unmercifully: his head clangs with pain, his vision glitching to useless static. He tries weakly to push them away, but whoever it is refuses to let him go; the hands holding him feel like iron, and he hangs from them and coughs with grueling helplessness until he retches, only barely aware that whoever it is has cupped a handkerchief to his mouth to catch the horrible bloodstained mess of petals, that now instead of being shaken he is being held, steadied against someone’s chest while his body does its best to rid itself of all the choking vegetable matter in his throat and lungs, that whoever it is is -- talking to him, softly, it’s all right, you’ll feel better soon, Vox, shh, I’ve got you, just get it all up and out, that’s right and the handkerchief is held to his mouth and he tries, he tries as hard as he can to cough for whoever is holding him -- he doesn’t know why he thinks they’re there to help but he does, he does, he coughs as hard as he can -- whoever it is is patting his back to help him bring up the flowers, how can anyone be so kind, when he’s such a revolting object -- he chokes on a horrible thick mess of petals as it comes up all at once and then suddenly he can breathe, the air like knives in his chest --

-- there, that’s better, says the voice, gentle, that’s much better, you’re doing just fine, Vox, that was just right, and now you need to rest --

“-- don’t -- leave me,” he hears himself rasp, grabbing for whoever it is, desperate, not caring how useless and pathetic he sounds, wanting so much for them to stay, to tell him he’s not a pathetic waste of oxygen, and the arms around him shift, holding him close: he’s leaning against someone’s shoulder, listening to the soft but present beating of their heart. “Please,” he says, “please don’t go --”

“I’m not going anywhere,” says his rescuer, and does not seem to mind when Vox presses his angular, burning face against them with a raw-choked sob; whoever it is cups a careful hand to the back of his screen, gentle, avoiding the hypersensitive input jacks, cool against his hot plastic, rocks him like a child. He should mind. He doesn’t. He clings helplessly, and if the voice is familiar he doesn’t have the presence of mind to try to track it down, it’s just too desperately strange and too desperately wanted to have someone there with him, holding him, telling him it’ll be okay despite everything. “I’ve got you, Vox. Just breathe, it’s okay if you have to cough, don’t be frightened.”

He has no idea how not to be frightened but this does not seem to matter, since whoever is holding him is not letting him go, and the miserable fear and pain and horror of the past however many days is floating away from Vox like silt in water, and he slips under the surface of desperate fatigue, and is simply gone.

#

When he wakes it is to the familiar dimness of his own bedroom, a blue darkness for which he can immediately calculate the hexcode: the equivalent of a familiar scent, a subconscious marker of safety, of home. He is lying in his own bed, propped up on pillows, and he could almost, almost believe the past week and a half has been nothing but a lengthy and horrible dream, except for how his mouth tastes of blood and petals and his chest aches -- a low, dull ache. He is breathing a little better, at least; the twining, rustling growths in his lungs seem to have been pruned back, discouraged from flowering.

And as data regarding his surroundings continues to tabulate in Vox’s consciousness, his gaze drifts down from the ceiling to the person sitting beside the bed. Because there is someone sitting beside the bed, where no one ever sits; no one spends time in this room with him without sharing the bed.

In the blue dimness Alastor’s coat is the deep maroon of slow-flowing venous blood; the pinstripes are hints of a lighter fuchsia. The only pale colors anywhere on him are the white piping of his lapels and the glowing crimson of his irises, tracking left to right as he reads the book held in one hand, and then refocusing on Vox himself without visible emotion of any kind.

Alastor. In his room. Sitting in his room reading some appropriately color-coordinated book he must have brought with him, because Vox doesn’t go in for decor of the literary kind. Alastor.

Alastor, he thinks, and the thought brings with it a horrible crawling tickle in Vox’s throat, and he would rather be doing literally anything else than curling over with his hands cupped to his mouth, desperately trying to cough up the petals choking him, but in this he does not have a great deal of choice -- he can remember a little of the immediate past, someone out of nowhere holding him while he hacked and retched, and if that person had been Alastor then Vox should stop even trying to breathe because the only fucking thing he wants in all the world is the merciful embrace of death, sooner rather than later --

This time he is aware when Alastor’s arm slips around his shoulders, steadying him, helping him bend over; Alastor is holding the tissues for him, Alastor is talking to him softly, phatic reassurance. Alastor, sounding entirely himself, and also entirely unfazed by the situation, as if helping people he hates through horrific coughing fits is the sort of thing he does. It is so strange, and his touch is so impossibly comforting, that the fit actually lets go much quicker than Vox is expecting: he manages to hack up a mouthful of flower-petals and gasp in a deep breath, eyes closed, and doesn’t whimper in protest when Alastor lets him settle back against the pillows, with considerable effort.

“Well,” says Alastor’s voice, warm --

(it’s the warmth of tube sound, the comforting glow of it, why can’t Vox stop thinking things)

-- “I’d ask how you’re feeling, but it seems both unkind and entirely unnecessary,” he’s saying. “You really are in a state, aren’t you, poor Vox. How long has this been going on?”

Vox doesn’t know what to do with how much he wants to crawl into this man’s lap and cling helplessly and smack the comfortable superiority off his face, how dare Alastor break into his rooms and -- what, put him to bed? Wait for him to wake? He looks at Alastor, hearing his own breath rustling in his chest. “I don’t know,” he says, after too long. “I -- it’s -- after I saw you were alive. After the battle. What -- how are you here?”

“Would you believe it if I told you your noisy little colleague called me?” Alastor says, dropping a girder in front of his train of thought. “The fashion bitch. Not a call I was anticipating, to tell you the truth.”

“Velvette called you?”

“She said you were a mess,” says Alastor, “and that I ought to come and do something about it, since it was apparently my fault. Which also came as some surprise, but these things happen.”

“These things,” Vox repeats.

“Mm,” says Alastor, and gives a little one-shouldered shrug. Vox thinks he’s hiding a wince, and wonders just how healed he is after that fucking angel-wound, and his own chest aches as he coughs again. Alastor sighs.

“You…know what this is?” Vox asks. It feels like testing a rotten tooth with his tongue, waiting for the pain.

“Oh yes,” says the Radio Demon. “Yes, it’s not the first time something like this has happened, I’m afraid. It’s Hell, you know. Narrative causality is stronger than fucking gravity in these parts.”

“Wait,” says Vox. “Someone else had this happen to them? For you?”

“Not exactly,” says Alastor. “Let’s just say I know what it feels like, and leave it at that?”

“What happened?”

“The situation was resolved,” says Alastor. “And leave it at that. Please.”

Did he just say please? Vox wonders, and is spared from wondering much more by another fit of coughing -- this one unproductive but painful. Alastor hands him the tissues and lets him get on with it rather than offering physical support, and Vox tries hard not to mind, and harder not to notice that he minds. When the fit is mostly over Alastor gets up -- fuck, he’s so tall, Vox thinks, tall as the sky, and wonders if he himself is entirely lucid at the moment -- and fetches Vox a small handful of pills and a glass of water with ice clinking in it. “These first,” he says, handing them over and then fishing out a beat-up hip flask from somewhere in his coat, “and then this.”

For a moment, only a moment, Vox considers asking what the pills are, and then simply swallows them with a wince. The water is ridiculously nice against his abused throat, and the flask turns out to contain the same rye whiskey Vox can remember him drinking back when they were the sort of people who drank together regularly.

He hands it back with some regret, feeling lightheaded, and can’t help closing his eyes and turning his face against the coolness of Alastor’s skin when he rests the back of his hand on Vox’s screen bezel. He can feel his fans struggling; it’s no surprise when Alastor says “You’re on fire,” but he is not expecting the “my poor Vox” that follows, or the tone he uses, as if Vox is something worth a lot of his money or his time. “The drugs should knock it down a bit,” Alastor is saying. “Get some rest.”

“Will you stay?” he hears himself ask, and in the dimness he thinks Alastor’s ever-present smile flickers a little. “You probably have -- better things to do.”

“At the moment,” says Alastor, sitting back in the chair by the bed, “I honestly can’t think of any. Go to sleep, Vox. I’m here. I’ve got you, I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s beyond his control, Vox realizes, even as he’s falling asleep: he doesn’t have a choice as the darkness closes over his head.

#

if you’re looking for disappointment you can find it around any corner in the middle of the night I hold on to you tight so both of us can feel protected

That turns out to be the last time he is lucid for quite a long while.

Falling away from the surface of wakefulness like a stone into dark water, and then into a sequence of awful, increasingly absurd dreams so vivid and believable that in the moment he is drowning in a lake of fire, the flames blazing inside his chest, burning away tissue and bone as he struggles in an idiot helpless effort to breathe, choking, drowning, coughing helplessly -- then wrapped in ice-cold darkness, coring out each rib with bitter, terrifying chill, ice filling up the passageways of his lungs, flowering in the darkness of alveoli, branching and coiling in each bronchiole -- then burning again, burning hazily in the sun -- over and over and over, ice and fire --

-- he thinks he can remember hands holding his, arms around him, someone saying his name over and over, telling him to stay with them over the shrieks of the things that raked their claws inside his mind; cool touches on his burning face and throat, his chest, someone pounding his back while he choked on horrors, telling him it would be all right, he just had to clear his chest and it would be all right --

-- begging through the pain and effort of breathing, let me go, I can’t do this, I can’t, it hurts, let me go and a voice he knows saying sharply like hell I will, we lost one another once, I’m not losing you again, you flat-faced bastard and wanting to punch the owner of that voice enough to struggle up a little further toward consciousness, to find himself held --

-- waking again, waking for real, into a world that didn’t shift and change around him like a bad computer effect: waking to find himself lying in his familiar room, with an unfamiliar tube snaking into his arm, able to breathe for the first time in recent memory.

He feels strangely light, scoured-open, burnt clean to white ash, pure as salt; he feels like something washed up on an empty beach above an unknowable tide-line, sea-wrack left to disintegrate under some distant sun. Taking a deeper and then a deeper experimental breath brings with it only the soreness of abused muscles, not the dark-red pain of infection; all his skin is still prickle-sensitive, but without the hot-cold shivery sensation of fever.

There is someone dozing in the chair beside the bed, and his heart gives an involuntary judder -- but it is not someone all in red, and Vox does not quite know what to do with how much he wishes otherwise. He must have shifted in the bed, or made some sort of sound, because Velvette blinks herself awake and scowls at him with the furious expression he’s come to realize means I’m worried about you, fuckface.

“Back with us?” she says. “About time too. Some of us have better shit to do than sit around waiting for you to wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”

“How long have I been out?” Vox asks, not surprised that his voice is a husky ruin. Velvette leans over to the nightstand for the water, pours him a glass. Despite the drip in his arm he’s so dehydrated that plain water tastes amazing.

“Better part of a week,” she says, while he drinks. “Valentino is beside himself. This is the longest he’s had to go without your company since you two got together.”

Vox tries to picture the moth beside himself, and assumes this involves throwing things and threatening to discharge firearms. “What…actually happened?” he asks.

“Turns out that even if you get your scorching case of fucking Hanahaki Syndrome or whatever it is dealt with,” says Velvette, “having had that much foreign object crap inside your lungs gives you pneumonia, which is not part of the fairytale bit.”

“Dealt with,” Vox repeats.

“It is so blisteringly unfair that your cherry-cola bastard refuses to show up like a normal person on video,” she says. “Because holy fuck, could we have made the world’s most niche special. See the terrifying overlord Alastor playing devoted nursemaid for nearly forty-eight hours straight, refusing to leave his patient’s bedside until he literally collapses in exhaustion! Thrill to the notorious Radio Demon soothing fevered brows and comforting delirium! I mean, fuck, the numbers would have been obscene.” She laces her fingers behind her head, leaning back. “Seriously. Shit was touching, Vox. I was touched. Me. Right in my cold black shriveled heart.” Her grin broadens. “Also he’s hot when he’s unconscious, but I figure you know that part already.”

Vox stares at her, and then covers his face with his hands and simply groans.

___________________________________

I've been loved but I didn't know how to feel it And I've been adored but I don't know if I ever believed it I've been loved my whole life but I didn't know how to take it Until you

It isn’t true that there aren’t sunsets in Hell.

If you want to get right into it, detail-oriented and specific, there is such a thing as day and night, and there is a lighter phase of the scarlet sky over Pentagram City that fades, regularly, through shades of blood and viscera and plasma as the hours go past.

It’s in Vox’s idiom to spend time lounging in a magnificently embroidered dressing-gown on the terrace of his apartment, drink in hand, as those shades pass from serum through arterial to venous and then filtration organ, deep red shadows gathering. It’s also in his idiom to be the one in charge of any social occasion, and to keep the other participants off their game; he’d feel odd if he weren’t manipulating someone at any given time. Right now he isn’t. Right now he doesn’t know what he could do to manipulate his companion; has no idea what’s really going on behind those scarlet eyes.

“Pretty, isn’t it,” Alastor says, resting his elbows on the parapet beside Vox, looking down into the teeming circles of Hell. “In this light, anyway.”

“Pretty enough,” says Vox. He has his voice back, more or less. A little rough here and there, and don’t ask him to walk up stairs in a hurry, but he’s back. He’s back. “Al, we need to talk --”

“Kindly refrain from calling me that. And if this is the we need to talk I’ve been anticipating for the past entire week,” says Alastor, sitting down and stretching out on one of the sun-loungers Vox has on his terrace because he thinks he ought to, “then do let’s get on with it, shall we?”

He can remember wanting desperately to punch the owner of that voice, wanting it enough to struggle up through the layers of consciousness only to find himself held close and warm in arms he recognized even in his profoundly fucked-up state, thinking he’s winding me up on purpose, he’s, he’s trying to make me stay.

To make me stay.

“Yes,” he says, still leaning on the parapet. “Why not.”

“Look, neither of us are any good at this,” Alastor says. It takes Vox a second to register why he sounds so strange: there’s no radio filter. This is what he really sounds like underneath it, and the realization sends a cold finger down Vox’s spine. He’s going to tell me he’s done with this, he thinks. That it was a fun little diversion and now he has better shit to do. That I need to move on. And he isn’t wrong.

“Yes, I care about you,” Alastor says, shocking him out of his internal conversation with himself. Vox half-turns to see his expression and then does not quite dare. “That much is unmistakably obvious. I wouldn’t have spent quite so much time trying to drag your wretched carcass through an acute case of pneumonia if I didn’t have some reason to care about the outcome. And while any number of beings can insist on existence as the only reason for itself, I find Hell -- in its newest iteration -- hardly worth it, if I didn’t have you around. If you were gone, truly gone, I don’t think I’d be here for very long myself.”

There’s the sound of a sigh, of fabric rustling, and Vox knows without the shadow of a doubt that Alastor is pinching the bridge of his nose, eyes shut. “When Velvette called me I was shocked, and when I got here I was more shocked,” he continues. “The idea that you could feel anything for me, after all our history, let alone the kind of vicious misery you were being subjected to, was -- difficult to comprehend. It wasn’t until you woke up enough to explain even a little that I began to understand.”

Vox wishes, he really wishes, that he’d had another week of recovery before he’d had to have this conversation, and all he can think about is blue-lit darkness and someone’s arms around him, someone telling him it would be all right, he wasn’t alone, he didn’t have to bear this all on his own, and he cannot quite look at Alastor. “Understand,” he repeats.

“You said it wasn’t until you realized I wasn’t dead,” says Alastor. “That that was what pushed you over the edge. When you knew I was still around to -- to want.”

Vox can feel himself blushing, knows the hexcodes for the deep violet his screen has gone. He still hasn’t turned from the balcony to see Alastor: he can’t, right now. It’s too much. He’s scared of what he might see.

“Turns out that cuts both ways,” Alastor says, quietly. “Turns out I’m very bad at forgetting, even when I’m putting effort into it. I’ve never been able to forget what you and I were to one another all those years ago, despite my profound desire to do so. But I’ve been able to put it on a shelf. To compartmentalize. To deal with that some other time, and place it out of sight and out of mind. I’d even begun to think I no longer felt anything at all, until I saw you in such a terrible fucking state on my behalf.”

Vox feels as if his fever’s back: he shivers helplessly as the mild evening wind blows through his bones. “I didn’t mean to,” he says.

“Shut up, I’m having a moment here,” says Alastor, with about half of his usual asperity, and that -- the tone -- helps like a breath of air in a sealed cavern. “I saw you and something went click, and -- well. I don’t know what this is, Vox. I don’t know and I am supremely bad at not knowing things but I simply have no basis for comparison, but I do know that I don’t want it to go away.”

That last sentence had lashed like a whip, leaving a strange sweet numbness behind it. Vox swallows hard, makes himself turn to look at Alastor, who has gotten up and is standing at the other end of the balcony, his back to Vox. “You don’t want it to stop,” he says, and coughs, wincing as it hurts his healing lungs.

Alastor turns to him. “Fuck you,” he says. “Yes. Okay? Yes. I don’t want this to stop. I don’t even know what this fucking is and I don’t want it to stop.”

“Well,” says Vox. “That’s a start.”

“I hate you,” says Alastor, in the exact tone he’d used to help Vox through the miserable painful extremis of his illness.

“I know,” Vox says, and then he is beside Alastor, is looking up at him, and when shadow-tentacle arms wrap around him and hold him up against gravity he’s grateful. The scent of smoke and static is heady, strong, rather than overpowering. “I know.”

“Well then,” says Alastor, as if some sort of deal has been struck. “My very dear. Come and lie down on your unspeakable patio furniture, about which no more need be said. Rest. I won’t let anything come near.”

“That’s the sweetest you can be?” Vox asks, aware again of the thinness of the catastrophe-curve’s edge.

“Let’s call it a start,” says Alastor, and gestures, and suddenly Vox is lying back against the pillows of a sun-lounger, more comfortable than he has any right to be. “Start there.”

“I hate you,” he says, hearing the drowsiness in his own voice.

“I know,” says Alastor. “My dearest and most terrible Vox, trust me, I know.”

#

So tell me where it hurts To hell with everybody else All I care about is you and that's the truth They don't love me Yeah, I can tell But you do, so they can go to hell

You do, so they can go to hell

--Garbage, Tell Me Where it Hurts

Notes:

This was 100% inspired by an absolutely gorgeous piece of art I came across over on DeviantArt. I saw the picture and had to write the story; you should look at the picture as well. Observe the fucking gorgeous wreckedness of our flat-faced prince.

The first order of business had, of course, been the replacement and repair of all the electrical systems, except for how the entire damn city was without real power anyway. A temporary network had been rigged up using generators, which hasn’t done much for the air quality but does at least mean you can turn the lights on and use some technology. According to the TV news -- because even without Vox running the show, Hell needs its TV -- the King and Princess of Hell are putting together a task force to rebuild the electrical grid from the ground up, taking volunteers to do the construction work, and offering temporary housing for the workers in that stupid fucking hotel. Fine by Velvette: not her problem. She wants them to get a fucking move on and fix the place, if they’re going to.

She’s been amusing herself filming videos of the tower’s repair process to put on social media, even if no one’s got much time to look at it right now: the documentation is key. And she’s had some fun trying out new construction-chic looks to star in: there’s a lot to be said for the simple boilersuit, if you make it out of bronze lamé with wide cropped legs.

No one seems to have any concrete ideas as to what exactly caused the explosion that blew the power grid. Most people are blaming it on whatever Vox’s network was up to -- it’s definitely not been made clear to the population that Vox himself was behind it -- and there have been some grumbles about overlords fighting amongst themselves to the detriment of the rest of Hell’s population. They’ve covered for Vox’s absence by using stock footage and still shots in what media they have been able to put up on the limited internet and broadcast shows, and one of Vox’s lackeys who can imitate his voice has been doing a pretty okay job on that end. Weirdly Velvette kind of prefers it to the real thing, largely because she can dropkick the lackey down the stairs if he gives her any attitude, which was not the case with Vox himself.

Velvette pours herself another cup of coffee and prepares to hit post on her latest infernogram update: she’s done Leia buns today and considers the look rather fetching. Being one of two, rather than three, Vees is something she’s very definitely getting used to.

#

Again: Alastor floats.

Somewhere a long, long way away, devoid of pain, dark and comfortable and silent. It is like being cozily tucked inside someone’s heart, in the darkness within their body, drawn slowly hither and thither with the tide of their blood.

(He is thinking, inasmuch as he is thinking at all, in somatic metaphor, rather than electromagnetic. Just recently he has been very much more aware of soma and sarx than pneuma. If he let himself consider this, he might find it alarming; but for many reasons, he has never courted introspection.)

It is the first time in a long time that he has not hurt. This is so novel that he barely notices himself slowly rising toward consciousness; when his face breaks the surface, soft and gently lapping, it comes as a faint surprise. It is still dark, or at least dim, and the familiar heavy scent of swamps and magnolia coils around his hindbrain and calms the initial stirring of where am I. He is lying on his own bed, on the side where he always sleeps, propped up against pillows.

Oh, Alastor thinks, slowly. Thinking feels a bit like walking through thigh-deep treacle. It must have worked, then. His idiotic last-ditch effort seems to have preserved the hotel from destruction after all, which means that they’re probably all still alive, including him. This comes as something of a surprise. As his consciousness of his surroundings solidifies, he is aware that he is not alone.

Charlotte Morningstar is dozing in the chair beside the bed. She’s wearing her usual red tux with the nametag pinned to the left breast, but her hair is up in a businesslike bun that makes her look considerably older than usual: older and less naive.

(Lilith had worn her hair like that, from time to time. When she’d wanted very much to give people the wrong impression.)

He can remember, with the vague, hazy sort of recall he associates with being very drunk, telling Charlie he’d explain later, that they didn’t have much time, and dimly curses past him for making it necessary to explain things. He knows she’ll ask. She can’t not ask: she’s Charlie, she never stops asking questions.

It’s not actually true that he doesn’t hurt. It’s just that it’s such a different sort of hurting than the kinds he’s used to. He feels -- scoured. Broken open and emptied, burnt clean, pure as salt and sweet as death, high and dry and left on a tideline by some unknowable ocean. There is a strange numb kind of discomfort in his antlers -- a numbness all through him -- and all his bones feel empty and hollow, as if the teeming marrow-jelly has drained away and left him just a fragile scaffold of minerals, barely able to support his own weight. He wonders if he will crack and collapse at a touch, and if it would matter in the slightest. He’s used to numbness wearing off at the worst of times, and wonders what lies beneath that numbing, and how he will bear it when it inevitably surfaces.

But he can’t think about that now: he is breathing, without difficulty, without rustling clogging rubbish in his chest, without severe pain, but something in his breathing must have changed: some little sound must have woken Charlie, because she blinks slowly in the dimness and sits up in the chair.

“Alastor?” she asks, in a voice so small and young it makes the grown-up hair even more jarring even while it makes Alastor’s chest ache inexplicably; he thinks this is not fair.

“Well done,” he says with all his superiority, or tries to, and swallows with a click: his throat is so dry it hurts to try to speak. Charlie reaches over to the nightstand for a glass of water, and he takes it from her in both hands, not entirely sure of his own grip. It’s just tap water but it tastes priceless, and Alastor drinks half the glass without stopping, feeling his head slowly begin to clear. “-- as I was saying,” he continues, reaching for that superiority, eyes half-lidded, “full marks for identification.”

“Are you…okay?” Charlie asks, her own eyes narrowed.

He sets down the glass with a sigh, glad that the world seems to have steadied. “It would seem so.”

“You’re -- you,” Charlie says, as if asking him to confirm this.

“Who else?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t -- we didn’t know what it would do to you.”

“What what would do?” he asks, ungrammatically.

“The chain. Losing the chain. Dad said he had no idea what it’d do, if you’d still be our Alastor when you woke up --”

Alastor stares at her, and then it is a good thing he’s set down the water-glass because both his hands go to his throat, scrabbling for a thin hot strand that isn’t there -- that’s what he’d been missing, that’s why he’s felt so oddly numb and light at once, it’s gone, the fucking thing is gone and he can breathe -- he tries a deep inhale and it doesn’t catch, doesn’t constrict, doesn’t threaten to choke him -- he feels his ribcage creak with effort as he breathes in and in and in, an effort of his own making, not a mindless reaction to her grip --

“Alastor?” Charlie is saying. “Alastor, are you okay?”

He exhales, managing not to catch halfway in a cough, still astonished at the freedom of being able to breathe as deeply as he wants. “How?” he demands.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she says, blushing faintly rose-gold. It’s astonishing how much she looks like her father and her mother at the same time. “I just -- Vaggie pointed it out, and -- she was using you, it was so fucking horrible I didn’t think at all, I just grabbed the thing and ripped it apart and you collapsed and I was so scared, Alastor, I was so fucking scared that I’d hurt you -- that we’d lost you --”

“Go back to the beginning,” says Alastor, managing to keep his voice even with considerable effort. “Explain exactly what happened, in order.” His fingers are still pressed against his throat, where the raving-hot line of Lilith’s soul-chain is not, and the stupid idiotic somatic part of his awareness is still jumping up and down in simple glee at being able to breathe without thought. If he let them, his shadows would be doing that dance; he’s trying for everyone’s sake to keep them corralled at present.

Charlie does her best. He tries to keep his face straight as she describes Lilith puppeting him -- it’s horrible, but it’s hardly the first time that had happened, just the first time Lilith’s daughter had had to witness it -- and her impulsive tearing of the chain, several times over, with details, at his request.

“Dad said no one else could have done it,” she finishes, not quite looking him in the eye. “That it was only because it was Mom’s hair and I’m half her. That he couldn’t have done it himself, even if he’d thought of trying.”

Alastor leans back against the pillows, staring at his employer.

“What?” she asks, after a moment. “Alastor, I can’t read your mind, you have to say something -- I’m sorry, I really didn’t know what else to do --”

“I am attempting,” he says, slowly, “to put into words my most profound and absolute gratitude, Princess, for freeing me. It has been so very, very long since I have been able to breathe deeply. To -- feel as if my body is mine alone. I had given up hope of finding a way out of the agreement, since your mother had absolutely no intention of setting me free on her own and frankly I have never, not once, been a match for her. Thank you.”

Charlie smiles like sunlight, and he is dazzled the way Lucifer’s glow dazzles him, but less kindly: she’s a brighter, actinic, younger kind of light. “You’re welcome,” she says. It’s possibly the freedom from thrall and possibly his imagination and possibly his somewhat weakened condition, Alastor thinks, but he’s fairly sure he can feel her gladness lapping at his brain, the warmth of it like the sun on his face, and thinks: she can break a soul-chain with her bare hands, what the hell else can she do, she’s the most powerful creature in Hell at the moment, what astonishing potential --

“Oh,” Charlie says. “I almost forgot. What’s in this?”

She takes out his folded-up letter, still sealed with a fingerprint in candle-wax. “I found it when we brought you back here after the roof. I didn’t open it because it’s addressed to Dad, and I didn’t give it to him because I completely forgot I had it in my pocket.”

Alastor’s eyes widen for a moment and he twitches the folded-up paper out of her grasp. She isn’t expecting that, and she flinches ever so slightly, and he feels the days of his years all weighing on him at once, a vast, endless stack of weight threatening to crack his so-recently-freed ribcage with its force. In his hand the paper -- cheap Hell paper, with the Hazbin logo branding, on which his fountain-pen ink has feathered badly -- feels like something spies would kill for in a movie, and yet so utterly banal he can’t believe he wrote it in the first place. When she’s gone he’ll burn it to green-glowing ashes, and then no one ever needs to know.

Nothing,” he says. “To answer your question. Nothing important at all. How long have I been out?”

“Nearly forty-eight hours,” she says, eyes still narrowed for a moment at the folded paper in his hand before she redirects her attention. “Dad and I have been with you the whole time. We didn’t want you to have to wake up alone.”

Alastor presses a hand to his chest, an involuntary reaction: the ache there is nothing like the pain of his wound had been, a deep sort of sweet hurt he doesn’t have the slightest idea what to do with. Charlie looks at him, concerned, and reaches out to touch his other hand, lying on the bedclothes with the folded letter. He doesn’t pull away; doesn’t even try to, even as the touch sends a wave of goosebumps flooding down his arm. “You should rest,” she says. “Dad will be here when you wake up. I’m -- I’m so glad you’re okay, Alastor. That you’re still you.”

He is grateful when she gets up and turns away; the corners of his eyes sting. And he is more grateful when she closes the wards behind her, leaving him alone. He breaks the wax seal on the piece of paper he’d left for Lucifer in the event that he hadn’t come back from this last stupid all-or-nothing gamble, rereads the words.

I know from experience that you recognize the value of quotations as shorthand, he had written -- not in his loopiest, most beautiful calligraphy but in the sharp angled cursive he uses when he needs to say something clearly and fast. Thus I will leave you with this, assuming I am not here to prevent its delivery: it is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done.

I have inexplicably and illogically come to feel quite sincerely for your daughter and her band of misfits, and I wish them all well, and as you are the most powerful creature on this plane I know you will protect them as far as they can be protected, whatever comes next. No one could ask for more.

I have also to thank you for -- to misquote Henry V -- your care and tender preservation of my person, and apologize that such work and effort is destined to be ruined so quickly.

Alastor closes his eyes, lets the paper drift down to cover his face. There simply hadn’t been a way to mention the fact that Lucifer’s ex-wife owned his soul and was probably going to do some creatively nasty things to him for dying again, assuming she could still get her claws on what was left. He hadn’t tried; he’d simply ended the letter with I remain, etc., yours, ALASTOR -- and felt a feverish shiver begin at his fingertips and pass through him like a shock-front as his pen finished the words. Now, holding the letter again, he feels that same hot-cold wave flow through him, and shudders despite himself. It means nothing. It’s a flicker of leftover somatic reaction to one’s own magic, that’s all.

He should destroy the letter, now, before there’s even the slightest chance that anyone else can see it. He should burn it to green-glowing ash between his fingertips. He should -- probably do a lot of things. When he has the strength for it.

Since he’s still here. And -- here on his own recognizance, not on somebody’s leash.

He has no idea what the future holds, or how long his freedom will last, or what he will be able to do with that freedom; he is still thinking about that when the fatigue lapping at his brain and body reaches up to swallow him and close over his head.

#

Vaggie has never had a CO she looked up to the way she looks up to Charlie’s dad.

It’s a thing. As a soldier you do what you are told, you obey the officer who’s doing the telling, but there’s a world of difference between following the idiotic ramblings of some incompetent douche and being directed by someone who knows not only what they’re doing but what you can do and is prepared to use you as the weapon you have trained to become.

It’s a little exhilarating, to have that. She hasn’t had that since her very early days as an exterminator, and even then, the command had been nothing more than “kill the motherfuckers” without a great deal of strategy involved. This, though. This is the kind of complicated supply-chain bullshit that apparently lights up Vaggie’s brain and allows her to churn out detailed reports on exactly how many people they need to do this repair and how many they need to do that, taking into consideration how few individuals they have on hand who are actually trained and capable of safely engaging with the kind of power infrastructure they’re rebuilding. “You know what,” Lucifer had said, halfway through their first morning, “you are an organizer,” and coming from him it had sounded like the best thing in all the worlds to be: she’d blushed violet and managed to stop her wings unfolding and not to curtsey all at once. It was easier when he’d summoned up a medal for her: CHIEF, ORGANIZATION.

He himself had been run ragged pretty much as soon as they’d started the project, and not because they’d had him zap a whole new power grid into being the way he’d rebuilt the hotel. He’d explained to Vaggie why he wasn’t going to be Hell’s deus ex the way he’d deus-exed the Hazbin, and it made sense: the task, the need, was totally different. What he could do was physical construction assistance, flying objects from here to there, helping raise towers and forge connections without needing a torch. But Vaggie, left on the ground with a megaphone and the Devil’s authority, had started to organize and she had gone on organizing ever since, and now -- it’s become clear how long this shit is going to need to take to fix, but it’s also clear that it can be, and that they can do it on their own. She’s had some of their more politically minded volunteers go down to the Vees’ tower to see if they can find out what they’re up to, and she’s done a brief TV spot with Killjoy’s stand-in because she frankly did not have time to wait an hour and a half for Killjoy to get camera-ready, but she and Lucifer still don’t have a really clear idea of what the Vees plan to do next. That much is gonna be an Angel Dust problem.

48 hours, Vaggie tells herself, watching Angel saunter down the street and then right an abandoned pink moped, look around, visibly think finders keepers and zip off workward at a notably increased rate of speed. It’s only 48 hours after the disaster. We’re not doing that badly. Angel will be able to tell us more. Right now --

Right now the wisps that are escaping from her tied and pinned hair are lifting in the backwash from six red-and-white wings, and Lucifer lands beside her and does the whole-body shrug thing that makes the wings wriggle and go away. “How we doing?” he inquires.

“Steady,” says Vaggie. “Angel just left. Hopefully he’ll get to the tower safely and can get an idea of what the fuck they’re up to inside. I got reports from sectors two and three that they’re gonna get done with the main cables probably today and need you to go make the connections, sir, and probably four can get there if we yell at them real loud.”

Lucifer grins at her. He’s not in his ringmaster drag any more than Vaggie is wearing her fighting-angels outfit: both of them are wearing pale-golden jumpsuits and steel-toed boots. It suits him, she thinks, and blushes again. “You got this shit under control,” he says.

“I try,” says Vaggie, and then looks up because while Charlotte Morningstar doesn’t do wings she does do the glow thing, and she’s not actually anywhere near as good as her dad at controlling the glow thing, so it’s a bit like a searchlight when she pops into existence twenty feet above the temporary platform her father and Vaggie have built and floats gently down to touch the muddy boards.

“Hi, honey,” says Lucifer. “Shining pretty bright there.”

“Dad,” she says, cutting off the light all at once, and then looks at Vaggie and grabs for her in a tight hug. Vaggie holds her, surprised, and strokes her back while Charlie apparently gets her shit together; after a moment she straightens up. “Sorry. Um. You guys. Alastor’s awake. Or he was, anyway.”

“Is he okay?” Vaggie says at about the same time Lucifer does.

“I don’t know. I hope so? He’s -- he was surprised. That the chain is broken. That I could break it.”

“I just bet he is,” says Lucifer, his wings reappearing.

“I think he’s resting now, Dad,” says Charlie. “He’s still really worn out by whatever magic he did with the radio?”

“Yes,” says Lucifer. “I rather think he is. And that the revelation of his freedom is kind of a gigantic important difficult thing to think about, while in a fragile state.”

“He left a note for you,” says Charlie. “Before he went up to the roof to do the -- the thing. It was addressed to you. I picked it up and I must have put it in my pocket because I had the thing afterward, when he woke up, and I gave it back to him. No idea what it said, I didn’t open it.”

“You shouldn’t take letters that don’t belong to you,” says Vaggie, fascinated.

“I know, it was just a “I don’t know if this part of the building is gonna get demolished” type of deal,” says Charlie apologetically. “Anyway he has it back now, so. He’s awake. Or he was. I think he’s gonna be in and out for a bit, but -- Dad, I know you wanted to talk to him when he woke up.”

Lucifer nods. “I’ll give the poor man a little longer to recover from the horrid shock of being awake,” he says easily, but Vaggie can tell he’s tense. “In the meantime, Charlie, they have a bunch of new recruits over at the hotel lobby who would like to ask you some questions, if you can spare a moment?”

“I’ll be right there,” she says, and salutes her father and Vaggie both before hurrying off up the hill, and Vaggie cannot speak for a moment for how full and tight her throat feels at that little offhand gesture: fuck, she loves Charlotte Morningstar, utterly and completely, and she would do anything for her. Anything at all.

And Lucifer is looking at her, knowingly, and Vaggie cringes -- but only for a moment, before Lucifer holds out his hand to her. “I know,” he says. “Trust me, I know. Wanna come with me to get an aerial view of the work?”