#killerhosts

It was the late hours of the night when Alastor went into VeeTower, little more than a crimson shadow in it's liminal spaces. At this hour, he'd learned from watching the place for the last couple of days, there were very few active staff members on the route he'd need to take to follow the signal upwards; not much more than janitorial and maintenance staff, a couple of security officers that wouldn't be long for the afterlife if Alastor had to deal with them. He didn't need to; most barely noticed the shadow slip around the corner and up the stairwell, those that did dismissed it out of hand as exhaustion, or the effects of whatever substances they used to self medicate their miserable existence into tolerability.

On top of that, Alastor thought he'd have to contend with a security system detecting his presence, alarms blaring, but he was surprised to find no alarms triggered as he made his way. The halls were silent as he followed the signal. It was weak, compared to what he knew Vox's signal to be normally... but unmistakably there, and easy enough to track upwards, upwards, upwards until he finally came to the floor it was on, one last hall between him and wherever Vox was being kept.

Once his shadow slithered out from under the stairwell door, it braided up into his full, seven foot form, black fading to crimson as he appeared in the dim hallway. A cursory glance back down the hall, ears angling as he listened, and then he was moving. His heels clicked on tile like the hooves of a much larger beast, carrying him forward, closer to the media demon's signal until he came to a door with a plaque indicating whose office this was. Instead of trying the handle, he simply dissolved under it, reappearing on the other side. He tried to ignore the pain in his joints, like old gears clogged with grit, wearing down from the events of the last few days. He was too giddy with his newfound freedom to truly be deterred by something so simple as pain, not when his mind felt unfettered, attached to his body by little more than his own strings.

Inside, Alastor took a moment to inspect the room, before he was circling around the desk; the signal was coming straight from it. He wanted to laugh. The cruelty of it was delightful, considering he thought these people were supposed to be the ones Vox considered his closet friends now.

I told you once, Vincent, he thought distantly as he grabbed the knob and pulled it open without ceremony. Alastor can't hide the small jerk of his head as light suddenly flooded up from the drawer, a flashbang of blue light across his eyes as it filled the darkness with more than just the red glow of his own gaze and whatever dim, neon glow filtered in through shuttered windows. His ears flicked, agitated, as they pinned instinctively back to his head, his lips peeled back from black gums as he bared his fangs. Then he blinked, quick, then another, slower, white spots dancing in his vision, and finally he was opening them fully as he reached in to pull the screen out. The blue light was the only thing illuminating him, washing his warm skin out until it was corpse pale.

"—uh huh."

Dafne's last few month on earth were—well. Were they lonely? She had company. Sometimes. She went to cool and idyllic places, such as the beautiful, beautiful state of Florida.

And now she's here. Alone all over again until being recruited for—what? The afterlife—the hell—version of a social media campaign?

Look, she's not completely enamored by the idea. She wasn't before she walked up here, and she's not now that a tall guy with a television for a face has his hands (talons?!) on her shoulders. There's nothing about what she did to Zachary Key, to herself, to planet earth, that's worth celebrating or publicizing.

"Harrowing is kind of dramatic," she says. But also: "I mean, it was. Harrowing. And it is. For—" Sigh. "Everyone that's still alive. With him. Can you—" She tries to crane her neck.

The cabin was a lonesome, decrepit thing on the edge of the pride ring, out in the middle of nowhere. The kind of place that had once called to Alastor's soul, a place he had once thrived in during the dead of night, when there was a body beneath his hands to carve up. The kind of place where the locals whispered of him a rougarou hunting, but there are no locals here, and this is not that cursed, old swamp. This place did not call to him. No, to the contrary; he hated it here. It was a symbol of the place where his collar was fastened around his neck like a hang man's noose.

Now, it was a prison. The cabin didn't so much as have electricity. The only light was the low burning fire to his left, where he stood at the window, peering out into the night. The tree coverage was so thick even his sight couldn't pick out more than abstract shapes in the shadows.

It was so still. Maddeningly still to a man like Alastor who needed to move, to act, to perform, who needed sound and light and entertainment to maintain what sanity he had left. There was nothing to do here, no one for which to perform, and he felt like he was losing what was left of his mind, and he still felt the invisible shackle around his throat. It still burned from his audacity a few days ago. The extermination had been a week before, and he had disappeared only a few days before that; the timing had almost certainly been intentional, he realized now. Despite that fact, he'd stubbornly tried to broadcast. Rosie hadn't told him not to. She hadn't told him that they had to think he was dead and gone, only that he had to leave. He could have made that work. Somehow.

Except then he had reached out to his broadcast and tried, and felt the shackle clamp tight on his neck, felt vines of glowing energy curl around his windpipe as the thorns dug in and the words curdled in his throat before a single syllable escaped into the air. Halfway across the ring, only a small number of radios had flared to life, crackling once, twice with the pop! of disturbed static before falling to silence. He was too busy choking to process how many he had even touched. Worse, Alastor had no way of knowing what they thought that feedback was, even if anyone heard it. Did they think him dead? Maybe they thought that fractured static was a natural byproduct of the radio demon's final death fall. The thought made cold rage burn hot in his chest, made him want to tear the cabin down around him. He stood stock still as he peered into the darkness.

Then he felt it. The rage guttered instantly like the flames beside him; not because his rage was gone, but because suddenly, suddenly... something had his attention. Something of interest beyond his own mind. Ears that had been pinned in agitation snapped upright as his head swiveled in what was roughly the direction of the Pentagram. For a heartbeat, he froze, listening, as if trying to ascertain what he was feeling beyond the walls of the cabin. Then the crawl of static down the back of his neck and he knew. He knew down to the marrow.

Vox. How did you find me? he thought distantly as he suppressed his signal. Had his old pal been listening? Could he suppress his signal enough to disappear? He wasn't sure.

A part of him hated this. A part of him panicked. Rosie had told him he needed to disappear, had told him, when she came back to enforce the command with more clarity, that he needed to be gone for now, out of sight, out of mind. Vox finding him here was the worst case scenario he could think of. What happened to his soul if Vox walked out and spread the news that he had very much not disappeared? Would he be torn down the middle, his soul asunder, lost in static, like so many overlords beneath his teeth?

A part of him wanted this. Needed this in a way he would never willingly tell Vox. The part of his mind that craved entertainment like his lungs craved oxygen. He'd nearly lost his mind in no more than the week or so that it had been since she had sent him away. There was nothing to do in that wretched, one room little hunting cabin. A bed in the corner that was too small for a demon of his size to sleep comfortably on, the bare minimum in furniture all shoved against the walls. A mostly decayed corpse shoved beneath what had once been a kitchen table and it's two chairs, all of it now coated in a century's worth of dust.

Effigies of sticks and bones and sinew hanging from the rafters.

Things he did not want Vox to see. Hints of a life lived, of things he hadn't told Vincent Vox even when they were still close.

There was no time to hide any of it. More than that, there was no where to hide any of it, but at least the flames had burned down low. It left a chill in the air that made his body ache as he glanced back around, but the space was swathed in shadows. He knew, intimately, that Vox's screen would illuminate the dark, would shine a light on the secrets on display in this place, but he could do nothing but act like they didn't matter. Maybe if he did, Vox would overlook them. He knew better than that.

Shadows crawl across his limbs, up his spine, over the back of his skull until he was swallowed by them, reappearing across the room in the armchair, beside which sat an end table with a bottle of whiskey. God, the things he'd do for a sazerac proper right now. Maybe a cigarette. All he had was the rye itself, nothing to mix it with, nothing else to pair with it either. Sighing to himself, he let himself settle, one leg folded over the other. There was no place to hide the secrets here; there was no place to hide himself, even if he managed to suppress his signal enough to disappear from Vox's radar. Where would he go? Beside the door? Startle Vox as he came in? A good way to get electrocuted, probably.

Alastor had an order to follow, the shackle ever present in his mind. He had to play it smart. Alastor poured himself another glass, his eyes on the front door as he felt the static in the air thicken the closer the source of the interference came. Until the clink of metal claws against the door knob outside, the rattle of it in the frame... then the door opened, and blue light flooded the room. His eyes squinted, then closed against the light, for one brief moment, before he forced them open again. crimson eyes fixed on the other overlord as he took a drink, pupils constricted against the sudden brightness. The edge of his lip curled in a snarl as he lowered the glass.

It felt like walking on brittle glass when the radio demon rematerialized inside the apartment. So many things had been said in a moment where he was compromised, when the mask was not so much slipped as simply gone, when he had no filter left with which to shut his damned mouth. How much did you give away? Not the important parts, he thought. Not the who. Or why. Not the how. His secret was still safe. It didn't matter that Vox suspected there was a deal. Let him suspect. It mattered that he didn't know the details. That he didn't know that for nearly a century, Alastor's soul was owned.

As he materialized inside, he took a moment to reconstruct himself, at least as full as he was able to. Vox wasn't the only one starting to suffer from withdrawals, but Valentino's drugs were clinging to his nervous system like dye in porous wood. He'd done plenty of drugs back in his day, but in Hell? He'd done astonishingly little, and certainly not Valentino's. His body didn't know what to do with itself.

The thought was dismissed as crimson eyes swept the apartment, finding no sign of Vox at first. An ear flicked, and then he listened. Not with his ears, but with his signal, reaching into the apartment to find the other signal he knew nearly as well as his own. He could have pulled the contract, but he didn't need to. Vox was easy enough to find, easy enough to sense up in the loft, above him and to the left of where he stood at the front door. His eyes drifted up towards the raised area, raising a brow slightly.

"Hm."

He melted into shadow, reappearing up the steps by the bed. His joints still felt heavy, weighted with lead, with grit between his connective tissue. That he was standing still was the only reason his limp wasn't making itself known as he posed the question.

Couldn't sleep?

The neutral smile split into an amused grin when Vox startled, blinking slowly at him. Alastor did look rough still. Vox wasn't wrong about that; the bags under his eyes were still bad, but not as bad. His eyes weren't as hazy, weren't as unfocused. He'd slept some, apparently, though it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. His posture was still less than acceptable, but his arms were folded behind his back. In the privacy of his broadcast tower, it would have to do. His arm also wasn't fully stitched, but he had been able to bandage the rest of it after Vox had done the bulk of the work, which meant the blood was no longer oozing through his suit, of which he'd changed into a fresh one.

Alastor thought he did a good job hiding it until Vox had said something, but... there was no way to fully mask it. It would take several days of rest before that part was gone. Instead he gave a slow, lazy blink as he listened to him, focusing instead on Vox's state more than on what he was really saying, trying to decipher him, his signal, the state of him. It felt... rough. Deteriorated, somehow. He was in no state to fully decipher it, but... it wasn't good, he realized.

"It's a wonder what a few hours of sleep can do for a man!" he said at his comment, hand reaching out as his staff spun into reality, moving in his hand like a baton that had been there long before it appeared while the empty hand was thrown up into a shrug, and then planted the end of the staff in front of him so he could rest his hand atop the microphone. He was just relieved to have it fixed again, to have access to the full scope of his power. He could live with the pain in his chest for now. Pain was manageable.

Alastor circled around the bed to the side Vox was closer to, and as he walked, he wasn't fully able to hide the limp. After how his leg had buckled beneath him the last time, he was lucky it was functioning at all. With the pain landing up through his thigh, he wondered if this was what Vox's leg felt like now, but he said nothing as he stopped nearer to him, folding his hands behind his back along with the staff as he leaned over into his space, closing the distance as he raised brow at him.

"And you! You still look rather worse for wear," he said, far too energetic. "How are the repairs coming along? Do you have all the tools you'll need here?"

⌖   𝒫︁ERVERTS,   accepting   @killerhosts.

the   confession   settles   ugly   between   them.   it   does   not   wound   the   room.   he   speaks   as   though   he   expects   revelation   to   follow   after   it,   some   terrible   understanding   descending   clean   &   white   from   the   ceiling.   but   the   tower   only   hums   around   them   in   sickly   electric   pulses,   screens   flicker,   wires   breathe   in   the   walls—   hell   churns   below   the   windows   like   floodwater   clogged   with   corpses.   alastor   says   nothing   for   a   long   while.

not   out   of   mercy.   he   simply   enjoys   the   sight   of   it   too   much.

there   is   a   particular   kind   of   suffering   that   ripens   beautifully   when   left   untouched.   like   fruit   splitting   open   in   summer   heat.   like   roadkill   swelling   beneath   the   louisiana   sun   while   flies   gather   fat   &   ecstatic   around   it.   most   people   rush   to   cover   misery   the   moment   it   exposes   itself.   they   smother   it   with   reassurance.   with   tenderness.   they   panic   at   the   nakedness   of   another   creature’s   despair—   he   has   never   possessed   that   instinct,   no.   he   watches   vox   instead.   really   watches   him.

the   restless   twitch   beneath   the   confidence.   the   exhaustion   stitched   beneath   all   that   arrogance   &   spectacle.   the   way   his   pride   drags   itself   upright   even   now,   even   after   laying   something   raw   &   shivering   at   alastor’s   feet.   it   is   magnificent   in   the   way   collapsing   buildings   are   magnificent—   all   that   noise   &   violence   just   to   announce   the   inevitable.   then,   slowly,   he   smiles   wider.   not   kindly. 

❝   oh,   i   know,   ❞   the   words   emerge   soft   as   velvet.

no   mockery   in   his   tone   at   first,   which   somehow   makes   it   crueler.   he   moves   through   the   room   leisurely,   heels   tapping   against   the   floor   with   funeral   rhythm.   red   spills   across   his   coat,   &   vox’s   screens   cast   their   pale   glow   over   the   sharp   angles   of   his   silhouette   until   he   resembles   some   old   devil   painted   inside   a   church   no   one   attends   anymore.

❝   you   have   always   mistaken   performance   for   personhood—   it   is   why   you   keep   building   larger   stages,   brighter   little   lights,   ❞   a   quiet,   dry   chuckle   curls   loose   from   his   throat.   ❝   as   though   volume   might   someday   compensate   for   substance.   ❞

outside,   thunder   rolls   somewhere   deep   over   pentagram   city.   or   perhaps   artillery.   he   sounds   often   resemble   one   another.   alastor   stops   near   the   window.   below   them   the   city   writhes   in   neon   &   vice,   sinners   pouring   through   the   streets   in   endless   glittering   streams.   desire   everywhere.   consumption   everywhere.   an   entire   civilization   built   atop   the   panic   of   empty   things   trying   desperately   to   fill   themselves—   &   standing   beside   him   now   is   the   backbone   of   televangelism   itself.   a   demi-god   of   screens   &   spectacle,   hollowed   clean   through.   nothing   godly   about   him.   &   god,   he   adores   it.

this   —this   stripped-open   ruin   of   him—   is   the   only   honest   thing   vox   ever   offers   the   world.   not   the   tantrums.   not   the   bravado.   not   the   endless   clawing   need   to   dominate   every   room   he   enters.   this.   the   terrible   awareness   that   beneath   all   the   screens   &   sound   &   arrogance   there   remains   a   void   so   vast   it   consumes   everything   poured   into   it.   alastor   steps   closer,   close   enough   for   the   static   to   crawl   warm   against   his   skin.   close   enough   to   loom   over   the   slumped   figure   with   something   almost   reverent   in   the   tilt   of   his   grin.

❝   you   shape   your   entire   existence   around   avoiding   that   horrible   emptiness   inside   yourself,   &   still   it   follows   you   faithfully,   ❞   he   tilts   his   head,   admiring.   ❝   how   exhausting   it   must   be   to   wake   each   morning   &   discover   you   are   still   yourself,   ❞

for   the   first   time,   there   is   genuine   delight   in   his   expression.   not   hidden,   nor   restrained.   as   though   vox   has   finally   become   something   worth   witnessing.

❝   &   the   cruelest   part?   ❞   he   says   softly,   voice   dragging   like   a   blade   against   silk   ❝   you   will   never   escape   it.   not   with   power.   not   with   attention.   not   with   love,   ❞   the   word   sounds   filthy   in   his   mouth,   bitter   enough   to   curdle   there.   he   resists   the   urge   to   bite   his   tongue.

❝   you   can   flood   this   city   with   your   image   until   every   sinner   in   hell   chokes   on   it,   &   at   the   end   of   every   night   you   will   still   return   here—   alone   with   the   knowledge   that   none   of   it   managed   to   fill   you.   ❞ 

silence   again.   heavy   now.   then   he   laughs,   warm   &   delighted,   like   a   man   seated   comfortably   before   a   hearth.

❝   oh,   vox—   ❞   his   grin   stretches   wider,   if   possible,   ❝   i   forgot   how   much   i   missed   our   talks.   ❞

Alastor disappeared from of the battlefield hours ago. No sign of the Radio Demon had been seen in the debris, and—something he would look back on bitterly—none of the hotel crew had looked for him after the fact. Not that any of them would find him on the other side of the Pentagram, but it was still a point of contention that would make him seethe with a bitter rage all the same. Everything he'd done, and they were crying about that fucking snake.

So he'd think, as soon as his body was capable of seething with bitter rage.

Now, it wasn't. It was barely functional at all.

Forced off of the battlefield, Alastor retreated to the one place in Hell he thought he could go to recover; his broadcast tower. As a vortex of shadows opened up in the room, he was dropped unceremoniously to the floor, guided through the portal with his own familiar to help him navigate to the other side. Microphone feedback squealed between his teeth as he landed, chest down, on the rug, not thick enough to soften the impact.

A wet, hiccupping breath escaped him as his limbs jerked, dragging his right hand up beside his head, nails digging into the burgundy fibers beneath him. He didn't move for a long time—it felt like a long time, at least; maybe it was minutes, maybe it was months, that he laid there in a haze, a thin slash of crimson staring blankly to the side—unable to get his trembling limbs under control. Was his left arm still attached? He'd vaguely had feeling, earlier, but now he couldn't even tell his fingers were there. Perhaps he had caused some irreparable damage moving it, severed already damaged nerves.

It would be fine. It was nothing he couldn't handle.

When the pain became less of a mind-deafening scream across his nerve endings and more of a muffled wailing, when his breath was less a desperate gasp and more the sick wheeze of a punctured lung, he finally tried to drag his knee up under himself. Agony. Blinding, white-hot agony that drew more feedback from the radio demon, this time echoing from the broadcast console as much as his own throat as the tower responded to him. He didn't stop, pulling his other knee up underneath of himself, then pushing himself up with his hand.

One step at a time. It was a process, like constructing a well-built engine. Or something. Next came the feet, pulling his knee up towards his chest as he planted his foot flat, using it to push himself upwards until he could drag the other leg up under him. He sagged heavily sidewards until he was resting his left shoulder against the wall. More of that blinding agony. More mechanical feedback through the console, a constant hum of white noise in the air. His left arm was completely non-functional by now, hanging limp at his side. Turning his head, he could see why; the strike had cut up onto his shoulder, nearly through it. If he'd been a single step closer to Adam, the blow would've cleaved him in half. Goodnight and goodbye, folks! That's the Radio Demon, signing off! Or, perhaps more aptly, one long, droning beep of a machine flatlining.

Another wet gasp, a death rattle drowning in static as his eyes fluttered closed and his other hand came up to his chest, claws digging into the blood-soaked fabric of his coat. The air was full of the acrid sent of burnt matches now, only growing stronger with each gout of blood flowing from the wound in his chest, from every heaving cough the left him lurching on unsteady legs, a mouthful of blood spilling between his teeth.

He forced himself to take one staggering step forward. Then another. Three, four, five until he had crossed the room to the switchboard, trying not to slip when his legs didn't want to work fully. If it wasn't for the state he was in, for the blood loss, and pain so intense even he almost couldn't bear it, he would've noticed the building static in the air, the hum at the base of his skull, signifying only one thing; Vox's approach.

But he was barely aware of what was in front of him as he stared down at the broadcast panel, his grin wrenched wide and full of blood, eyes sometimes half lidded and sometimes too wide as he teetered on the edge of passing out. The axe had cut deep, biting through his shoulder blade until it nearly opened his ribcage. Some of his lower ribs, low on the side opposite that motionless arm, he thought might have been split in half. It felt like it, like they moved with every breath, but he couldn't tell what was real and what was imagined.

His hand rested on the broadcast panel, bracing, supporting himself as he took one desperate breath after the other. Was he dying? No, his mind stubbornly responded. He didn't know. Death had been swift the first time. The brief awareness of dogs baying in the darkness, the all too familiar sound of a bolt action rifle being loaded, but he never heard the gunshot itself, never felt the ground rise up to meet his body. He awoke screaming in a place he hadn't recognized, zero transition from the there and then to the hereafter. So was he dying?

No.

Alastor shifted his balance back onto his heels so that he no longer needed to support his own weight. He reached up to a heavy, worn pushbutton and depressed it with a heavy click as he began the powering sequence. He felt the electrical grid inside the switchboard hum to life beneath his finger tips, before Alastor further reached over to grab the knife switch to engage the antenna.

He would have, at least. It was the final step needed to make the broadcast live, although it would be dead air, with nothing but static humming over the airwaves. But he staggered, dropped hard against the side of the control panel, the corner digging into those splintered ribs as he caught himself on one elbow and... oh! Well, it seemed the other one did still work after all, coming up instinctively to catch himself as his claws gouged the metal in a vain attempt to find purchase at the cost of immense pain lancing through his shoulder. He tried to hold himself up, legs half folded beneath him as his head swam, black spots dancing in his vision. Was he imagining the scent of ozone building in the air?

meme tag || inbox || OPEN

Vulpine Cervine ears pinned flat against Fable's head as Alastor closed the distance between them, turning his head away as claws were suddenly entirely too close to his throat. The grin tightened at the edges, but he didn't move from where he stood as Alastor fidgeted with adjusted the identical bowtie Fable now wore.

What an odd feeling, the changeling thought absently, one hand, one hand coming up to touch the side of his face, dragging fingertips over the skeletal structure of a face built nothing like his. It normally wasn't so disconcerting to do this. After all, he had been shapeshifting for a damned long time. Far longer than Alastor had even existed. But those faces had always been self described, or contracted from a soul he owned or otherwise dealt with. This inversion of his usual power to claim a face made his skin feel like an ill-fitted suit, like a mask twisted around sideways, sitting wrong over the real thing.

The charcoal hand and crimson claws dropped away from Fable's face, almost lacing together in front of him as the changeling was known to do, before he reconsidered it. The personality and physical affect was still asserting itself over top of his own, the mask slowly adjusting to sit right over his face; it would take at least another half an hour, if he had to guess at it, for the muscle memory to come to life, and for the mental affect to come forward and allow him to fully step into the role. This evidenced in the way his ears were still pinned in irritation.

Inhale. Sigh.

He was a good enough actor to cover for it until it did, if Alastor pushed him out of the door between now and then. Well. He'd have to be if that happened, wouldn't he? The smile held, at least.

Fable folded his arms behind his back instead, slotting his cane—changed, like the rest of his outfit, until it was an imitation of Alastor's staff—through the gap between his arm and his side. Slowly, crimson eyes swung back around to face his patron, eyes half-lidded.