Siren’s Domain

Still in his arms, Vox does not move. His first instinct is not panic. Panic is crude. Panic is undignified. Panic is what lesser men do when their circumstances become inconvenient. Vox does not panic. He freezes with immaculate internal violence. The room remains dim around them, folded in late-blue quiet. The old radios on the shelves hum faintly, their dials dark, their wooden bodies polished enough to catch the soft light in dull little gleams. The hidden jammers in the walls pulse beneath the atmosphere, nearly silent, almost polite. Every system in the room has been tuned to low output, calibrated for stillness, comfort, and containment.

It’s containment.

Yes.

That is what this is, you idiots.

This is not intimacy.

Certainly not for my indulgence.

Containment.

Alastor is curled against him with the kind of unguarded ease Vox has no right to witness. His forehead rests near Vox’s chest, not quite tucked there now, but close enough that the memory of last night still presses into the space between them. One of Vox’s arms lies across his waist, light but unmistakable. The other rests near Alastor’s shoulder, fingers curled loosely against the sheets. He should move immediately and professionally. He does not. Instead, he looks. He tells himself it is an assessment.

Temperature normalized. Breathing steady. Stitching dim. No visible flare. Frequency dependency is still present, but reduced during sleep. Post-collapse recovery proceeding within acceptable…Alastor’s ear flicks: small, soft, unconscious, and Vox’s screen glitches.

A thin line of static rips across the blue and disappears.

Absolutely not.

The thought from last night returns, unwelcome and fully formed this time.

Cute.

Vox stares at the far wall as if offended by the word’s audacity.

No. Stop thinking that!

No, that is not the category. That is not the operating framework. That is not helpful. The Radio Demon does not get to be cute simply because he is unconscious and fever-drained and inconveniently tucked into my side like he had once decided sleep meant surrender, mother fucker.

He adjusts his hand the smallest fraction. Alastor shifts toward the warmth. Vox goes still again. His screen brightens by one faint degree.

Noted.

He should be ashamed of the satisfaction that curls through him. He is not. He will be later, perhaps, when it becomes strategically inconvenient. For now, he lets himself have exactly three seconds of victory.

One.

Alastor’s breathing remains slow.

Two.

His ear twitches again, then relaxes.

Fuck. Three.

Vox withdraws his arm.

Shit. Shit. Careful.

So carefully it irritates him. He slides his hand from Alastor’s waist inch by inch, watching the stitching for any flare, watching the face for any tightening. The mattress shifts beneath him; Alastor’s brow creases faintly, and for a moment Vox’s hand hovers, ready to settle back where it was. He does not. He eases away and sits up at the edge of the bed, smoothing his jacket automatically. It is creased from sleep. That, more than anything else, makes the situation feel real in a way he resents. He glances back once. Alastor remains asleep, hair slightly mussed, coat folded neatly on the chair nearby, ears relaxed. The dim blue light softens the harsher angles of his face without making him look harmless. Nothing could make him harmless, it is part of the appeal. Vox stands. 

The room seems louder once he is no longer lying in the center of it. Not actually loud, never that, not here, but more aware of itself, the jammers hum in the walls. The temperature system shifts, and the old television parts along the shelves sit like witnesses. Vox crosses to the wall panel and pulls up diagnostics with a flick of his fingers. Blue interfaces unfold in layered rectangles: temperature, signal interference, stitching flare patterns, shadow movement suppression, and frequency response. Each one gives him something logical to look at.

Good. This is perfect.

Logic is better than whatever the fuck that bed moment had been. Focus.

He adjusts a limiter by two percent, then pauses.

Too much could irritate the stitches. Too little and Alastor might slip through shadow the moment he regains the strength to be difficult. Vox adjusts it back by half.

“Contained, remember,” he murmurs under his breath. “Not caged.”

The room, like an unhelpful bastard, does not tell him whether there is a meaningful difference. Behind him, the fabric shifts. Vox’s hand stills over the interface.

A breath.

Then a voice, rough with sleep and sharpened by immediate offense, “…Of course.”

Vox turns. Alastor is awake. Not fully, but awake enough to be angry, which is a reliable sign of improvement. He lies still for a moment, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling, as if he is taking inventory of every indignity before deciding which one to punish first. Then his gaze shifts, slow and surgical, to Vox. The smile appears after the eyes and not before. The performance reassembled itself. Vox almost admires the craftsmanship.

“Hey sleepyhead, you’re awake,” he says.

Alastor blinks once.

“How observational.”

“Good morning to you too.”

“Is it morning?”

“Uh, technically.”

“How unfortunate.”

He starts to sit up too quickly.

Vox takes one step forward. Alastor’s ear snaps back. Vox stops.The movement is instant and automatic. Alastor notices that too.

Good, Vox thinks.

Let him.

Alastor pushes himself upright with insulting determination, one hand braced against the mattress, shoulders lifting into a posture too dignified for someone who nearly folds in half halfway through it. The green stitching along his side brightens under the strain. His jaw tightens. He refuses to make a sound. Vox watches him fight gravity like it has personally offended him.

“Careful Bambi,” Vox says.

Alastor swings his legs over the side of the bed. “I see you’ve downgraded from Overlord to zookeeper.”

Vox leans back against the console, folding his arms. “And yet you’re still the most difficult exhibit.”

Alastor’s eyes narrow. His ears, traitorous little things, flick once in irritated amusement before he forces them still.

“Cold-blooded lizard.”

“If you’re going to fucking insult me,” Vox says, with smooth offense, “at least do it right and upgrade me to something impressive. A shark, perhaps.”

Alastor pauses. Then the faintest smirk touches the edge of his mouth.

“No, no,” he says. “That’s too much of a compliment. I would definitely and surely say you’re more of a gecko, my dear.”

Vox’s screen glitches.

“A gecko?!.”

“Big eyes,” Alastor continues, tone warming with cruel pleasure. “Clings to walls and appears where he is not wanted. Probably makes upsetting little chirping sounds when excited.”

Vox scoffs, “I do not chirp.”

“Mm. I doubt you hear yourself.”

“You were sleeping on my chest less than an hour ago.”

The smirk dies, not completely. Alastor goes very still. The air between them changes. The humor remains in the room, but it has edges now. Vox knows immediately he has hit something real.

Good.

No wait, not good.

This can be useful.

Alastor looks away first, which tells Vox more than a retort would have.

“That,” Alastor says, very carefully, “was an unfortunate lapse in bodily judgment.”

“Uh huh, bodily judgment,” Vox repeats.

“You heard me. Is your input not working?”

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

“We are actually calling it nothing. There is not label that needs to be placed.”

Vox smiles.

Alastor notices. “Do not look pleased.”

“What? I’m not.”

“Oh you absolutely are. I can see your smile is about to go off your screen.”

“I’m professionally encouraged.”

“Professionally? I would not say that word. You’re nothing but that.”

“Hey rude, you stabilized.”

“Oh, how romantic.”

Vox tilts his head. “I didn’t say romantic.”

Alastor’s gaze snaps back to him. A small victory. Vox lets the silence breathe just long enough to be felt, then shifts away from it before it can become too exposed.

“You remember last night.”

Alastor’s fingers curl lightly against the bedspread.

“I remember enough.”

“He, enough to be angry?”

“I require very little to be angry.”

“That’s actually true.”

Alastor’s smile sharpens again, but the color in his face, faint and fever-warm, betrays him. He remembers more than enough: the cooling, the bed, the arm around him, the humiliating comfort of surrendering to relief. He remembers his own body melting into Vox’s, remembers the awful safety of it, remembers the nickname.

Bambi.

His ear flicks at the memory. Vox’s screen brightens.

Alastor sees it and points one long finger at him.

“No.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You considered a thought that caused you to have that face. I don’t like it.”

“Having a thought is a crime now?”

“With you? Preventative measures are absolutely necessary.”

Vox laughs. Alastor hates that it warms the room more than the lights do. He forces himself to stand. It is a mistake. His body informs him immediately. The first step is unsteady; the second barely happens. His knees threaten to fold, and one line of stitching across his hip tightens hard enough to make his breath catch. He catches the bedpost with one hand and turns the motion into something that almost resembles choosing to lean there… almost. Vox does not move this time. He watches.

Alastor appreciates that about as much as he resents it.

“You brought me back,” Alastor says.

“Yes, we already had this conversation.”

“I want to blatantly remind you I specifically said no.”

“I know.”

“Wonderful. I’m pleased that your hearing is still intact.”

Vox’s expression remains smooth, but the blue deepens a fraction. “What do you want me to do? I told you already and I’ll drill it into your skull that your body was falling apart in a fucking  alley.”

“And you took that as an invitation.”

“No, I took that as an emergency.”

“You clearly took that as an opportunity.”

The line lands. Vox’s screen flickers once.

There.

Alastor’s smile widens, small and mean.

“Ah,” he says softly. “You always twist my thoughts.”

Vox pushes off the console. He has not come closer yet.

“You collapsed.”

“I was making a strategic retreat.”

“You literally passed out!”

“It was part of the strategy.”

“You were fucking unconscious!”

“It was a bold maneuver, sure.”

“Oh my god! You would rather fucking die than admit you my fucking needed help!”

Alastor’s expression hardens. The room goes quiet, that one was too close to the bone. Vox realizes it a fraction too late. Alastor straightens, despite the strain. His smile is still there, but there is less humor in it now.

“Let me remind you that you would rather dress control in a clean suit and call it rescue.”

Vox does not answer immediately. The jammers hum in the walls. Alastor’s gaze flicks toward one corner. Then another.

“You think I would not notice the alterations.”

“Adjustments, I’m testing out something.”

“To keep me from leaving.”

“No, don’t be so dramatic, look at it as though it’s to keep you from tearing yourself apart the next time you decide dramatic exits are an effective coping mechanism.”

Alastor laughs softly.

“You really do have a gift.”

“For?”

“Making a cage sound like a clinic.”

Vox’s jaw tightens.

“I’m offended. It is not a cage.”

“The bed?”

“It’s for recovery.”

“The frequency dampeners?”

“Duh, it’s a precaution.”

“The fact that I could not shadow-walk out of this room if I attempted it right now?”

“Temporary.”

Alastor’s smile turns poisonous as a deer shriek is heard.

“That word is doing an astonishing amount of work.”

Vox steps closer now, only one step, to change the pressure in the room.

“Let me remind you that you are unstable.”

“I am well aware.”

“You’re not acting like it.”

“I was under the impression that making frailty to everyone else’s problem was considered tacky. I can do this on my own.”

“You’ve always done this.”

Alastor stills slightly.

Vox sees it. He hates that he’s using it but continues anyway.

“You’d walk into turf wars like the outcome of your body was fucking incidental. You’d laugh at injuries like they were some mediocre punchlines. You’d come back stitched together with blood dripping like an open faucet and with radio static spilling everywhere and  you would act all offended if anyone noticed.”

Alastor’s eyes narrow, but something flickers behind them. It was an old memory, or the edge of it. Alastor tilts his slightly.

“That certainly doesn’t sound like me.”

“Oh ho, it absolutely fucking does.”

“Nonsense. I am the picture of restraint, my dear.”

“Bullshit, you once took a bullet through the shoulder and kept hosting because you didn’t want the audience thinking the other guy had a really good aim.”

Alastor pauses.

“…That sounds like excellent showmanship.”

“That sounds like reckless stupidity.”

“That sounds like winning to me.”

Vox’s voice drops. “You didn’t fucking care what happened to you.”

“And why should I have?”

The question is light, too light. It opens something in Vox before he can stop it.

“Because I can’t keep finding you half-dead in alleys.”

The room goes still, the sentence has no polish and no showman’s shine nor spin. It sits there, raw and inconvenient, between the old radios and the new bed and the hidden jammers in the walls. Alastor’s face does not change, his ears do… one tilts forward slightly, listening. Vox realizes what he said only after it has already done its damage.

Alastor’s gaze studies him with slow, unsettling focus.

“That sounded dangerously sincere.”

Vox looks away first this time.

“A technical failure.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t make it  fucking weird, asshole.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“You would absolutely dream of it. You’re weird that way.”

“My dear, my dreams have better taste.”

Vox laughs once, but it doesn’t entirely clear the tension. Before either of them can decide whether to bury or examine the moment, Vox’s phone buzzes.

Valentino.

The name flashes across the screen. Vox’s expression shifts immediately. Alastor sees it. There was no panic with his expression, a mild annoyance, sure. His features had a familiar practiced momentum, the look of a man bracing for a conversation he already knows by shape.

Vox answers.

“What.”

Valentino’s voice pours through the speaker, rich, careless, edged in amusement.

“So are we kidnapping now or was that a one-time thing?”

Alastor’s ear flicks.

That voice.

A small pressure rises in him, distaste without context.

I hate him.

The thought arrives with certainty. Then, annoyingly, no explanation follows.

Why?

He searches for the answer and finds only fragments: moth wings, too much perfume, hands too easy with space, a laugh that treats boundaries like a matter of negotiation.

He exhales quietly.

It’ll come back to me.

Vox turns slightly away, lowering his voice.

“You crossed a line.”

“Relax, cariño, I barely touched-”

“You touched him after I told you not to push.”

“What? You said play nice.”

“And somehow you interpreted that as ‘test the feral deer demon currently held together by cursed half-assed embroidery.’”

Alastor’s eyes sharpen.

“Feral deer demon?”

Vox covers the speaker briefly. “Not now.”

Alastor mouths silently, offended: Feral?

Val continues, unbothered.

“He looked fine to me.”

Vox’s voice goes colder.

“He wasn’t.”

A pause over the line.

Val’s tone shifts just slightly.

“Is he now?”

Concern, buried under insolence but present.

Vox glances back at Alastor.

Alastor looks away as if bored.

“Yes.”

“Then you’re welcome, mi amor.”

Vox’s screen glitches.

“Hey! Do not make this my fucking fault in reverse.”

“I’m not. I’m saying if he’s that reactive, you need better rules before somebody loses a hand, maybe he needs a muzzle.”

“Funny. That’s exactly what I called to discuss.”

“You didn’t call me.”

“Well, I was going to.”

“Sure, Voxxie.”

The endearment lands in the room with irritating ease. Alastor studies the old radio nearest him with unnecessary attention.

Vox notices.

Of course he does.

His voice tightens further.

“You don’t touch him again. Not casually. Not to test him. Not to prove a point.”

“Wow.”

“Val.”

“No, no, I heard you. Hands off your deer-shaped nuclear incident. I was only trying to help. Maybe some BDSM will help will help you better control him, now that he’s half of a brain. Easier to manipulate. I can let you borrow some of my leashes…”

Alastor’s eye twitches.

Vox pinches the bridge between his screen and casing as if that could help.

“Goodbye, Val.”

“Wait, wait-”

Vox ends the call.

Silence returns.

Alastor says, very mildly, “Deer-shaped nuclear incident. And what is this ‘BDSM’ he was referring to?”

Vox slips the phone away. “Don’t start.”

“I wasn’t aware I had stopped.”

“What you need to focus on now is rest.”

“And you need better assistants.”

Vox’s gaze sharpens.

“They’re not assistants. They’re my associates.”

The correction comes too fast. Alastor notices. The room seems to notice too.

“Ah,” Alastor says.

“No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said ‘ah.’ That’s worse.”

Alastor’s smile returns, slow and unreadable. “How intimate.”

Vox looks at him for a long second. There are several things he could say. That Valentino is loyal. That Valentino cares in the only ways he knows how. That the Vees are not simple, not to him, not to each other. That not everything in Vox’s life has been waiting for Alastor to return. He doesn’t know how much Alastor really remembers about him and the Vees. He says none of that because Alastor is watching too closely and because some explanations sound too much like pleading. Before the silence can twist into something sharper, the door opens.

Velvette enters without knocking, already mid-complaint.

“Okay, what the hell is going on with the north-side system-”

Her phone glitches in her hand. The screen flickers and freezes, drops three active windows, and she stops dead and looks at the phone. Then slowly lifts her gaze to the room.

“…Oh.”

Her eyes move fast.vBed. Couch. Alastor standing too straight. Vox standing too close. Old tech. Low light. Hidden corners. Frequency dampeners humming just beneath the walls. Then back to her phone. She taps it once. The screen flickers again.

She scowls, “You’ve got interference running in here.”

Vox says, “Velvette-”

She lifts one finger.

“Don’t.”

He stops.

Alastor’s brows lift faintly.

Interesting.

Velvette steps farther inside, waving her phone slightly as if testing the signal with contempt alone.

“Cute,” she says. “Very cute. Subtle as a hostage note, but cute.”

Alastor’s smile shifts.

Vox crosses his arms. “It’s not-”

“Don’t finish that sentence if you value the few little scraps of dignity still rattling around in your fucking casing.”

Vox’s screen flickers.

Alastor’s eyes brighten with quiet pleasure.

Velvette swipes across her phone with quick, precise movements. Her nails click lightly against the screen.

“Some of my features are lagging,” she continues, “which is annoying, because unlike the rest of you dramatic fossils, I have actual work.”

A tap.

Another.

The phone stabilizes.

She smiles, sharp and satisfied.

“But I know how to fix it.”

She lowers the device and turns fully toward Alastor.

“So.”

A beat.

“You’re the problem.”

Alastor, still standing on pride and very little else, inclines his head.

“How charming. I was beginning to worry I’d been reduced to a patient.”

Velvette glances at the bed. Then at Vox. Then back at Alastor.

“Patient, prisoner, pet project… honestly, the branding’s a fucking mess.”

Vox says, “Well, he’s recovering, you know.”

Velvette snorts.

“Oh, is that what we’re calling the weird little bachelor bunker with signal blockers and a suspiciously large fucking bed?”

Alastor’s smile grows sharper.

“Bachelor bunker,” he repeats, delighted.

Vox points at him. “Hey! Do not enjoy this.”

“I would never deny a lady her excellent phrasing.”

Velvette’s gaze slides back to Alastor. For the first time, she really studies him. It’s not in the way Valentino had: no lingering physical claim, no testing proximity, and no careless reach. Velvette stays exactly where she is, phone in one hand, hip angled, eyes sharp enough to cut through the room’s softened light. Alastor notices the distance. He appreciates it, against his better judgment.

“Hm, you don’t like being handled,” Velvette says.

Alastor’s eyes narrow.

“Oh, how insightful.”

“You’re stiff as a board.”

A pause.

“Not in the fun way, my dear.”

Vox scoffs and mutters, “Can we not?”

Velvette ignores him. “You’re standing like if you move wrong the room wins.”

Alastor’s smile remains fixed, but his ears tilt forward a fraction.

“And you’ve arrived at this conclusion in what, thirty seconds?”

“Give me some credit. Twenty-two.” She glances at her phone. “And I’m being generous, love.”

“How efficient.”

“I’ve worked with Vox for years. You either learn to read a room in under a minute or you get eaten by his fucking big ass ego.”

Vox looks offended. “Hey! My ego is an essential part of this company’s brand identity.”

Velvette laughs, “Your ego needs a leash and a crisis manager.”

“You wound me. I have both.”

“Uh huh, clearly not, considering”, she gestures around the room, “whatever this is.”

Alastor lets out a soft, delighted hum.

Velvette catches it.

“Oh, you like that, don't you?”

“Oh, I do appreciate someone with competence.”

“Then you must be having a miserable fucking week.”

Vox says, “I’m standing right here.”

“Yes, yes,” Velvette says. “That’s part of the problem.”

For a moment, Alastor almost forgets the ache in his joints, just slightly. Velvette’s presence changes the room differently than Valentino’s had. She does not fill space by force. She edits it. Cuts through it. She exposes weak lines in its composition and rearranges the focus with a sentence. There is no comfort in her, exactly, but there is clarity. Alastor respects clarity. Velvette’s eyes drop briefly to the green stitching visible at the collar and cuffs where his coat no longer hides everything.

Her expression changes only slightly.

“What happened to you? I don’t remember seeing that the last time we saw each other.”

Vox answers too quickly. “He’s just fractured.”

“Was I looking at you? No. Why are you answering for him? I asked him.”

The room stills. Alastor’s gaze shifts to Vox, then back to Velvette.

He could answer flippantly. He should.

Instead he says, “I seem to be experiencing a mild inconvenience at the moment.”

Velvette stares.

Then laughs once. “Right. So catastrophic magical trauma then. I don’t touch all that voodoo shit, but I am aware of it. I can feel you spewing so much magic that I can smell it all the way to my floor.”

“Must you strip all poetry from the room?”

“Only when it’s getting in the way of the obvious, love.”

She steps, not closer, but slightly sideways, changing the angle so she can see both him and Vox at once.

“He’s hovering, you know,” she says.

“I am not,” Vox says.

Velvette doesn’t look at him and whispers, “He hovers when he’s panicking.”

Alastor turns his head slowly toward Vox.

Vox’s screen remains very, very still.

“How unfortunate for him,” Alastor says.

Velvette’s mouth curves.

“Yeah.”

A beat.

“It is.”

Alastor does not respond immediately.

Velvette sees that too.

“We’ve clashed a few times, but you’re not what I expected,” she says.

Alastor’s eyes return to her.

“Disappointed?”

“No, no.”

She considers him openly.

“Just inconveniently interesting, love.”

“Careful,” Alastor says. “That almost sounded complimentary.”

“Now don’t get attached. I recover quickly, love.”

Vox exhales. “Why are you here, Vel?”

She finally looks at him fully.

“Because your shitty systems started acting like you were hiding a fucking nuclear meltdown in the back of the tower.”

Alastor’s mouth quirks.

“Deer-shaped, apparently.”

Velvette points at him. “That’s funny. Don’t encourage me.”

Vox pinches the bridge of his casing again. 

Velvette continues, more pointed now. “You vanished, north-side signal output dipped, private room dampeners came online, three of my phone features lagged when I crossed the threshold, and Val sent me five messages that were mostly swears and one very unhelpful moth emoji.”

Vox closes his eyes.

Alastor looks intrigued. “A moth emoji.”

“Don’t ask.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to.”

“You absolutely were.”

“I was considering it.”

Velvette’s gaze cuts back to Vox. “So I came to see what was worth breaking the system over.”

Her eyes flick to Alastor.

“And surprise.”

The room holds that.

Vox says, quieter, “It’s under control.”

Velvette’s face does something subtle. Something almost sympathetic, if she were a softer person.

“No, it isn’t.”

Vox’s screen darkens. Alastor watches the exchange with growing interest. Velvette looks between them, then folds her arms.

“You know what’s funny? You’re both pretending this is a different problem.”

Neither answers.

She points at Alastor. “You’re pretending you’re not one bad dizzy spell from eating the floor.”

Then at Vox. “You’re pretending ‘keeping him from eating the floor’ isn’t making you insane.”

Vox says coldly, “Thank you for the analysis. Are you done?”

“You’re welcome. Pay me.”

Alastor’s laugh slips out before he can stop it. It was small and brief. Vox hears it. Velvette hears it. Alastor hates them both for hearing it.

Velvette’s eyes flick back to him, not softening, but sharpening with satisfaction.

“Ha, there you are.”

Alastor stills.

Something about the phrase echoes Mimzy. Different voice. Different intention. Same unnerving precision.

“Why is everyone very fond of saying that?” he asks.

Velvette’s expression turns curious.

“Saying what?”

“There you are.”

A pause.

Velvette studies him more closely. Vox does not move.

Alastor regrets saying it the moment the room receives it.

Too revealing.

He covers with a smile.

“One might think I’ve been misplaced.”

Velvette’s phone buzzes. She glances down, scrolls with her thumb, then looks back up.

“Maybe you have.”

Silence.

Then she turns toward the door.

“Well. This has been creepy.”

Vox says, “Vel-”

“Nope. I’ve seen enough for one morning. Fix your fucking dampeners so they don’t mess with my phone and systems, or I’ll fix them in a way you hate.”

“They’re not for you to handle.”

“I know. That’s why they’re ugly.”

She pauses at the door and glances over her shoulder at Alastor.

“Try not to break anything while he’s gone, love.”

Her gaze shifts to Vox, then back.

“He gets weird about his stuff.”

A beat.

“Especially you.”

The door opens. Then closes behind her. The quiet she leaves behind is not the same quiet as before. It is sharper now. Alastor remains standing near the bed, one hand resting lightly against the post, posture too controlled to be comfortable. Vox stands near the console, arms still folded, screen unreadable. The room hums. The dampeners pulse softly in the walls.

Neither of them speaks.

At last, Alastor says, “She notices too much.”

Vox’s mouth line shifts.

“She’s good at that.”

“A dangerous habit.”

“Oh, you would know.”

Alastor’s smile returns.

“Yes,” he says. “I would.”

Another silence.

Vox looks toward the door Velvette left through. Then back at Alastor. For the first time, it occurs to him, not as an abstract risk, but as a real and immediate possibility, that keeping Alastor in VoxTek does not mean keeping him to himself. He built this room for himself and, lucky enough, to keep Alastor close. He had not considered that someone else might make him comfortable in it.

Alastor, unfortunately, looks like he has considered exactly that.

And worse… like he might enjoy finding out.

______________________________________________________________

a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

The weight is not difficult. Vox could carry more. He could carry heavier things. He could even carry things fighting back. That is not the point., the point is the stillness. No sharp remark waiting at the corner of a smile. No half-lidded look that says I know exactly what you’re doing and I intend to make it difficult for you anyway. No dry, polished cruelty dressed up as manners. No performance. Just the living, breathing absence of all those things.

Alastor’s head rests against his shoulder at an angle that would be inelegant if it weren’t so completely involuntary. One arm hangs slack, his hand loosened into an exhausted curl. The green stitching beneath his coat glows in dim, irregular lines, not flaring, not tearing at him, simply lingering in a low, watchful shimmer like embers that have not yet decided whether to go dark.

Vox adjusts his hold instinctively.

He tells himself it’s practical.

I’m not being protective.

I’m especially not careful in any way that matters.

Practical.

The corridor hums around them. Somewhere deeper in the tower, a service elevator clanks into motion. A bank of screens farther down the hall cycles through muted ads and analytics, all of them automatically dimmed in this section because Vox had arranged it that way weeks ago, months ago, long before he had any reason to imagine bringing him here.

“That,” Vox mutters under his breath, voice low enough that only the walls hear it, “was a close one.”

The words disappear into the carpeted hush. His antennas flick once. There was a residual irritation, signal, and something too sharp to name without making it worse.

Valentino.

Vox’s jaw tightens.

He keeps walking.

His steps remain even, though part of him wants to move faster, to get the door open, get Alastor inside, get the room sealed around him, around them, before anyone else can intrude and turn this into something public and stupid and impossible to manage cleanly. He doesn’t. He has spent too many years teaching himself that urgency, when visible, gives too much away. Still…

“We are going to have a conversation,” he says quietly, almost thoughtfully, “about boundaries.”

The sentence sounds civilized. It is not. The back room door slides open at his approach. The room receives him exactly as it was designed to, without fanfare, without accusation, and without surprise. Blue light glows low and steady along the seams of the walls. The older radios and obsolete equipment hum in the background like a second nervous system. The air is cooler here, cleaner, carrying a faint blend of polished metal, dust controlled rather than ignored, warm circuitry, and the sterile sweetness of ozone.

Vox steps inside. The door seals behind him. For a moment he simply stands there.

Alastor in his arms. The room around them.

The quiet. The fact of this.

Then he exhales and moves toward the couch.

He lowers Alastor carefully, not delicately, not in the sentimental sense, but with the sort of control that prevents a body from jarring on impact. One hand supports the back of his shoulders while the other eases his legs into place. He adjusts the angle of his head against the cushion. Shifts one arm so it doesn’t hang awkwardly. He makes sure the line of his spine isn’t twisted. Alastor doesn’t wake. He settles, and for the first time since the alley, the room grows still enough for Vox to look at him properly. Peace is not a quality Vox has ever associated with Alastor. Stillness, yes. Poise, certainly. Composure sharpened into a weapon, absolutely. But not peace. Not this kind of unconscious ease, the softened mouth, the slackness around the eyes, the way his ears rest at a neutral angle rather than tracking every fluctuation in the room as if vigilance were a reflex stronger than sleep. 

One ear twitches once. It was small and involuntary. The gesture is so absurdly unguarded that it catches Vox off-center. He can’t remember the last time he saw Alastor like this. Not in the studio. Not in the old days. Not even when things between them had been easier, looser, before words like humiliation and rejection had to be fitted into the architecture of memory.

He looks…

Vox’s screen flickers.

No.

Absolutely not.

The thought arrives anyway, swift and treacherous.

Cute.

His entire system gives a tiny, offended glitch.

“…No,” Vox says aloud at once, because hearing the objection in his own voice feels safer than letting the thought remain private.

He steps back as though distance itself might correct whatever that was. It does not. Alastor shifts faintly against the couch, and one of his ears flicks again. The movement is slight, nothing dramatic, just a sleepy little response to some internal sensation no one else has access to.  Before he has fully thought better of it, Vox leans back in and reaches out.

His fingers brush the edge of Alastor’s ear.

Soft.

Warm.

The response is immediate. The ear twitches hard, then folds briefly under the touch before flicking back into place. Vox snatches his hand away like he’s touched a live wire. The static that pops across his screen this time is not small.

“…Okay,” he says to the room, to himself, to the old radios, to literally anything listening. “We are not doing that.”

He straightens so abruptly he nearly collides with the shelf behind him.

Focus.

Right.

Problem.

Alastor ran.

Alastor escaped.

Alastor can do it again.

That thought restores the shape of him more effectively than any self-scolding ever could.

Vox turns sharply, pacing once across the room, then back again. His hands begin moving before his words do, pulling up small diagnostic displays from hidden panels, flicking open narrow blue holograms, scanning frequencies, replaying the alley escape frame by frame.

“Variables,” he says under his breath. “Failure points. We adjust.”

The room answers in flickering data.

“He can still access shadow travel,” Vox mutters. “Limited, unstable, but enough.”

One hand gestures. A schematic of the room rises in the air.

“Frequency response is intact. That’s how I found him.”

He pauses.

That’s the key, isn’t it?

Not merely that he could find him.

That he foucking would.

That part of Alastor still answered.

No. Shit.

Later.

Vox pinches two fingers together and strips the thought out of the equation.

“He can’t be allowed to move that freely.”

The line comes out flatter than intended. The room doesn’t care. He begins working. Small devices emerge from hidden slots in the wall, sleek, quiet, easy to miss unless one knew where to look. Vox catches the first and carries it to the far corner, mounting it just above eye level. Then another by the doorframe. Another beneath the shelving. Each one gives a brief blue pulse when activated, then disappears visually into the room’s architecture.

“Localized dampening,” he says, thinking aloud. “Not enough to hurt him. Not enough to destabilize. Just enough interference to keep the room from being an easy launch point.”

He glances back at the couch. At the body lying there with infuriating tranquility.

“…Just enough to slow him down.”

The phrase sounds better if he says it quickly. He places the final jammer and steps back. The room’s hum changes at once, almost imperceptibly, a tiny tightening at the edges of the frequencies moving through it. To anyone else, nothing has changed.

To Vox, the room feels less porous.

Safer.

Worse.

He folds his arms. He looks around. The couch is no longer sufficient. It wasn’t before, honestly, but he’d allowed himself the fiction because it sounded temporary.This doesn’t feel temporary anymore. And that…  is a dangerous realization.

“If he’s staying,” Vox says slowly, “this stops being a stopgap.”

He winces at his own phrasing.

“No wait,” he corrects immediately. “If… if he’s stabilizing here.”

That is technically better.

It fools no one. Vox turns toward the back wall, triggers a hidden panel, and watches as the mechanism there unlocks. Something retracts with a quiet motorized hum. A section of the wall folds inward. From it, a bed extends in clean, smooth movements, settling into place with the exact sort of luxury restraint he usually reserves for private design projects. The bed is unavoidably large. It’s large enough for two people to sleep in comfortably. Vox stares at it. The room stares back.

“That,” he says after a beat, with tremendous dignity under the circumstances, “is efficient.”

He doesn’t examine why his private emergency bed is that size. He dims the lights a little further instead, adjusts the ambient cooling in the room, repositions one chair to clear the path between the couch and the bed, and tells himself he’s optimizing the space for recovery.

That is what this is.

It’s optimization.

This is definitely not nesting.

Certainly not fucking that. Who would say that?!

When he finally looks back at the couch, Alastor hasn’t stirred. One hand has shifted slightly higher against his chest. The green glow at his ribs has softened. Vox tells himself he is only checking the stabilization lines when he steps closer again. The lie is almost elegant.

– - -

Alastor wakes slowly, not all at once. Awareness returns in fragments, sensation first, then light, then the low hum of the room, he feels weight in his body before he feels pain, then both at once. His limbs are heavy in a way that reminds him uncomfortably of being damp cotton packed too tightly into a doll’s frame: not broken, held, stitched, and managed. The thought makes nausea flicker low in his stomach. He opens his eyes: blue light, the quiet room, the smell of old electronics and polished wood and something cool and artificial in the air, and Vox. 

He is across the room, back half-turned, reorganizing the space with the sort of focused efficiency that makes it immediately obvious this is not casual. A chair has been moved. The shelves have shifted. Something hums faintly in the walls that wasn’t there before. And…

Alastor’s gaze fixes on the bed. His smile does not vanish. It does sharpen into something with teeth.

“…Of course.”

Vox glances over at the sound, for a fraction of a second, surprise crosses his screen, then smooths itself away.

“You’re awake. You startled me there.”

The calm in the line is irritating. Alastor pushes himself upright, every joint protest. Not violently, it was just enough to remind him they can. His shoulder catches halfway through the movement. The green stitching at his side brightens, then settles. He looks down. The lines are still there, still glowing faintly through the gaps in his coat. Still, in every way that matters, dictating terms to a body that used to require no such maintenance. He flexes one hand. More range of motion than before. Less than he wants.

He hates all of it. He hates the room. He hates the bed.

He hates the humiliating clarity with which this place now resembles a suite for convalescence more than a sanctuary.

He hates most of all that it works.

“You brought me back,” he says.

Vox doesn’t insult him by pretending to be confused.

“Hm, yes.”

“I said no.”

“Oh, I know.”

The honesty of it lands harder than any excuse could have. Alastor swings his legs off the couch and stands anyway.

Bad decision.

The room lurches, not externally, but in his body. His knees go unreliable for a second. His ribs seize. The stitches along one elbow pull tight enough to force the arm slightly inward before he forces it back.

Vox notices immediately. He doesn’t touch him yet, which only makes the attention more infuriating.

“Careful now.”

“I don’t need-”

The line breaks on a breath as pain pulls clean through his side. He catches himself on the arm of the couch and straightens through sheer refusal.

Vox takes one step closer. “Oh, you absolutely do.”

Alastor lifts his head sharply, ears angling back. He grunts.

“You don’t get to decide that.”

“Apparently,” Vox says, too evenly, “someone does.”

A beat.

Then, before Alastor can cut that to pieces, Vox adds, “You were destabilizing.”

“And?”

“And you would have collapsed in an alley.”

Alastor’s smile goes thin and elegant.

“And so that grants you permission to what? Collect me?”

There is no immediate answer. Vox’s screen flickers once. He is irritated.

Good.

“It gives me the responsibility,” Vox says at last, “to keep you functional.”

“I am certainly not your responsibility.”

“Well you are right now.”

The words strike cleanly.

Alastor’s breath hitches, not from emotion, not directly, but because the effort of standing and arguing and hating all of this simultaneously is costing him more than he wants to show. He presses through it anyway.

“Oh how very convenient for you,” he says softly. “How every violation sounds noble in your mouth.”

Something in Vox’s posture tightens.

“Hey, you’re running a fever.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s an explanation, jeez.”

“For your arrogance?”

“For why you’re standing there pretending this isn’t already beyond you.”

Alastor laughs once. No humor. “Oh now you sound offended.”

“Now,” Vox says, “I sound tired.” He lets out a long sigh that catches slightly deeper than intended. The room goes still around it.

Tired.

Interesting.

Alastor opens his mouth to answer, but the next pulse of strain hits first. His knees weaken. His shoulder locks. A line of stitching bites across his lower back and up his spine so sharply his breath vanishes altogether. Vox moves before the rest of him can fully fail. The wires emerge so quickly they almost don’t register as separate from Vox’s body, thin, sleek, black-blue, alive with controlled current. They don’t lash. They don’t bind dramatically. They slip around Alastor’s wrist and side with the infuriating politeness of an elevator door closing. Then they pushed, it was just enough pressure at his arm and waist to redirect momentum. Alastor finds himself backwards onto the bed. It is not rough, that’s what makes it so insulting.

Alastor lands sitting, then half-reclining, shoved by assistance masquerading as accommodation. He stares at Vox. There is a strange, brittle quiet between them.

“…You’re not even pretending anymore,” Alastor says.

Vox stands over him, the wires already retracting. “I never was.”

The answer is so clean it nearly earns admiration. Instead, Alastor’s eyes narrow. The fever Vox mentioned announces itself all at once, heat blooming behind his eyes, under his skin, in the stitching along his neck and ribs. His thoughts feel a fraction too slow. His temper doesn’t.

“You built a room I can’t leave,” he says.

“No, I built a room, so you stop breaking in.”

“That doesn’t make sense?! That is not the same thing.”

“Well no,” Vox agrees, “but one of them matters more at the moment. It makes sense in my head.”

The room hums softly. Somewhere in the walls, one of the dampeners gives a low, almost inaudible pulse. Alastor hears it now, of course he does. His expression changes by barely a degree. He lets out a small growl.

“You trapped the frequencies.”

Vox does not deny that either.

“I adjusted the room.”

Alastor lets out a weak, incredulous sound. “You really can justify anything. You have an answer for everything now?”

“Yes,” Vox says. “And you can dramatize anything. It’s how we survive, darling.”

That line almost distracts him from the heat crawling down his spine.

Vox’s head tilts, then his entire focus sharpens.

“…You’re getting worse.”

“I’m getting irritated by you.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

He steps closer. Alastor tries to lean away on instinct and finds the effort costs him too much. The room sways very slightly. Vox’s hand lifts, hesitates, then settles against his forehead. An immediate cooling sensation is felt. Alastor’s entire body betrays him with the sound it makes. A soft, involuntary, humiliating little exhale, not quite a sigh, not quite a coo, but close enough to both that he wishes the ceiling would open and drop him through twelve floors.

Vox goes still for half a second. Then the blue on his screen warms with unmistakable satisfaction.

“I can’t believe that worked,” he murmurs, grinning a little.

Alastor glares at him through fever-bright eyes. “Do not.”

“Do not what?”

“Enjoy this.”

“Oh, sweetheart, that’s asking far too much of me.”

The line is smooth and teasingly catastrophic. Alastor tries to push his hand away. Vox catches the weak protest with one wrist and gentles it back down without force, without apology.

“You are overheating, idiot,” Vox says. “Your entire body is running itself into the ground trying to compensate.”

“I’m aware of my own body.”

“Are you? For real?” Vox’s brow, if it can be called that on a screen, arches. “Because from here it seems to be staging a mutiny.”

“From there,” Alastor replies, voice thin but still poisonous, “everything probably looks like content.”

That lands. Vox’s mouth line flattens for a second.

“That was good.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t. I’m pleasant company.”

The answer comes too easily and fondly.

Alastor goes still, so does Vox. Neither of them says anything for a beat.

Then Vox, mercifully or not, breaks first. “You need to cool down, Alastor.”

“I need,” Alastor says through clenched teeth, “to not be treated like a delicate object in your private museum.”

“You say that,” Vox murmurs, fingers still cool against his forehead, grinning, and lets out a chuckle, “but your body keeps disagreeing.”

He lets the hand linger one second longer, then slides it back. The relief vanishes quickly enough to make Alastor visibly resent its absence. Vox notices that too.

“Now,” Vox says, voice softening into that dangerous register he uses when manipulation wants to dress itself as concern, “I could cool the rest of you down.”

Alastor looks at him suspiciously.

“No.”

The answer is immediate.

Vox hums. “I’d make an excellent ice pack.”

“You are unbearable to look at.”

“And yet I am versatile.”

Vox’s hands move to Alastor’s coat. He grabs Vox’s wrist at once. The gesture would be more effective if his fingers weren’t trembling faintly with effort.

“Don’t you dare!”

“Relax,” Vox says. “Just the coat.”

“No.”

“You’re sweating through three layers. It’s like a sauna under there.”

“That sounds like a personal problem, it doesn’t give you a reason to touch me.”

“It is,” Vox replies. “Because you’re doing it in my room.”

The audacity of the line almost eclipses the fever.

Almost.

Alastor’s grip weakens before his pride does. Vox feels it. He waits exactly long enough for the refusal to become impossible to sustain, then eases the coat off carefully, slow enough not to jostle the stitches, and steady enough not to make it look like permission was required. The cool air that hits beneath it drags a small, involuntary shiver from Alastor’s body. Vox notices that too, and of course he does. He folds the coat with maddening neatness and sets it aside. Then he looks at the bed. He looks back at Alastor and makes a decision.

“Don’t,” Alastor says immediately, because he knows that look.

“Too late.”

Vox climbs onto the bed behind him. There was no flourish or any hesitation, his smooth purposeful movement as if he’s done this a hundred times in some life Alastor doesn’t remember and would like to object to in principle. He settles in close behind him, one arm slipping around his middle, the line of his body aligning along Alastor’s back with infuriating precision. The bed dips under the added weight. The room’s cooling system kicks in with a whisper. Alastor goes rigid.

“Vox.”

“That’s my name.”

“Move.”

“Wait, in a minute.”

The cooling starts gradually. It was not the room this time. It was him. Vox’s body temperature drops in controlled increments, coolness spreading through the contact points first, chest to back, arm around his waist, the place where his hand rests lightly against Alastor’s sternum just beneath the brightest lines of stitching. The relief hits harder than it should, hard enough that Alastor’s next protest gets caught in a breath. His forehead lowers, despite every conscious instinct, and ends up pressed lightly to Vox’s chest.

He freezes.

This is unbearable.

This is-

His body melts anyway. The fevered tension in his muscles slackens by degrees. The ache along his ribs eases. The stitching dims. The cool pressure of Vox’s chest at his forehead and the low hum of frequency beneath it create a cocoon of relief so immediate it feels like betrayal.

“I hate this,” Alastor says, and the words come out muffled against Vox’s shirt.

Vox’s laugh is quiet and shameless.

“Do you really?”

“Immensely.”

“Mm.”

The dismissive little hum is somehow worse than argument. Alastor tries to twist away. Vox’s hold tightens, not painfully, not even firmly enough to count as struggle. Just enough to remind him where the limits are. Another of those subtle gestures that means nothing in the moment and promises trouble later. The audience in the back of the mind takes note.

“Careful,” Vox giddily murmurs near his ear. “You might start enjoying yourself.”

Alastor lifts his head enough to glare backward over one shoulder. The effect is undercut by how fever-flushed and exhausted he is.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Oh, I’m not flattering myself,” Vox says smoothly. “I’m merely observing. There’s a difference.”

“Well you observe too much.”

“And you deny too much.”

Alastor opens his mouth and closes it again. Vox smiles into the top of his ear.

Then, because he is Satan’s most irritating invention, he says lightly, “Bambi.”

Alastor stiffens so hard the bed shifts. He lets out a soft grunt.

“…Don’t.”

That single word comes out in a strangled little mix of fury and embarrassment that gives away entirely too much. Vox’s delight is immediate.

“Oh, absolutely not. That’s staying.”

“It most certainly is not, idjit.”

“You’re trembling.”

“Didn’t you say I am running a fever.”

“Sure. Sure.”

“That is the reason. There’s nothing more.”

“Whatever helps you sleep, Bambi.”

Alastor makes a noise of profound offense, turns around, and buries his face harder into Vox’s chest as though that somehow conceals the fact that he is, in fact, aggressively bashful. Vox, bastard that he is, seems to sense this and enjoy it more.

“You know,” he says after a beat, all false innocence, “I could probably cool lower.”

Alastor goes rigid again.

“If you finish that thought,” he says, each word clipped and venomous, “I will rip every wire out of this tower with my teeth.”

Vox laughs, really laughs this time, the sound vibrating softly through his chest under Alastor’s cheek.

“There’s the Alastor I know.”

“I was never gone.”

“Mm. Debatable.”

A silence follows. The atmosphere was not hostile. It was worsely intimate. The room is dim now. The lights have softened themselves to low blue and amber. One of the old radios hums from the shelf. Somewhere beyond the walls, VoxTek lives on in reduced volume, distant enough to be irrelevant. Here, the bed smells like clean fabric and old electronics and the faint synthetic chill of Vox’s cooling system. Alastor hates, with fierce and focused sincerity, how nice it feels. He also hates that Vox knows.

“Temporary, this is temporary. I only need this to clear my mind from this insufferable fever, nothing more,” he says into the dark.

“Sure.”

“I mean it. Don’t do anything that can cause you to lose a limb. I will rip it off.”

“I know.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“So I’ve been told.”

By whom? Alastor nearly asks. Valentino? Velvette? Half the city?

He doesn’t pry, that line of thought is too hot, too ugly, and too full of things he doesn’t want to examine while effectively pinned by comfort and spite. 

So instead he says, because fever makes people less careful and because some part of him still wants to wound on instinct, “I don’t understand how anyone tolerates you.”

Vox is quiet for a beat.

Then, very softly: “It’s practice.”

The answer is funny enough to be infuriating and sincere enough to take some of the bite out of the room.Alastor’s anger doesn’t disappear. It just loses some heat around the edges. His body, the treacherous thing that it is, keeps relaxing. The fever ebbs slowly under the cooling. His thoughts begin slipping at their edges. Words are harder to line up. His eyes drift shut, open, drift again. Vox keeps talking, not much, not nonsense exactly, but low little comments pitched into the dark as if the sound itself is part of the treatment.

“You’re still too warm.”

“You complain when I run hot and when I run my mouth. You’re very difficult to please.”

“That’s because you insist on doing everything dramatically, jeez.”

“I was not dramatic.”

“You vanished into the fucking shadows because Val touched your shoulder.”

“He represented a problem.”

“That is the single most polite yet shittiest possible way to describe what happened.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another soft laugh, it vibrates through Alastor’s skull pleasantly enough to make him more annoyed.

“You shouldn’t let him touch you again,” Vox says after a while.

The statement arrives so casually that for a second it almost escapes scrutiny. Alastor’s eyes stay closed.

“You shouldn’t let anyone touch me without asking.”

“That’s fair.”

A pause.

Then, because the night clearly intends to ruin him completely, Vox adds quietly, “I didn’t know it was that bad.”

Alastor goes still.

The words could mean many things. The overload. The aversion. The body’s response. The trust required for touch to be tolerable at all. Vox doesn’t clarify, and that restraint makes it worse somehow.

Alastor exhales slowly.

“Now you do.”

“Yes.”

No excuse follows. No argument. No joke. It was that simple acknowledgement. The honesty in it settles somewhere deeper than he wants.

His reply comes drowsy and clipped.

“I still hate this.”

“I know.”

“You say that like you’re fond of it.”

“Maybe I am.”

The fever is not gone, but it has lost enough ground that sleep begins pressing at the edges of him in earnest. He can feel himself slipping toward it and hates that the path there goes directly through Vox’s body. His forehead has drifted lower without permission, nestled properly now against Vox’s chest. The arm around his waist remains loose but inescapably present. Every now and then Vox’s cooling shifts a degree colder, then warmer, adjusting in tiny increments that say he’s paying far too much attention.

Alastor tries one last time to summon enough outrage to hold himself upright.

“I am not,” he mutters, nearly asleep, “a house pet.”

Vox’s answer is immediate.

“No,” he says, amused and lets out a laugh. “You’d be impossible to house train.”

Alastor makes a tiny, furious sound that has no strength behind it at all. Then the room wins.

The bed, the coolness, the dim lights, the old radios humming softly and the impossible, humiliating relief of being held together by someone else long enough that his body can stop fighting and start recovering. His voice goes first, then his muscles, the last hard little point of will that had been trying to stay awake out of principle. He falls asleep in increments, and Vox feels each one. The tension leaving the shoulders. The breath deepening. The tiny involuntary adjustment that tucks Alastor more comfortably into the space against him. One ear flicks once in sleep. Then stills. Vox doesn’t move, not immediately.

The room has gone quiet enough that he can hear the old circuitry in the walls and the soft hush of the cooling system beneath his own signal. Blue light pulses gently along the seams. A radio somewhere clicks once and settles. He looks down.

The Radio Demon.

The one person in Hell who once made him feel young and stupid and seen all at once. The one who laughed at him and with him, let him near and then shoved him away, left a rejection in his chest so old he’d learned to build whole identities around it.

And now…

Here.

Weak. Dependent.

Asleep in my arms.

The thought rises before he can stop it.

I could win like this.

It arrives hot and immediate, dressed in the language of rivalry, of strategy, of finally, finally gaining the upper hand in a game that had embarrassed him once and then haunted him for decades. But even as he thinks it, he knows something in him knows it isn’t that simple, because victory should not feel like this.

Victory should feel sharper. 

Cleaner.

More triumphant.

It should not feel like careful hands and low light and relief so intense it borders on tenderness. It should not make him tighten his arm around Alastor, not enough to wake him, just enough to make the shape of him more certain. It should not make him lower the lights further with a thought, dimming the room until only the quiet blue remains. It should not make him wonder, with a flicker of embarrassment he would gladly kill anyone else for witnessing, whether the room needs softer sheets if this is going to keep happening. He stares at the far wall and refuses to think that last thought again.

“Rivalry,” Vox murmurs to the dark, because saying it aloud gives it the dignity of a justification. His screen dims to a deep, muted blue.

“Right.”

The room offers no opinion. He lies there anyway. Listening to the slow breathing against his chest. The old technology is humming around them. The tower was kept at bay by a door and a lie and a set of jammers hidden neatly in the walls. Somewhere beyond all that, Valentino is probably awake and dangerous and due for a conversation. Velvette is likely already suspicious. Mimzy is absolutely plotting murder. Vox should be awake for all of it. Instead, for the first time in longer than he cares to quantify, his own body loosens around someone else’s sleep. He doesn’t notice the exact moment he starts drifting. Only that at some point the room goes softer, the blue goes deeper, and the shape of Alastor in his arms stops feeling like a problem to solve and starts feeling like a fact he refuses to surrender.

When sleep finally takes him, it does so without permission.

Which, in this room, feels almost poetic.

_______________________________________________________________

a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

The moment Alastor tears himself out of that room and vanishes into shadow, something inside Vox goes still in the way it only ever does when the stakes become immediate. It was not panic, not exactly. Panic is sloppy, and Vox has never liked being sloppy where anyone can see it. However, there was something in him that hardened. The room in the tower had still been vibrating from the burst of magic when he’d turned away from Valentino, blue light flattening across his screen until expression became almost impossible to read. His antennas had lifted, angled, and then steadied. There was no grand speech and no dramatic declaration… just movement. He had become static electricity before Valentino could think of anything smart or stupid enough to say.

Now he runs through the city as frequency.

He doesn’t walk. He doesn’t fly, or take the roads like other demons forced into architecture and distance.

He moves through what he built his life around.

Streetlights. Security cameras. Dead restaurant signs flickering open and closed over old brick. The city’s current takes him in fractured ribbons of blue-white static, his body breaking into transmission and reassembling in the next available line. A dozen screens across Pentagram City twitch as he passes through them. Advertisement girls blink once with his face for eyes. A cracked television in a pawn shop window spasms with blue interference. Somewhere, a billboard smiles with his mouth for half a second and then corrects itself. He filters everything else out. The city tries to hand him everything at once, traffic feeds, hacked chat logs, a nightclub’s security loop, a pharmacy sign dying one letter at a time, some idiot’s private live stream from a rooftop, but Vox slices through all of it with old, ruthless ease.

He is not looking for everything. He is looking for one thing.

One old frequency. One private language hidden in static.

Find me.

The memory hits before the signal does.

A laugh through an old speaker. The warm analog hiss and a younger voice, roughened by whiskey and arrogance:

You’re getting predictable, Vincent.

And then Alastor’s answering tone from some half-lit room that no longer exists in the same shape, sharp with amusement:

Hardly my fault if you insist on being easy to find.

Vox tightens around the memory and pushes it aside before it can cost him speed.

Not now.

His awareness widens. He threads the old trick outward with care, not blasting the city with it, not making it obvious. Just a frequency tucked inside frequency. A brush against the architecture of signal. Not a command, it was an invitation.

Here.

Nothing.

A beat.

A faint answer.

A stutter in the line. A breath caught in the current. A piece of the old code turning toward him whether the man at its center means it to or not.

There you are.

Vox changes direction without visible motion, his body slipping down a power line and out through a sagging sign in a district where the streets are narrower and the neon less curated. Here the buildings lean too close together. Rainwater from some old storm sits black in potholes that never fully dry. Fire escapes rust in decorative loops above old brick facades. The smell is wet concrete, engine heat, stale sugar, cheap smoke, overripe fruit somewhere turning in a crate, and under all of it the steady electrical bite of too many patched systems feeding off the same grid. He reassembles under a buzzing streetlamp and stops. Across the street, half-hidden by a row of shuttered storefronts and the angled shadow of a broken awning, Alastor crouches in the mouth of an alley.

Mimzy is with him.

Vox goes very still.

– - -

Alastor does not remember leaving in any orderly way.

He remembers the touch, that is the center of it.

Not pain first, not fear, exactly, it was just the sensation of contact arriving before choice. Too sudden. Too close. Something indulgent and careless laid across his body before his nerves had time to prepare a shape to hold it.

Then there was the sound collapsing.

Then the room turning thin and bright and impossible.

Then shadow.

Now the alley.

He is crouched low enough to feel the damp cold of the concrete through his clothes. His slim hands are spread against the ground as if they had caught him there and never properly lifted again. The city around him is louder than the tower, but it doesn’t demand itself in the same way. Here, there are no screens trying to colonize his vision. No smooth walls humming with hidden intent, nor were there any curated gradients pressing him gently toward compliance: just grime, noise, brick, wet metal and space.

Too open.

Better.

Worse.

His breath keeps coming oddly. Not shallow enough to call panic, it was deep enough to call the sensation calm. The green stitching under his coat flares, fades, flares again. The pulses run in uneven lines across his ribs and shoulders and elbows, little private agonies tightening and releasing as if some unseen hand cannot decide how tightly to hold him together. He hates that he knows exactly what room he fled from. He hates more that a part of him already wants to go back to it because it was easier to breathe there.

That is intolerable.

“...Hey.”

Mimzy’s voice cuts through the static in his head like a warm hand through water. He lifts his head sharply, ears twitching toward the sound before the rest of him follows.

“Mimzy?”

She is already there, framed by the alley’s broken geometry, heels clicking once against the concrete before she slows. Perfume reaches him before touch does, powder, sweetness, the ghost of smoke and old stage lights. Her silhouette is all curves and confidence and concern softened by the way she’s holding herself back from rushing him.

“Well,” she says, crouching a few feet away, “I was wondering how long it’d take you to make everybody miserable and then disappear.”

The line is light, though her face isn’t. Alastor stares at her for a second longer than politeness calls for. Relief is not something he likes feeling at people. Recognition without explanation is almost worse. He knows her, not fully, not in sequence, not with context attached cleanly to memory, but he knows the shape of her presence. Knows the emotional temperature of it. Safe enough to be irritating.

“You found me, my dear.”

“Please,” she says, though her smile is softer than the joke. “You always did think you were more mysterious than you actually are.”

That should earn him a smarter answer than the one he gives.

Instead he says, quietly, “I didn’t mean to…”

His mouth closes around the rest of it.

Flee? Break? Bare his teeth like some feral thing in front of all of them? He doesn’t know which word would be most accurate. All of them sound ugly. Mimzy’s face changes at once. The teasing remains, but something under it turns careful.

“Oh, sweetheart.”

She lowers herself further, knees bending, one hand braced against the wall beside her. She does not touch him yet. She is better than that. Better than most.

“You got overwhelmed,” she says, and because she knows him, or enough of him, she adds, “It happens.”

He lets out a humorless little breath.

“It didn’t feel like happens.”

“No,” she admits. “It felt more like you were about to rip the neighborhood in half.”

One of his ears flicks. Another answer occurs to him, dark and defensive.

It doesn’t survive contact with her face.

Mimzy reaches out then, slowly enough to be refused. Two fingers only, brushing the sleeve near his wrist. The difference is immediate.

Not dramatic, she doesn’t stabilize him the way Vox does, there’s no frequency there, no systemic correction, no old line of current sliding under his skin and making his stitches behave. However, she helps anyway. Not his body, his mind. Her touch doesn’t soothe the damage. It gives him something outside it to feel.

“There,” she murmurs. “See? Still you.”

The words hit wrong. Not because they are unkind, because they land on something dangerously close to wanting to believe them. He looks away first.

“You’ve been looking for me.”

“Yeah.”

“MIA,” he says, the letters strange and modern in his mouth.

She snorts. “Yeah. Gone. Missing. Vanished. Poofed! Scared half the damn circles who still pay attention to what you do.” Her eyes narrow just a little. “And before you get smug, it wasn’t all admiration.”

“That would’ve disappointed me.”

“There he is,” she says again, but this time the relief in it is more obvious.

He studies her in the half-light. The edge of her lipstick has softened. One earring is missing. Her dress has a snag at the hem. She came looking in earnest, then. She did not stumble across him, there was no convenience. Something in his chest loosens that has nothing to do with stitches.

“I heard you’d gone quiet,” she says. “No broadcasts. No appearances. No chaos. People talk when you stop making noise.”

He glances down at his hands.

“I don’t know what happened.”

Mimzy’s mouth tightens. “I know enough.”

“Do you?”

Her silence answers before her words do.

“Enough to know that place back there wasn’t good for you.”

The statement comes out too quickly for strategy. Too honestly. She knows it, he knows it, and she leans back slightly as if giving the truth room to soften.

But Alastor catches on the phrasing.

“Back there,” he repeats. “You know where I was.”

Mimzy sighs. “C’mon, honey. If you go missing and Vincent goes quiet at the same time, I’m gonna start with him.”

The name lands harder than it should.

He hears it and thinks of blue light on black glass. Of a room lined with old radios. Of a hand resting on a cracked television as though it were a relic and a confession. Of carefully chosen quiet. Of a lie called storage.

“He’s different,” Alastor says.

Mimzy gives a small, humorless laugh.

“Tell me about it, sweetheart.”

The answer sits there. He turns it over.

“He feels the same.”

This time Mimzy really looks at him, searches his face. Some old knowledge in hers flares sharp for a second, then dims behind discretion.

“Yeah,” she says, very softly. “That’s the problem.”

Across the street, under the dying lamp, Vox watches that exchange and feels something ugly move under his skin.

It isn’t surprise. Mimzy has always had a way of making familiarity look innocent.

It isn’t anger, not first. It is something hotter and meaner and more humiliating.

Jealousy arrives in him like a glitch he can’t immediately smooth out.

Not because Mimzy is touching him, because Alastor is letting her.

Because Alastor is leaning, not much, not enough for anyone else to call it that, but he is angling fractionally toward her in the old, unthinking way people angle toward safety. And Vox, who has spent chapter after chapter constructing spaces, sounds, light, logic, ritual, all to make himself necessary, watches someone else calm him with nothing but presence and history.

For one hateful second, the thought comes raw and simple:

He doesn’t need me.

And under that… he trusts her.

Vox steps forward before he can decide what expression he wants to wear. The lamp above him buzzes. Blue ripples across his screen and smooths itself into composure by the time Mimzy looks up.

“Well,” she says, and there’s no warmth in it. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Alastor turns. There’s a beat, a real one, stretched enough to feel. Recognition moves across his face in layers. Relief. Irritation. Residual pain. Some smaller, sharper thing buried underneath all of it, still unnamed.

“Vincent,” he says.

Vox stops a few feet away, not too near, not yet.

“Alastor.”

His voice comes out steadier than he feels.

Mimzy rises slowly from her crouch, but not fully. She remains physically lower to the ground, between flight and readiness, like she doesn’t know which he’ll need from her next.

“You scared him,” she says.

Vox doesn’t look at her.

“I know.”

“You pushed too far.”

That gets his eyes.

“I didn’t touch him.”

“No,” Mimzy says, “but your world did.”

The line lands harder because it’s true.

Alastor says nothing. He only watches the exchange, ears tilted toward both of them, eyes a little too bright.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he says at last.

The statement cuts through everything else.

Vox feels something in him go still.

“I know,” he says, and hates how honest it sounds.

Mimzy lets out a low breath. “Then maybe stop deciding for him.”

Vox could answer ten different ways. He has a dozen neat responses ready at any given time. Some funny. Some devastating. Some so smooth they would make argument look childish.

He uses none of them. Instead he looks directly at Alastor.

“Are you hurt?”

The question seems to catch him off guard.

“No,” Alastor says after a pause. Then, quieter, “Just overwhelmed.”

The city crackles around them. A train shrieks somewhere too far away to matter. The neon wavers in a puddle beside the curb, blue and red shivering together.

Vox nods once.

“Then come back.”

No command. No ownership in the wording. Just an invitation sharpened into intention. Mimzy’s hand tightens very slightly against Alastor’s sleeve.

“He doesn’t have to.”

Vox doesn’t glance at her this time. He keeps his focus where it belongs.

“He’s safer with me.”

Mimzy’s smile is all teeth and no comfort.

“That depends on your definition of safe.”

Alastor’s gaze shifts between them. The alley suddenly feels smaller. He hates that he knows what Vox means. Hates that part of him already maps the path back to the room with the old radios and the softened light and the low hum where his stitches didn’t burn so badly. Hates, too, that the desire for relief is making cowards of all his better instincts.

“I’m not going back,” he says.

Vox stills. Not dramatically. Not visibly, perhaps, to anyone but him. It was enough for the city’s hum to fill the gap.

Then, with infuriating calm, he says, “Alright.”

Mimzy’s eyes narrow at once. Alastor’s ears angle slightly back. The answer is too easy.

He sees Vox register their suspicion and smooth it over with the slightest tilt of his screen.

“I’m not going to drag you,” Vox says, voice low and controlled. “You said no. I am a man of my word. I heard you.”

“Did you?” Mimzy asks.

Vox ignores her.

Alastor searches his face. 

There’s the old frequency there, yes, but sharpened. Older. Better at lying. Better at letting truth sit beside lies until both look equally plausible.

“You followed me,” Alastor says.

“Yes.”

“How?”

A pause.

Then Vox says, “Old habits.”

That answer lands with the weight of something underexplained on purpose.

He could press.

Instead he says with a scoff, “Persistent.”

“It’s called efficiency,” Vox corrects.

Mimzy lets out a disgusted little laugh. “Oh Satan, you two really do make everything sound like foreplay for an argument.”

Neither man answers that. The silence stretches. Then the first stitch pulls. Alastor’s breath catches. It isn’t dramatic, not at first. It was a sudden tightening under the coat, one line of green cinching with vicious precision along his side. He goes still. Vox notices instantly. Mimzy notices half a second later when Alastor’s hand moves to his ribs.

“What?” she says.

Another pull. This one is sharper. His shoulder locks for a second. Then an elbow. Then something in the line of his spine.

No.

Not here.

He forces his hand to unclench and fails. The green stitching flares bright enough to cut through the alley’s shadows.

Mimzy swears.

“What is that?”

Alastor tries to answer and gets only air. It spreads fast now, tightening in sequence through his body like a seamstress dragging thread through soaked cloth. Shoulder. Wrist. Knee. Neck. Every joint becomes suddenly, horribly aware of itself. His body does not feel broken exactly. It feels held, too tight and wrong, like the thing keeping him together has decided refusal is an offense.

“Alastor,” Vox says, and there is no polish left in his voice now. Only the alarm flattened into control.

Mimzy reaches for him on instinct. Alastor’s knees give before pride can stop them. He catches himself half a second too late, the movement awkward and puppet-like, one leg failing to respond quickly enough as the stitching seizes tighter through the joint. A helpless, furious sound tears out of him.

“No,” he breathes. “No-”

Vox is on him before the second denial fully forms. He moves too fast for any of them to pretend this is measured anymore. One hand closes around Alastor’s forearm, not bruising, not rough, but final. His other arm comes around him as his balance collapses. The contact hits like relief. Blue frequency hums through the point of touch, low and immediate, threading under the skin and between the lines of green light. Alastor gasps at it, not because it hurts, but because it doesn’t. The stitching slackens just enough to stop feeling like wire dragged through muscle. His shoulder unlocks. The line at his ribs eases a fraction. His whole body sags forward on betrayed instinct. For one humiliating second, he leans into Vox. Mimzy sees it. Vox feels it. Alastor hates all of them for knowing.

“Easy,” Vox murmurs, and his voice is close now, stripped down to the register he uses when no one but the target matters. “I’ve got you.”

The phrase should infuriate him. It does. It also works. The pain is not gone. But it is being managed in real time, frequency pressed against fracture, signal against voodoo tension. Alastor’s hands twitch once weakly against the fabric at Vox’s side, not gripping, not exactly, failing to push away with enough conviction to count.

“You did this,” Mimzy says.

Her voice is low and shaking with a fury she cannot afford to spend uselessly. Vox doesn’t look at her.

“I prevented worse.”

“That’s not prevention… Vincent.”

That gets a reaction, a visible ripple of static across his screen.

“It’s Vox,” he says, without taking his eyes off Alastor.

“Oh, go fuck yourself.”

“Mimzy,” Alastor manages, though it comes out thinner than he intended.

She immediately drops lower again, closer to his line of sight, furious and helpless all at once.

“Hey,” she says, softer now. “Hey. Stay with me, alright?”

His ears twitch toward her voice. His vision blurs, sharpens, blurs again. The alley tilts. Vox’s frequency floods in stronger as the stitching tightens once more in ugly protest and then begins to lose the fight.

“I can’t-” Alastor starts.

“Hush,” Vox says, not unkindly. “Don’t spend energy you don’t have.”

The words are wrong in a way that would almost be funny if the pain did not make humor feel so far away. Mimzy hears it too. Her mouth hardens.

“Don’t talk to him like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like he’s already yours.”

The line lands like a shot. Vox finally looks at her. In the blue light of his screen, his expression is cold enough to raise gooseflesh.

“He will destabilize if he stays out here.”

“That doesn’t make you his savior.”

“No,” Vox says, and there’s something frighteningly sincere beneath the control. “It makes me necessary.”

Alastor feels the argument happening around him like weather. Mimzy’s voice. Vox’s. The alley. The city. The stitching tightening once more at his knees, then at the line of his spine, then loosening under the next wave of frequency. His body is losing this war and everyone can tell. He hates that most of all.

“I’m not-” he starts, and loses the thread of the sentence entirely when the next pulse hits.

This time the pain rolls through him deeper, dragging his awareness with it. His shoulder jerks. His hand slips from where it had braced against Vox’s sleeve. His head dips.

“Alastor.”

Vox’s voice sharpens.

For one brief, strange second, it feels like the world is being tuned around him. The city noise recedes. The alley narrows. All he can hear is that signal, old and familiar and maddeningly comforting, the one that once had meant game and flirtation and challenge, now turned clinical in the service of keeping him conscious.

It is too much and then it is nothing. His body finally gives up the performance of cooperation and goes slack in Vox’s arms.

Silence follows.

Not in the city.

Just here.

Mimzy stares.

Vox catches the full weight of him without fumbling, one arm under his back, the other braced beneath his knees when he lifts him. The movement is too practiced for comfort. His hold is secure but not gentle in the sentimental sense. It’s the grip of someone who has already decided what happens next.

Mimzy stands at once.

“No.”

Vox doesn’t answer immediately. He adjusts Alastor’s weight with small, precise motions, keeping his head from lolling, making sure the stitching is dimming rather than flaring. The possessive shape of it makes something ugly and protective rip through Mimzy’s chest.

“You are not taking him back like this, asshole.”

Vox looks at her over the quiet line of Alastor’s shoulder.

“Uh, he’s unconscious.”

“I can see that.”

“Then don’t fucking waste my time.”

The cruelty in the line is flat, efficient.

Mimzy steps directly into his path.

“You don’t get to keep him just because he breaks better in your hands.”

For the first time in several minutes, Vox’s screen glitches visibly, just once. A line of distortion through the blue. Then it smooths out.

“He isn’t breaking,” he says. “He is destabilizing.”

“Cute rebrand.”

“Ha, you think I’m doing this for fun?”

“I think you’d call anything care if it let you keep him.”

The words hit. She sees they hit and presses harder.

“You think because he leans toward your signal when it hurts, that means something noble about you? Real original.”

Vox’s jaw tightens, visible in the line of his neck, the angle of his shoulders, the way his antennas lift a fraction higher.

“It means he’s alive.”

Mimzy’s laugh is short and vicious.

“And whose fault is it that he needs you for that?” That cracks something.

The blue on Vox’s screen darkens. Not red. Worse. Cold.

“Move.”

“No.”

He takes one step forward anyway, just stepping with the steady certainty of someone who is used to rooms giving way. Mimzy holds. For a second, she nearly believes she can stop him. Then she looks at Alastor in his arms, at the dimming stitches. The line of pain was still visible around his mouth even being unconscious, and she realized the horrible truth of the moment.

She cannot help him. Not like this. Not against that. Not because she does not care enough. Not because she is weak. Because she is not an Overlord. Because she cannot push back against the current Vox is using. Because whatever game has gone wrong around Alastor now lives at a scale she cannot brute-force with love and fury alone. The helplessness of that feels like acid. She steps aside. It wasn’t because she yields, because she would not make Alastor the price of her pride. Her voice follows Vox like a thrown knife.

“You touch him like a thing one more time, and I swear to Satan, Vincent, I will make your life so miserable you’ll miss being nameless.”

Vox pauses, just long enough to let her believe she’s reached him. Then the faintest, ugliest curve pulls at the corner of his screen.

“I’d like to see you try, bitch.” 

It isn’t theatrical, that’s what makes it chilling. He shifts his grip around Alastor once more, making sure the line of his body rests securely against his chest. Then he fractures into signal. The alley flashes white-blue at the edges. And where he stood, there was nothing. Mimzy is left staring at emptiness and a wet street lit by dying neon. The city hum rises back into full awareness around her. Somewhere above, a sign buzzes and then sputters. A train screams over old rails three streets away. Laughter erupts from a club entrance and dies almost immediately. None of it reaches her properly, she presses a hand to her mouth and swears into her palm. She lowers it. Then says, very quietly, to the place where he vanished:

“If you break him worse, I’ll burn the fucking tower down.”

The city gives her nothing back.

________________________________________________________________

a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

Vox does not hurry him. That, more than anything, is what makes the whole thing suspicious. He does not touch his arm, does not steer him with a hand at the back, does not keep up a cheerful stream of noise to herd the moment in a desired direction. He simply walks just ahead, close enough to set the pace, far enough to leave the shape of following intact. A path is made. A rhythm established. Alastor falls into it before deciding whether he means to.

He notices that too.

The city blurs around them in bruised neon and cracked glass, its noise rising and dipping in strange tides. Hell never really sleeps. It only changes tempo. By the time VoxTek rises before them again, black glass, lit seams, a vertical monument to relevance and surveillance, the world feels louder than it did when they left it.

Or perhaps Alastor simply does.

VoxTek receives them like a machine that knows its maker by scent.

The outer hallways glow in crisp bands of cold color, screens alive with movement before anyone has properly stepped into range. Graphics slide. Logos bloom and fade. Numbers update. Voices, commercial, amused, artificial, filter from speakers placed too cleverly to locate at first hearing. The entire building feels sentient in the worst possible way: not alive, but attentive.

Alastor slows. It is almost nothing, more like a fraction, rather… a breath. A tightening across the shoulders.

But he feels the change in himself immediately. The green stitches beneath his coat flare with a faint, needling pulse. His ears flick once at a burst of laughter from somewhere above, again at a feedback whine from a nearby screen recalibrating brightness, and the third time they settle, one remains angled, traitorously, toward Vox.

The pressure in the tower is not the pressure of threat exactly, more like a demand.

Look here. Listen here. React here. The place is built to keep one from ever fully retreating into the privacy of one’s own thoughts.

Vox notices, of course.

He lets them walk in silence a few more paces first. It was enough for the strain to become undeniable, just enough that when he speaks, it sounds like observation rather than management.

“This part isn’t ideal.”

Alastor glances at him, a smile faint, elegant, and intact.

“No?”

Vox’s screen shifts subtly, a little more brightness around the edges of the eyes, a little more curve to the mouth. His voice remains light.

“You’re doing that thing again.”

“What thing?”

“The one where you pretend nothing is fucking bothering you while your body files a formal complaint. Man, I wouldn't want you to be my boss.”

The answer comes with enough humor to soften it, a charm to make the contradiction feel fussy.

Alastor’s smile sharpens.

“I’ve found that denial streamlines conversation.”

A low pulse of static cracks softly from Vox’s speakers, not quite a laugh, but near enough to pass.

“That does sound like something you’d believe.” Something in the reply sits under the skin strangely, it was sort of familiar without context. It’s irritating in its accuracy.

They turn off the larger corridor and into a narrower one. The shift in atmosphere is immediate, like stepping behind a theater set and finding the scaffolding. The lighting dims. The reds soften. The more aggressive screens fall away. The sound of the tower flattens under insulation until it becomes background hum instead of assault. Alastor exhales before deciding to. His shoulders lower by degrees so small they’d be invisible to most.

Vox says, with the unbearable calm of a man who already knew this would happen, “Better.”

The word lands like a hand placed gently against a spinning globe to slow it.

Alastor gives him a sidelong look. “You sound very pleased with yourself.”

“I’m deeply fond of being right, old man.”

“How modest.”

“I save my modesty for special occasions.”

That almost earns him a laugh.

Almost.

The corridor stretches. The deeper they go, the more the tower changes around them. Here the floors are clean without being polished for show. The panels are functional. The air smells less like heat and light and more like cooled electronics, paper, metal, dust allowed to exist in sensible places. The staff they pass are fewer, their movements sharper, quieter, better. They know Vox instantly, not because he announces himself, but because their bodies adjust around him before they seem aware of having decided to. A path clears. A conversation dies. A technician steps aside without taking her eyes off the datapad in her hands.

Obedience in advance, that is a kind of power Alastor respects, it is also a kind of power he dislikes being near for too long.

They pass a stretch of smoked glass overlooking one of the larger interior floors. Below, rows of screens illuminate moving bodies in white-blue light. Some scroll analytics. Some show social feeds. Some display camera grids, trending tags, live metrics, faces and faces and faces. The architecture of the floor is all sleek lines and weaponized aesthetics, too fashionable to be accidental, too self-aware to belong entirely to Vox.

Velvette.

The recognition comes easier now. It’s not a full memory, but a sharpened outline. The sharp voice, a sharper gaze, the kind of young arrogance that only exists in people smart enough to back it up. He remembers her speaking to Vox, cool, fast, unimpressed, and not afraid of being either. More importantly, he remembers Vox listening.

That is filed away.

People who can speak to Vincent, Vox, without fear are not incidental.

Alastor slows for half a beat. Vox, without comment, matches the pace.

He says nothing, neither does Vox, that silence says enough. By the time they reach the back room, Alastor already knows where he’s being taken.

The door waits where it did before, black paneling, soft line of light along the frame. Vox lifts a hand toward the sensor, then pauses, not theatrically, not for effect, but just enough to make the hesitation real.

“I wasn’t entirely honest before,” he says.

Alastor turns his head.

“Oh? Really? Do tell.”

Vox’s screen dims a fraction. The smile there remains, but it loses some of its public polish.

“That room,” he says, “isn’t storage.”

Alastor’s mouth curves a little higher.

“I had gathered.”

“Ugh, I assumed you had.”

Then, after the barest pause, “It’s mine.”

Vox opens the door. The lights answer in stages.

Blue first, rising low beneath the shelves and along the seams of the walls. Then the softer red-amber follows, filtered enough to warm the room without forcing it into Hell’s usual palette. The old equipment breathes around them in a low, steady hum: not dead, not fully alive, but kept.

Alastor steps inside more slowly than he had before.

Now that he knows the room belongs to Vox, every detail rearranges itself in meaning.

The couch is no longer conveniently placed. It is chosen.

The old radios lined in one corner are no longer cluttered. They are kept.

The reel canisters, the boxed microphones, the obsolete television parts, the cracked but polished little display units, none of it is accidental. Even the dust has been managed. It exists where it flatters age, not neglect.

A room like this is not where one stores things.

It is where one preserves them.

Behind him, the door closes with a soft click.

Vox lingers near it for a second, then steps in fully, and for one brief, almost absurd moment, Alastor has the distinct impression of someone bringing another person into a chapel and confessing they built it themselves.

“It’s where I go,” Vox says, “when I don’t want the rest of it.”

He gestures vaguely outward. The tower. The noise. The empire. The endless performance of relevance.

“The screens. The output. The people. The… theater.”

The last word comes with a dry edge, as though he recognizes the joke before anyone else has to.

Alastor turns slowly, taking in the room again. The old radios pull at him first. There’s something in the shape of them, in the presence of wood and dial and analog body, that sits in his chest like an itch behind memory. He brushes two fingers lightly over the polished side of one set and finds the varnish smooth from repeated use.

Used.

Not displayed.

“Interesting,” he murmurs.

“What?”

“You made yourself a little sanctuary. How adorable.”

Vox’s screen shifts, smile flattening into something harder to read.

“Fuck you! That’s a dramatic word for a quiet room.”

“It’s not the room that makes it dramatic.”

For a second, something warm and humorless flashes through Vox’s speakers.

“You say that like I built an altar.”

Alastor glances over one shoulder at him, smiling elegant and faintly amused.

“Hmmm, you did.”

The answer lands. Vox doesn’t deny it. He grunts and mumbles to himself. Instead, he crosses toward one of the shelves, fingertips grazing the edge of an old portable television with a boxier frame than his current head. His screen catches its reflection and becomes briefly stranger for it.

“I built this before VoxTek got too loud,” he says. “Before every room had a function someone could monetize. Before, I needed ten different versions of my own face reminding me what the world expects it to see.”

He says it lightly. Alastor watches him carefully. There it is again, that thing beneath the polish. Not softness, it was never softness, but it was a certain fatigue around the edges of performance. A private irritation with being watched by one’s own machinery.

“And you keep the old things,” Alastor says.

Vox looks down at the television part beneath his hand.

“Well, I keep what still works.”

“Sentimental.”

“Practical.”

“Liar.”

That earns a real little flicker of amusement.

“There’s overlap.”

The room settles into silence for a moment. It isn’t empty silence. The old electronics hum. Somewhere a capacitor clicks. The low lights pulse faintly. From beyond the insulated walls comes the faintest suggestion of the city and the tower, distant enough to be tolerated.

Alastor hates that it is easier here.

The proof of it is in his body before he has words for it. His breathing is steadier. The flare in his chest has dulled. His ears aren’t having to choose between twenty different sounds. Even the color is less aggressive. Vox knows this. The bastard knows it and is standing there in that blue glow pretending observation isn't a strategy.

“You brought me here because it’s easier,” Alastor says.

Vox meets his gaze.

“Yes.”

Alastor’s eyes narrow just a fraction.

“And because you want me here.”

Another pause.

“Yes.”

It is the second honest answer in a row, that is almost more suspicious than if he’d lied. Vox steps a little closer, not enough to touch. It was where his frequency is felt before it is consciously heard. It smooths the room, sharpens the quiet, and makes the stitches under Alastor’s coat burn less.

“It’s not just a room,” Vox says, his voice dropping slightly, less public now. The sound was less host, more man. “You respond better to this part of the tower. Let’s just say to the lower output where I have the older tech. To predictability.”

Alastor tilts his head.

“You’ve been watching.”

“I’ve been paying attention Alastor.”

“That’s not a correction, old pal.”

“No,” Vox says. “It isn’t.”

The reply is too direct to swat away. It sits there between them with all the uncomfortable solidity of truth.

Alastor walks slowly past him, toward the couch, then farther, making the room once again his own to assess. He lets his fingers skim the back of the couch, the edge of a shelf, the arm of an old chair that looks too carefully maintained to be decorative. It occurs to him, not for the first time, that Vox has built a place in which he can remove himself from the machine and remain its center anyway.

That is very like him, I suppose.

“You’re very good at this,” Alastor says quietly.

“Good at what?”

“Making care look like reason.”

Vox’s screen dims, then brightens again.

“Would you prefer it to look unreasonable? Would you like to be somewhere else?”

“I would prefer not to be arranged at all.”

Vox’s expression changes, not much, but enough to matter. Some of the smoothness in it shifts. Not gone. Never gone. But less decorative.

“Look, I’m not forcing you to stay.”

“No,” Alastor says. He turns and looks at him fully. “You’re making leaving sound irrational.”

Then Vox says, very softly, “Would it be irrational?”

The bastard.

Alastor almost laughs because there it is in its purest form, not command, not manipulation in the crude sense, but argument. Charm was used not to conceal pressure, but to make pressure feel like logic. It would almost be admirable if it weren’t happening to him.

He looks away first, not because he has lost, but because the room is easier to think of than Vox’s face.

And there lies the problem: it is easier here. 

The old technology softens the edges of things. The color is tolerable. The hum of the room is steady enough that his body doesn’t keep preparing for impact. Even the silence feels less empty, he can breathe here, think here. He hates the truth of that almost as much as he hates the satisfaction it must be giving Vox.

His ears flick once, then stills. Alastor lets out a small grunt.

“…It is quieter,” he admits.

Vox doesn’t pounce on the concession. He knows when to let a truth land without immediately trying to own it.

“That’s the point,” he says, crossing his arms.

Before Alastor can decide whether to resent the answer properly, the door opens. The shift in the room is immediate.

“Well, look at that.”

Valentino’s voice slides in first, indulgent, amused, and edged in the kind of intimate irreverence that assumes welcome before earning it. He steps into the room on broad moth wings and too much confidence, four arms moving with effortless, predatory laziness. He smells faintly of smoke and expensive perfume and something sweet left too long in heat. He leans into the doorway at first, taking in the room with a quick glance before his attention lands on Alastor and lingers there.

“Private little gathering,” he says. “And here I was starting to think you’d moved in without telling me, Voxxie.”

The endearment sits between them like an established fact. Alastor feels something small and sharp twist low in his chest. He does not like that he notices it. He likes even less that he notices the way Vox’s posture shifts in response, not softer, not looser, but lived-in, a familiar feeling. These two know each other in a way rooms remember.

Vox glances back at him. “You’re early.”

“It’s a gift.” Valentino’s grin widens. “Settling in, sweetheart?”

The question is aimed at Alastor, but it carries no real request for an answer. It’s a probe. A hand extended not for warmth, but to feel what the air is doing. Alastor straightens almost imperceptibly. His smile remains in place. One ear angles back.

“I wouldn’t say settled.”

Valentino laughs softly. “Good. I hate anything that looks too easy.”

He steps fully into the room now, not close enough to provoke… yet. It was just to alter the geometry of it. Vox does not move to block him. He simply remains where he is, and somehow that feels more controlling than if he had. Valentino’s gaze skims the old radios, the couch, the carefully arranged relics, then returns to Alastor.

“So he’s showing you around his old man cave; this is where he hides when he gets tired of his own empire,” he says, smiling, “Cute.”

“Hey! It’s not hiding,” Vox says.

“No?” Valentino lifts a brow. “Then what would you call it?”

“A break.”

“A shrine.”

Both men speak at once.

Valentino laughs. Vox’s screen flashes a brief line of irritation before smoothing again.

Alastor says nothing.

He watches the exchange instead.

The word cute had been a joke. The word shrine had not.

Valentino notices the silence and turns his grin back on Alastor. “See? He gets weirdly protective of this room. You should feel honored, sweetheart”

“Should I?”

“Oh, absolutely. It means he likes you.”

“Val.”

“What?” Valentino spreads two hands, the other two still loose at his sides. “I’m helping.”

“You never help quietly.”

“Quiet is your thing, not mine.”

There is a whole relationship inside that sentence.

Alastor notes it.

Valentino looks back to him. “You’ve got that face on.”

“Do I?”

“Mhm.” Valentino tips his head, studying him. “The one that says you’re listening too hard.”

One of Alastor’s ears twitches before he can stop it.

How annoying.

“That seems unwise,” Alastor says.

Valentino grins. “So does most of Hell.”

He takes a few more slow steps, enough to bring him into Alastor’s orbit, not yet to qualify as a threat. It was enough to make Vox say, in that same calm voice which somehow carries more warning than raised volume ever could, “Val.”

“I know,” Valentino mutters. “Play nice.”

He says it like he’s quoting Vox from earlier, which he probably is. His attention returns to Alastor. There’s something more careful in it now. Curiosity sharpened by prior information, he can tell something is wrong; he’s already been told enough to know not to poke blindly. Unfortunately for everyone, Valentino has never been very good at resisting a line once he’s found it.

“So,” he says, dragging the word out lightly, “what do you make of him?”

Vox lets out a short incredulous exhale. “Absolutely not.”

Valentino ignores him. “Come on. I’m curious, sweetheart.”

Alastor’s smile remains neat. “About?”

“About whether the reality matches the branding.”

“That depends,” Alastor says.

“On?”

“How charitable I’m feeling,” his expression becomes slightly grim.

Valentino’s grin breaks wide and delighted. “Oh, there you are.”

Vox says nothing, but the blue on his screen deepens.

Valentino notices that too. He steps just a little closer. The room’s easy balance shifts, Alastor’s body becomes aware before his mind does. One ear snaps back. Then forward. Then stills.

Valentino’s gaze flicks to it. He notices, of course he notices. He is many things, and stupid is not among them.

“Relax,” he says, though the word is more instinct than comfort. “I’m not gonna bite.”

Alastor says, with perfect politeness, “That is not especially reassuring.”

That earns another laugh. Valentino is enjoying himself. Vox is not. The air tightens a notch. Valentino lifts one hand in a loose, almost placating gesture. Then, because he misjudges, or because he chooses to test anyway, he lets his fingers settle lightly against Alastor’s shoulder.

The touch is brief, casual even.

To Valentino, perhaps, harmless. To Alastor’s body, it is an alarm, everything stops. His world narrows to contact. The shoulder. The weight. The too-closeness. The wrongness of being reached for before readiness. The green stitching under his coat blazes with sudden heat. His ears flatten hard. His smile remains for one impossible, brittle second too long before the shape of it cracks under the strain.

“Val,” Vox says, warning Valentino.

The sound that tears from Alastor’s throat is not human enough to be mistaken for speech. It is sharp, rough, dragged through static, a deer’s alarm bark corrupted by radio distortion. It cuts the room in two.

Valentino jerks his hand back at once, all humor gone. “Whoa-”

Shadows explode. It was not in the composed, theatrical shapes of deliberate conjuring. It was instinct, pure instinct. Dark tendrils lash outward around Alastor in a violent, defensive bloom. The lights flicker. One of the old televisions spits static across a dead screen. VoxTek’s hum skips. For a single vicious second, Alastor’s eyes flare red, dials spinning where pupils should be.

And then… he is gone.

The shadows collapse inward so fast the eye almost can’t follow the motion. One breath he is there, rigid and bright and cornered, the next there is only the afterimage of movement and the smell of hot ozone where he stood.

Silence hits after him like a physical thing. The room stabilizes in stages. The lights stop stuttering. The static clears. The old radios hum as though pretending nothing happened. Vox does not move at first. He stands perfectly still, screen nearly blank with concentration. Then he turns to Valentino. The anger in his voice is quieter than shouting would have been, which makes it far worse.

“Don’t,” he says, “touch him.”

Valentino breathes once through his nose. His wings shift and settle. He looks at the empty space where Alastor had been, then at his own hand, then back to Vox.

“…Yeah,” he says after a beat. “I got that.”

There was no joke or defensiveness. That, more than anything, says he understands the scale of the mistake. Vox turns away from him toward the room, toward the hum, toward the dark beyond the walls where a frequency he knows better than he should has just fled. His antennas begin to pulse, low, and searching. An old trick rises in him with the ugly grace of muscle memory. Tiny signals hidden inside static. Message embedded in noise. Find me. Here. There you are. A childish game once, years and years ago, playful because it had not yet had consequences attached to it. The ghost of Vincent knows how to do it. Vox still does. Something in the city answers. The frequency is faint, but it’s there.

Valentino hears the shift in the hum and says quietly, “You know where he went?”

Vox’s screen brightens, not with satisfaction, but with purpose sharpened into a point.

“Yes,” he says.

________________________________________________________________

a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

Alastor stands in the center of the room now, listening to it breathe.

The tower feels very different here than it does elsewhere. Out in the halls, VoxTek is all glass and hum and image, motion layered over motion, sound braided into more sound, a place built to make one feel looked at even when alone. But here the noise is muffled. Contained. The blue glow is softened to something low and ambient, washing the edges of the room without forcing itself into his eyes. It is, Alastor has to admit, easier on him than the main floors. Easier on his head. Easier on the trembling green stitches beneath his coat. Easier on the instinctive animal part of him that still hates sudden movement and louder reds and the impossible sharpness of everything when he steps into an open, busy space.

That does not make the lie any less obvious.

A storage room does not smell like this.

It does not smell faintly of static, polished metal, and the clean, ozone sweetness of well-kept electronics. It does not feel used in the way this one does, lived in without being lived through. Someone comes here to think. Someone comes here to decide things. Someone comes here when they want the world outside reduced to a volume they can control.

Alastor’s smile remains in place, but one ear angles subtly back.

He turns his head just slightly and catches Vincent in his periphery.

No… Vox.

Vincent wears the newer name the way some men wear expensive cologne: deliberately, thoroughly, as if enough layers of it will overpower what came before. But names do not always settle where one tells them to. Sometimes they drift. Sometimes they snag. Alastor remembers how he would always follow him around like a little pup who doesn’t know who to follow. He is… was a funny little creature.

Vincent is at the console by the door, one hand resting lightly against the edge, screen cast in that softened blue he seems to reserve for Alastor and no one else. His antennas are still. Too still. There is a quality to that stillness Alastor is beginning to recognize… not calm exactly, but attention sharpened into poise.

He is watching.

Like a man who has already decided which way the room should lean and is waiting to see if it obeys.

“You are very attached to this room,” Alastor says at last, his tone mild enough to pass for idle conversation.

The answer comes quickly.

“I like privacy.”

Alastor’s gaze trails over the shelves again. “And your privacy requires coordinated lighting?”

A beat.

Then Vox chuckles softly, and the static in the room warms by a degree.

“You make that sound more dramatic than it is.”

“Do I?” Alastor turns just enough to look at him fully. “I was under the impression storage rooms were generally less… curated.”

The word lands.

Vox’s screen brightens, then settles. His smile shifts… not gone, just altered. A little more honest. A little more entertained.

“It started as storage.”

“And then?”

“And then I decided I preferred it clean.”

There.

Alastor lets the answer sit between them. It is not satisfying, which makes it useful.

Outside the room, something heavy rolls down a distant hall. A burst of laughter rises somewhere below them and dies under the insulated walls. The tower never fully goes quiet. It simply behaves when Vox asks it to.

Which is a kind of answer in itself.

Alastor moves toward the shelves, fingers skimming the spine of one old reel canister. The metal is cool and smooth, recently handled.

He does not look at Vox when he asks, “How long have you had this room?”

Long enough.

That is what the room says.

Vox’s answer is more careful.

“Hmm, a while.”

Not long enough to matter. Not short enough to dismiss.

Alastor hums.

He is aware of his own body in peculiar, unhelpful ways these days. A constant catalog of strain and steadiness. The places that ache. The places that don’t. The humming pull beneath his ribs. The way the green stitches flare if he becomes too agitated, too bright, too fragmented. He has learned, resentfully, that Vincent’s proximity softens some of it. Not all. Never all. But enough to be noticed. Enough to become a pattern.

Patterns are dangerous.

They invite trust.

He turns back toward Vox, smile still neat, eyes thoughtful.

“You lied.”

Vox’s screen flickers once, small enough most would miss it. “About what?”

“This room.”

It is not an accusation. It is a test, and Vincent, to his credit, recognizes it as one.

“A storage room was simpler,” he says.

“Than what?”

A pause.

“Than saying it’s where I keep things I don’t want the rest of the tower touching.”

That, at least, sounds closer to the truth.

Alastor studies him.

The aura is the same, that is the unnerving thing. Not the face, if one can call a television face a face, not the sharper edges, not the richer glow, not the way confidence has settled into him like lacquer over wood. Those things are different. Those things are obvious.

But the aura is the same.

The old frequency beneath the polished one.

Brighter once. A little greener. Less armored. More eager to prove itself.

Vincent had worn his ambition openly then. It had crackled out of him in those early days, restless and hungry and just innocent enough to be amusing. He had looked at me with something halfway between admiration and challenge, and I, amused, bored, and a little curious, had let him orbit a little closer than he let most.

That man is gone.

This one is smoother. Smarter. Less innocent. More beautiful, perhaps, in the sharpened way dangerous things often are.

But still Vincent.

Or enough of him to make the distinction irritating.

Alastor takes a slow step closer.

Vox does not move.

Interesting.

There had been moments before, small, strange, fleeting things that now sit inside Alastor’s memory like glass caught under skin. A private room. A lowered voice. A hand almost but not quite touching. Shared glances stretched longer than they needed to be. Nothing overt enough to name, everything subtle enough to dismiss.

We had done this before, he thinks.

Not this exact dance, but the shape of it.

The lingering.

He closes the distance by another inch, not enough to be obvious but enough to matter.

Vox’s antennas shift almost imperceptibly.

There you are, Alastor thinks.

Alastor lifts one hand and, after the briefest hesitation, brushes two fingers lightly against the edge of Vox’s lapel, as if tidying some invisible imperfection there. The touch is brief, measured, not affectionate… not entirely.

Vox goes very still.

Still in the way one becomes when instinct says move and will says don’t.

Alastor watches the restraint with quiet interest.

“You changed your name,” he says softly.

Vox’s voice, when it comes, is smooth enough to pass for ease. “People do.”

“And the room?” Alastor asks. His fingers linger at the seam of the lapel just a moment longer before withdrawing. “Did that change too?”

A beat.

“You’re very nosy for someone half-made-put together ragdoll.”

Vox uses humor like a skilled man uses a knife, not always to cut, sometimes just to guide attention somewhere safer.

Alastor notices that too.

“Curiosity is one of my more charming flaws, old pal.”

“So I’ve heard.” Vox’s screen glows a little brighter.

Alastor steps back at last. He watches the tension leave Vox in increments so small they would be invisible to someone less interested.

Yes.

Still Vincent.

Just hidden better.

Behind him, one of the screens flickers soundlessly. For the briefest second, reflected in the black glass, Alastor sees another face, not a full memory, just the outline of a woman with sharp eyes and sharper posture, dressed like she’d walked out of a magazine and expected Hell to thank her for the favor.

Velvette.

The name comes to him more cleanly than it should, not a full recollection: a note.

I remember her presence in the tower before this room. The way she had looked at Vincent, Vox, with a kind of sharp-edged boredom that only people close enough to be unimpressed can manage. The way Vox had answered her with practiced ease, barely glancing away from his screens, and yet she had seemed heard. I remember her voice, cool and cutting and younger than the room it occupied. I remember the mutual rhythm of it.

That, too, is filed away.

A network. A hierarchy. A stage.

And Vincent at the center of it, smiling.

How… curious.

“You’re thinking too loud.”

Alastor blinks back to the room. Vox is watching him with that same softened blue.

“My apologies,” Alastor says. “I forget some people find silence suspicious.”

“Only when it looks like plotting.”

Alastor’s smile deepens. “I’m always plotting.”

“Good,” Vox says. “You’d worry me if you weren’t.”

Vox pushes off the console, moving with that unhurried confidence that makes others instinctively make room for him even when he is alone.

“Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

Alastor’s ear angles forward. “Another storage room?”

One corner of Vox’s screen-smile tips higher. “Try not to sound so disappointed.”

The walk through the tower feels longer than it likely is.

They take the quieter routes, not the public ones. Vox leads him through service corridors and back lifts and narrow hallways where the sound of the main floors comes filtered and remote, music in one direction, shouting in another, the endless static chatter of hundreds of screens speaking over one another somewhere beneath them. Every now and then they pass an employee, and every one of them reacts the same way: shoulders straightening, attention sharpening, their entire bodies tilting unconsciously toward Vox before he even looks at them.

He doesn’t have to command.

He is obeyed in advance.

That is new too.

Or perhaps not new… only more complete.

Alastor watches the way people orbit him and thinks, not for the first time, cult leader.

It would almost be funny if it were not so effective.

Vox catches him looking once and lets out a small, self-aware hum.

“What?”

“You do enjoy being looked at.”

Vox glances at a passing monitor, where his own face flashes briefly among ten different feeds before vanishing again. “Wouldn’t you?”

Alastor considers that.

The truthful answer is no.

The more truthful answer is not like this.

He says neither.

By the time they step outside, the air has shifted. Hell’s sky hangs in its eternal bruise-colored twilight, and the city glows in patches around them: neon, smoke, reflected fire, and the ugly beauty of a place too busy to rot all at once. Vox walks close enough that the blue from his screen cuts a clean line through the muddier reds. It is easier on Alastor’s eyes. He resents how much easier it is.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

“I do dislike cryptic men.”

“Noo, you dislike losing.”

That earns Vox a sidelong look.

The ride is short, though distance in Hell has a habit of feeling dishonest. When they stop, Alastor knows the building before his mind catches up.

He goes still.

The old studio rises from the block like something dragged back from the bottom of a river, its frame intact, but weathered, the neon signage long since dead, the windows dark with dust and disuse. Time has not been kind to it. Paint has peeled. Cracks run down one side. Rust freckles the metal trim. One of the side doors hangs slightly crooked, and someone at some point has boarded over a lower window badly enough to insult the structure.

For a moment, Alastor cannot reconcile what he sees with what he knows.

Yesterday.

It had been yesterday.

That is what his body says. What his memory says. The laughter, the lights, and the old warmth of the place are not distant enough to justify this level of ruin.

He steps toward it slowly, ears lifting, the smile on his face fixed now by something more brittle than charm.

“It shouldn’t look like this,” he says before he can stop himself.

Vox, beside him, goes very quiet.

“No,” he says after a pause. “It shouldn’t.”

Alastor turns his head.

There.

That look.

Nostalgia sits strangely on Vincent, less romantic than he might like, less gentle. It makes him look hollowed out around the edges neither broken or soft, just momentarily inhabited by someone older than his screen allows.

How long? Alastor thinks.

How long has it been for you?

He does not ask.

Instead he walks to the front of the building and lets his fingers brush the doorframe. The dust comes away on his hand. The air smells stale, sunless, beneath it lingers a familiar metallic scent: old wiring, old heat, and old ghosts.

“It was ours,” Vox says quietly.

Alastor looks at him.

Not mine. Not yours.

Ours.

Interesting. I don’t remember it being ours, Picture Box.

“And now?” Alastor asks.

Vox’s smile returns, but only because he chooses it. “Now it’s an expensive monument to everyone making bad decisions.”

That almost earns a laugh.

Almost.

Inside, the studio is worse.

Dust films everything. A dropped microphone lies near the center of the floor like a snapped bone. One of the light rigs overhead has half-collapsed. The control boards are dead or stripped. Water damage stains one wall in an ugly bloom. The place hums faintly anyway, as if memory itself refuses to leave.

Alastor walks slowly through it.

He can feel the shape of an old movement here. The way bodies had once crossed the room. Where chairs had stood. Where a hand had rested too long on a console. Where Vincent had lingered, eager, younger, all appetite, and static.

To Alastor, it is all one wrong step away from the present.

To Vincent…

No. Vox.

To Vox, it is clearly something else. A wound perhaps. Or a relic he keeps visiting just to make sure it still hurts.

Alastor watches him watch the room, that is more useful than the room itself. He notices the places Vox will not look at directly. The slight stiffening in his posture near the piano. The extra beat before he answers simple questions. The way his voice thins just a fraction when he says, “This one stopped working years ago.”

Years.

Again that word.

Again that distance.

Before Alastor can pull at it, a voice rings out from the door behind them.

“Voxxie?”

Valentino.

The irritation is immediate and inexplicable.

Small, but sharp.

Alastor does not move. He simply turns his head enough to see the man in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, wings partly tucked, all easy familiarity and confident intrusion. He looks at Vox like he already belongs in whatever moment this is.

Vox glances back. “I said I’d be down in ten.”

“It’s been twenty.”

“Then congratulations. You can count.”

Valentino laughs under his breath and crosses into the room a few steps, gaze sliding from Vox to Alastor and back again. There’s no threat in it, and no immediate hostility, that somehow makes the small irritation under Alastor’s ribs worse.

He files it away.

Valentino is close enough to Vox to ignore tone. Close enough to stand in old ghosts without asking permission. Close enough to receive that name, Voxxie, and have it answered like a habit.

Ah.

That too is noted.

Not a rival. Not exactly. Not in any form I’m prepared to name.

Just… a fact.

One that unsettles him for reasons he does not yet intend to examine.

“Everything alright?” Valentino asks, though the question is angled more at Vox than either of them.

“Fine,” Vox replies.

Valentino’s gaze flicks over Alastor. “You look like you found a haunted attic and decided to move in.”

Alastor’s smile sharpens faintly. “You have such a lovely way of speaking to near-strangers.”

“Occupational hazard.”

Their eyes meet for half a second.

Valentino is not careless, Alastor realizes, loud perhaps, indulgent certainly, but not careless.

And Vincent… Vox…trusts him, that is the more interesting piece.

Alastor turns his attention back to the ruined studio before either of them can read too much from his face. He does not need to.

He has already seen enough.

Vincent is not alone.

Vincent has built something.

Vincent has changed.

And yet, beneath the new name and the blue and the tower and the practiced calm, the old frequency is still there. Still audible if one listens carefully.

Alastor’s ear flicks once.

Then stills.

How very curious.

________________________________________________________________

a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

The pressure in his chest loosens. The green stitching beneath his coat dims from a painful, watchful glare to something quieter, manageable. His breathing deepens. One of his ears flicks once in unconscious relief while the other remains angled toward the nearest constant in the room.

Vox.

Alastor lies still a moment longer on the battered couch, half-curled into its worn cushions, feeling the room hold itself around him. The leather smells faintly of ozone and dust and something cleanly synthetic, Vox’s doing, no doubt. Somewhere in the studio, a loose cable taps softly against metal in a rhythm that almost resembles rain.

“That’s new,” he murmurs.

Vox stands at one of the consoles with the easy stillness of someone entirely at home in a space he controls. His television screen glows a calm, even blue, its brightness lowered from the aggressive sharpness Alastor has come to associate with performance. His antennas hum faintly in quiet synchronization. His fingers rest on the console with deceptive softness, as if everything around him answers to touch alone and never force.

He glances over. His screen brightens just enough to suggest a smile before the expression resolves fully.

“What is?”

“The lights,” Alastor says, squinting faintly as he pushes himself up onto one elbow. One ear tilts back in thought. “They didn’t used to do that.”

“They didn’t need to,” Vox replies smoothly. He taps a control with one finger, barely a gesture, barely a sound. “Your system’s sensitive right now. Harsh transitions aren’t great for you.”

Alastor blinks.

“My system.”

Vox lets out a low chuckle, warm static rippling through the room like a hand smoothing wrinkled fabric. “You know what I mean.”

Do I?

The thought forms and dissolves almost at once, softened by the room, by the hum, by the fact that his body has already accepted this arrangement before his pride can object to it. That unsettles him more than the answer would.

He sits up carefully. His antlers come close to one of the hanging cables and he adjusts on instinct, though the motion leaves a slight lag in his balance that he hates being aware of. Vox watches without appearing to. That may be the most unnerving part: not the attention itself, but the artfulness with which it is made to feel unobtrusive.

Alastor swings his legs over the edge of the couch and stands.

The room stays still.

No sudden clutching in his chest, brutal lock in his joints, nor a humiliating freeze, he draws one cautious breath, then another.

“No freeze,” he says, and hears the faint surprise in his own voice before he can hide it.

Vox nods once. The image on his screen sharpens almost imperceptibly. Approval, clean and neat as a pressed suit.

“That’s what consistency does.”

“Ah.” Alastor smooths a hand over the front of his coat, smile sharpening as he regains some semblance of himself. “So you’re training me.”

“Stabilizing,” Vox corrects instantly. “Training implies an end goal. This is just… maintenance.”

Maintenance.

The word settles badly.

Alastor turns it over in his head the way one tests the edge of a blade: carefully, without revealing how much it matters.

“I don’t recall agreeing to be maintained,” he says, voice light enough to pass for humor.

One ear angles back, a warning.

Vox notices, of course he notices. There is no visible flicker in his screen, no betraying twitch in posture. He only meets Alastor’s gaze with that same curated calm.

“You didn’t object.”

The words are not threatening, that somehow makes them worse. Alastor holds his gaze a beat too long, searching for the seam in the performance, the place where he might pry something honest loose. He finds nothing he can prove.

Before he can press, the studio doors slide open.

“Well, fuck me sideways.”

The voice slices through the room’s cultivated calm like a knife dragged lazily across silk.

“I knew you were reorganizing, Voxxie, but this is… new.”

Valentino steps in like the space was built to receive him.

He fills the doorway without seeming to try. Tall, broad, all looming elegance and indulgent menace, with four arms moving in easy, predatory confidence and broad moth wings folding behind him in a hush of scales catching the colored light. He brings with him the smell of expensive smoke and sweeter things rotting underneath. The room changes around him, not because he controls it, but because his presence demands adjustment.

His gaze sweeps once.

Stops.

Locks on Alastor.

“…Huh.”

A beat passes.

Alastor does not move.

He does not offer a greeting. He does not reach for charm. His smile remains in place, but quieter now, less animated, more mask than weapon. One ear angles subtly back, guarded. He does not know this man. Val notices that immediately.

“Well, hello there,” Valentino says slowly, voice silk-wrapped and dangerous. “Aren’t you an interesting creature?”

Alastor inclines his head a fraction. The lack of performance is more telling than any snappy remark could’ve been. Vox moves then, smooth as thought, stepping just enough into the line between them to alter the geometry of the room without making a spectacle of it. 

“Val,” Vox says mildly. “Play nice.”

“I am playing nice,” Valentino replies, though his attention never leaves Alastor. His wings flex once in lazy mock innocence. “Just looking.”

He takes a step closer, enough to test the room, enough to see whether Alastor will react. Alastor gives him very little. He straightens, shoulders drawing into a more formal line. His smile doesn’t waver. His eyes stay on Valentino, watchful and cool.

“You got a name, sweetheart?” Valentino asks.

A brief pause. Alastor’s gaze flicks, almost involuntarily, toward Vox.

Then back.

“…Alastor.”

Valentino’s expression doesn’t change much, but something in it sharpens. He turns his head slightly, reassessing.

“Just Alastor?”

No answer, it’s only silence and that smile. Valentino glances toward Vox, then back to Alastor. His instincts catch before his words do, something is wrong. Even without knowing Alastor well, Valentino knows what an Overlord should feel like when they occupy a room. This feels muted. Smoothed over. Curbed in all the wrong places.

His gaze drops to the faint green pulse beneath Alastor’s coat.

“Satan,” he mutters. “You look like shit.”

A flicker of discomfort passes through Alastor too quickly to name. One ear dips. The stitching pulses once in answer, bright enough to confirm what Valentino was already beginning to suspect.

Alastor says, with dry softness, “I’m told Hell does that to a person.”

Valentino snorts despite himself. “Cute.”

His head turns to Vox, humor thinning.

“What the fuck is going on?”

Vox doesn’t hesitate.

“Hmm, he’s stabilizing.”

Valentino’s eyes narrow. He looks at Alastor again. Alastor is still not reacting the way he should. There’s no interruption, any mocking, not asserting. He’s just listening and measuring the situation. It’s, wrongly, a little too quiet.

Valentino shifts his attention back to Vox, voice lower now. “Yeah? We’re doing this out here?”

Vox’s smile doesn’t fall, but something in the blue glow of his screen tightens.

“Val,” he says, softer. “Walk with me.”

It wasn’t a request.

Valentino hesitates, taking one last, long look at Alastor. Alastor returns it without blinking. His ears remain neutral now, though the angle of his head suggests he’s listening to much more than either of them would like.

Then Valentino exhales through his nose.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “We’re gonna talk.”

Vox turns first. Valentino follows. The doors close behind them with a soft creak.

The hallway beyond the studio is cooler, sharper, less forgiving. The blue and red lights here are cleaner, more corporate, less disguised as comfort. Valentino barely waits for the doors to seal before one of his lower hands catches Vox by the arm.

Not violently, but it was firmly enough to stop him.

“What,” Valentino says, very quietly, “the fuck is that?”

Vox glances down at the hand, then back up. He doesn’t pull away. He adjusts his posture instead, smoothing the moment into something less confrontational than it is.

“He lost his shadow,” Vox says.

For the first time, Valentino actually stills.

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

Valentino’s eyes search his screen, as if he’ll find the punchline hidden in the pixels somewhere. He doesn’t.

“And the memory?” he asks after a beat.

“It’s fragmented.”

“How fragmented?”

Vox’s gaze shifts, just briefly, toward the closed studio doors.

“He remembers enough to be dangerous. Not enough to be whole.”

Valentino lets that sit. His grip loosens, but he doesn’t fully let go. His wings shift once, not threatening… thinking.

“Fucking hell,” he mutters. “So that’s why he’s acting like a ghost in his own skin.”

Vox says nothing.

Valentino studies him. Really studies him now.

“You’ve been in there alone with him.”

A statement.

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell us because…?”

Vox’s smile returns, controlled and sleek. “Because I needed to understand what I had before everyone else started reacting.”

Valentino’s eyes narrow. “What you had.”

Vox does not correct the phrasing.

“He’s unstable,” he says instead. “He’s suggestible in the right state. He doesn’t know what’s missing, only that something is. If we push too hard, we lose whatever leverage we have.”

There’s a beat of silence.

Then Valentino’s mouth curls.

“You want him.”

Vox’s screen stays blue and still.

“I want him… correctly aligned.”

“Bullshit.”

“Val.”

“No, don’t ‘Val’ me, cabrón.” Valentino steps in closer, voice still low but edged now, more honest than loud. “You have been obsessed with that man since before your name fit your face, and now he lands in your tower broken and half-blind and suddenly it’s all strategy?”

Vox’s antennas pulse once.

“Lower your voice.”

Valentino laughs softly, without humor. “That’s not a denial.”

Vox holds his gaze. When he answers, his voice is smoother than the tension deserves.

“It can be both.”

That earns him a pause.

Then Valentino huffs, almost impressed despite himself. “Fuck. At least you’re honest when cornered.”

Vox steps closer, not confrontational, not affectionate. Magnetic. Controlled. The voice he uses next is the one that sells impossible things to willing crowds.

“I need you to play nice,” he says. “No testing. No pushing. No reminding him of anything unless I say so. Not yet.”

Valentino’s mouth flattens. “You giving me instructions now?”

“I’m asking you to be useful.”

That lands better.

Valentino tilts his head. His tone cools into something more businesslike. “And what do we get if your little project works?”

Vox’s smile sharpens. “An Overlord on our side who doesn’t yet realize he could be against us.”

Valentino lets out a slow breath.

“And if it doesn’t?”

Vox’s gaze hardens, just a little. “Then we adapt.”

There’s enough in that answer to satisfy and unsettle in equal measure.

Valentino finally drops his hand from Vox’s arm. “Fine. I’ll play nice.”

A beat.

Then, quieter:

“But if he snaps, I’m not pretending I didn’t warn you.”

“He won’t.”

The answer comes too fast.

Valentino notices. Of course he does. He says nothing about it. For now.

Instead he leans in just enough to murmur, “You always did think you could talk your way into taming monsters.”

Vox’s smile returns in full. “Only the interesting ones.”

Valentino shakes his head, half fond, half exasperated.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

When they step back into the studio, the room feels different. Not because anything has visibly changed, it’s worse. Alastor has moved.

He stands near one of the older consoles now, fingertips lightly brushing the edge of it as though reacquainting himself with texture more than machinery. Dust has gathered faintly along his hand. His head is tilted, listening to some internal echo neither of them can hear.

He looks up when the doors open, smile intact, but one ear has angled toward the doorway before the rest of him follows, proof that he was listening all along.

“…Everything alright?” he asks.

Vox’s smile arrives instantly, seamless as a channel change.

“Perfect,” he says, and the room settles around the lie as if it, too, has agreed to play along.

Alastor’s gaze lingers on them one beat longer than necessary. Then he looks back down at the console beneath his hand.

The studio hums softly.

Blue light bleeds across old equipment. Static curls at the edges of silence. Somewhere overhead, a wire shifts against metal with a faint, dry tick.

No one says anything else.

But the room is no longer calm.

It is arranged.

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a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

Alastor grins, sharp and genuine. “It wanted to be used.”

The song swings into a lively tempo, the kind that demands footwork whether you’re ready for it or not. Alastor’s shoulders loosen immediately, posture straightening as if the rhythm has found a joint in him and turned the right way.

“Well?” Alastor asks, already stepping into motion. “Are you going to stand there admiring the décor, or will you dance with me?”

Vox laughs, low and warm. “You always did have a way of making things sound inevitable.”

“Did I?” Alastor’s brows lift. “How flattering.”

He launches into a Lindy hop step without hesitation, fluid, precise, and alive. The movement comes from somewhere deeper than memory, his body answering the music with practiced ease. He spins, pivots, kicks lightly off the floor, and laughter bubbling up as the rhythm carries him.

Vox watches for half a beat too long, then he joins.

Not clumsily but tentatively, Vox moves with confidence, meeting Alastor’s energy step for step, the blue glow of his form casting sharp, electric highlights across the floor as they circle each other.

“Charleston next?” Vox asks.

Alastor’s eyes sparkle. “Try to keep up.” They do.

The room fills with motion, heels tapping, bodies turning, and laughter cutting clean through the static. Alastor spins Vox under an imaginary arm, only to be spun himself a moment later, balance flawless despite everything else about him being so very wrong lately.

For a few minutes, just a few, the world makes sense.

Then Vox steps closer.

Not touching yet. Just enough that Alastor can feel the hum of him, the way his presence seems to sharpen the rhythm rather than drown it out.

“You’re overextending,” Vox says lightly, voice pitched just low enough to be heard over the music. “Careful.”

Alastor waves him off, laughing. “Nonsense. I haven’t even warmed up.”

He kicks into a faster sequence and stumbles. It’s small, barely noticeable, but Vox is already there, his hand firm at Alastor’s elbow, steadying him before he can fall.

The contact is intentionally brief. Alastor freezes, not in panic this time, but a surprise. His breath catches, stitches flaring faintly under his coat. Vox doesn’t let go right away.

“Hey,” he murmurs, thumb pressing lightly where fabric meets skin. “Easy. You don’t need to prove anything.”

The words land deeper than they should. The music continues, but the moment stretches.

Alastor swallows, then laughs softly, the sound more brittle now. “You’re very good at that.”

“At what?”

“Making it sound like rest is an option.”

Vox smiles, slow and knowing. “It is. You just need… structure.”

Alastor tilts his head. “Structure.”

“Nothing strict,” Vox adds quickly. “Just… rhythm. Times to move, times to stop. Times to eat, times to sleep. Rituals help stabilize fractured systems.”

Alastor considers this, gaze flicking briefly to the glowing green stitches at his chest.

“And you’ve decided this applies to me?”

“I’ve noticed it does,” Vox says gently. “When you follow a pattern, you hurt less.”

The music winds down on its own, the final note lingering in the air like a held breath. Alastor steps back, creating space between them. He rolls his shoulders, testing his balance.

“I don’t recall agreeing to be studied,” he says lightly.

Vox meets his gaze, unflinching. “You don’t recall a lot of things.”

The honesty surprises them both. The silence thickly settles. From the doorway, a quiet cough breaks it. To both of their surprise, Velvette leans against the frame, arms crossed, expression sharp and unreadable. She hadn’t been there a moment ago. Or perhaps she had, and neither of them noticed.

“Well,” she says dryly, eyes flicking between them. “This is cozy.”

Alastor straightens, instinctively polite. “Ah! An audience. I do hope we were entertaining.”

Velvette smirks. “Depends who you ask.”

Her gaze lingers on Vox, longer, more pointed.

“You reorganizing your hobbies now?” she asks. “Or just redecorating people?”

Vox chuckles, unfazed. “I’m helping.”

“Mmhmm.” Velvette’s eyes narrow. “Looks like it.”

Alastor shifts slightly closer to Vox without realizing it, the blue glow at his side grounding him instinctively. Velvette notices, something sharpens in her expression. Before she can speak again, Alastor laughs suddenly, bright, unguarded, and caught somewhere between relief and exhilaration.

“This reminds me of-” He stops.

He pauses and looks at Vox.

“You used to hate it when I led,” Alastor says slowly. “You’d complain I was stealing the spotlight.”

Vox’s smile falters, just a fraction.

“That so?”

“Yes,” Alastor says, thoughtful now. “You’d sulk. Say it wasn’t fair.” He squints slightly, then- “Vincent.”

The name slips out easy as breath. The room goes very still. Vox’s systems spike hard.

Velvette’s head snaps up. “He said what?”

Alastor blinks, startled by the sudden tension. “Vincent,” he repeats. “Isn’t that-?”

Vox steps forward quickly, too quickly, static flaring bright before he reins it in.

“That’s… an old name,” he says smoothly. Too smoothly. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

Alastor’s smile tightens, replaced with confusion. “But I remember it.”

Velvette straightens, eyes sharp now. “You didn’t tell me his memory was doing that.”

Vox doesn’t look at her. “It’s nothing.”

Alastor’s hand drifts to his chest, stitches pulsing faintly as the static in his skull rises again.

“I don’t like when things don’t line up,” he says quietly.

Vox softens instantly, stepping back into Alastor’s space, voice dropping into that steady, guiding cadence that makes the world feel manageable.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “It’s alright. Memory comes in pieces. Names stick sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.”

Alastor searches his face, then exhales slowly as the pressure eases.

“If you say so,” he says, trusting.

Velvette watches the exchange in silence.

Then, quietly: “We need to talk.”

Vox nods once. “Later.”

She hesitates, then turns to leave, throwing one last look over her shoulder at Alastor.

“Careful,” she says, not to Alastor, but to Vox. When the door shuts again, the studio feels smaller.

Alastor clears his throat. “Did I… upset something?”

Vox smiles, gentle and reassuring. “No. You did great.”

The praise lands warm and dangerous. Alastor relaxes again, leaning subtly into Vox’s presence.

“Will you dance with me again later?” he asks.

Vox’s smile sharpens, proud, possessive, and pleased.

“Of course,” he says. “We’ll make it part of the routine.”

And somewhere deep in Alastor’s fractured mind, the name Vincent echoes, soft, insistent, and waiting to be remembered.

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a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

Not aimlessly, never that, but without a destination he can articulate, his fingers trail along surfaces as he moves, brushing dust from consoles, grazing cracked screens, and touching microphones like old friends whose names sit just out of reach. Each contact sends a small ripple through the room. Lights flicker weakly. Old systems hum in recognition.

Vox watches, not from a distance this time. He moves when Alastor moves, always a step behind or beside him, never in front. When Alastor slows, Vox slows. When Alastor pauses, Vox stops. It’s intentionally subtle.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Alastor says suddenly, glancing back over his shoulder.

Vox raises a brow. “Doing what?”

“Circling,” Alastor replies mildly. “Like a particularly polite little shark.”

Vox laughs, warm, easy, and practiced. “Force of habit.”

Alastor studies him for a moment, head tilting. “You strike me as someone with many of those.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Vox agrees. “I collect them.”

Alastor snorts softly and turns back to the equipment. He doesn’t tell Vox to stop following him.

That feels… notable.

They reach the center of the studio again, where the main broadcast console sits dormant beneath a thick layer of dust. Alastor hesitates before it, something in his posture tightening.

Vox notices immediately.

“This used to be yours,” Vox says gently. Not a claim. Not an accusation. A statement of fact.

Alastor’s fingers hover over the controls. “It feels like it’s waiting for permission.”

“It is,” Vox says. “Everything here always did.”

Alastor lets out a quiet, incredulous laugh. “You make it sound like I was some sort of tyrant.”

Vox’s smile sharpens, just slightly. “You preferred the host.”

The word lands heavier than Alastor expects.

Host.

The green stitches at his chest pulse faintly, tightening for a moment before easing again as Vox subtly adjusts his output.

“You don’t seem comfortable with that,” Vox adds, watching carefully.

“I don’t remember earning it,” Alastor replies.

“You don’t have to remember,” Vox says smoothly. “You just have to accept that it happened.”

There it is.

Alastor turns to face him fully now, eyes narrowing with curiosity rather than suspicion. “You’re very good at making statements sound like invitations.”

Vox inclines his head. “People tend to relax when they feel like they’re choosing.”

Alastor considers him for a long moment, then smiles faintly. “Dangerous quality.”

“Only if misused.”

“And is it?”

Vox doesn’t answer right away.

Instead, he steps closer, not invading, not touching,  just enough that the blue glow from his form spills more fully into Alastor’s space. The contrast is immediate. The static in Alastor’s skull softens. His shoulders loosen without conscious effort.

“You tell me,” Vox says quietly.

Alastor exhales, surprised by how good that feels. “You do this to everyone, don’t you?”

Vox chuckles. “Everyone who listens.”

“That’s quite the qualifier.”

“Listening is the first step,” Vox replies easily. “Belonging comes later.”

The word belonging slides into the space between them, soft and dangerous. Alastor looks away first, attention caught by a piano tucked against the far wall,  old, scarred, but intact. Its presence tugs at something deep and aching inside him.

“Oh,” he murmurs, moving toward it. “I didn’t notice you were here.”

Vox’s gaze sharpens with interest. “You always liked the quiet instruments best.”

Alastor pauses. “I did?”

“Yeah,” Vox says. “Less competition, it’s what you usually say.”

Alastor huffs a soft laugh and sits, fingers hovering over the keys. He presses one experimentally. The note rings out, clear,and rich. His breath catches.

Something opens inside his chest, not painfully this time, but tenderly, like a door left unlocked too long finally being pushed open.

He plays another note.

Then another.

A melody begins to form,  slow, uneven, and  searching. It isn’t practiced. It isn’t polished.

It’s instinct.

Vox doesn’t interrupt.

He stands behind Alastor, listening, the static around him shifting subtly to harmonize with the rhythm. The room responds, lights flickering brighter with each passing moment. Alastor plays like he’s remembering something with his hands instead of his mind.

When Vox finally speaks, his voice is low, full of reverence.

“You used to do that,” he says. “When things got too loud.”

Alastor doesn’t stop playing. “It still helps.”

“I know.”

The words come out softer than Vox intends.

Alastor glances up at him, startled. “You sound very certain for someone I barely know.”

Vox meets his gaze evenly. “I’ve always paid attention.”

There’s something in his eyes now, not hunger, not ownership, but focus. The kind that makes people feel seen, singled out, chosen.

“You’re safe here,” Vox adds gently. “You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to decide anything yet.”

Alastor’s fingers slow, the melody tapering off into silence.

“Yet,” he repeats.

Vox smiles. “Yet.”

They sit there in the quiet hum of the studio, piano echoing faintly in the aftermath, static wrapping around them like a low hymn. Alastor doesn’t remember the act of causing fear of his name, but his body does, and Vox knows exactly how to shape that.

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a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

Alastor becomes aware of how often he glances sideways, checking that Vox is still there, not because he expects him to vanish, but because the blue glow feels… anchoring. Like a lighthouse beam cutting through fog.

“You’ve been here before,” Vox says lightly, breaking the silence. Alastor stops.

He hadn’t realized he was moving with purpose until Vox named it.

“Have I?” Alastor asks, glancing around. The area feels wrong and right at once, too familiar to ignore, too empty to understand. “I don’t recall.”

“No,” Vox agrees. “But your feet do.”

Alastor huffs a quiet laugh. “Traitors.”

The humor comes easily, and that worries him. They round a final bend, and the structure comes into view. The old studio squats at the edge of a clearing like a forgotten relic, its once-proud facade cracked and weathered, neon signage hanging crooked and dark. Broken windows stare out like empty eyes. The air around it hums faintly, charged with something that refuses to dissipate.

Alastor’s breath catches.

“Oh,” he murmurs. The word slips out unguarded.

Vox watches him carefully now, expression unreadable. “You feel it too.”

Alastor nods slowly, drawn forward despite the way his chest tightens. The green stitches beneath his coat glow faintly, pulsing in response to the building’s presence.

“What is this place?” he asks.

Vox hesitates.

“An old workplace,” he says finally. “Yours.”

Alastor studies the building, head tilting. “It feels… loud.”

Vox smiles faintly. “Yeah. You never were subtle.”

They approach the door together. It hangs off its hinges, barely resisting as Alastor pushes it open. The sound echoes unnaturally inside, bouncing off walls that still remember applause, static, and laughter. The interior smells like dust and ozone. Old equipment lies scattered across the floor: microphones, cables, cracked panels, and frozen mid-abandonment. Faded posters cling to the walls, their edges curled and torn.

Alastor steps inside and freezes. His posture stiffens, eyes widening as the space presses in on him from all sides. The static in his skull spikes, pain flaring briefly along his chest as the stitches tighten. Vox reacts instantly, stepping closer, lowering his output by instinct.

“Hey,” he says softly. “You’re okay. Take it slow.”

Alastor’s breathing steadies as Vox’s presence fills the room, blue light softening the harsh reds around them. The tension eases reluctantly, like a clenched fist forced open.

“Sorry,” Alastor murmurs, embarrassed.

“Don’t be,” Vox replies. “This place holds a lot of residual energy. Even intact systems get weird in here.”

Alastor nods, though the explanation only half-satisfies him. He moves deeper into the studio, fingers brushing lightly over a console as he passes. The moment he touches it, the room responds. A low hum vibrates through the floor. Screens flicker weakly to life, casting ghostly light across the space.

Alastor startles, then laughs breathlessly. “Well! It appears I’ve offended it by leaving.”

Vox watches him with open fascination. “You always had a way with machines.”

“Did I?” Alastor asks, distracted as he trails his fingers along a microphone stand. The familiarity makes his chest ache. “They feel… patient. Like they’re waiting for me to remember.”

Vox swallows. “They’ve been waiting a long time.”

Alastor pauses near the center of the room, gaze lifting to the ceiling where lighting rigs hang like skeletal remains.

“I used to stand here,” he says slowly.

“Yeah,” Vox replies. “You did.”

Alastor closes his eyes.

For a fleeting second, sound rushes in, applause, music, and the warm crackle of a live broadcast. His smile flashes sharp and confident, then falters as the vision dissolves into static. He gasps, stumbling back a step.

Vox is there instantly, hands hovering just short of touching him. “Easy. Don’t push it.”

Alastor opens his eyes again, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. It felt like-”

“Like too much,” Vox finishes.

Alastor exhales. “Yes.”

They stand there together, surrounded by echoes neither of them can fully claim.

After a moment, Alastor straightens, smoothing his coat with habitual care. “I like it here,” he says decisively. “Even if I don’t understand why.”

Vox’s smile is small. Careful. “I figured you would.”

Alastor glances at him sideways. “You seem very certain about me, Picture Box.” The nickname felt right to use.

Vox chuckles. “I’ve had time to observe.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“An occupational hazard.”

Alastor hums thoughtfully, eyes drifting back to the equipment. “Would it be terribly rude of me to stay a while?”

Vox shakes his head. “No. I think… that would be good for you.”

Alastor smiles, genuine and warm, and something inside Vox twists painfully at the sight.

“Then you’ll keep me company,” Alastor says, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Vox meets his gaze, blue light steady.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I will.”

And in the quiet hum of the old studio, surrounded by machines that remember him better than he remembers himself, Alastor feels, if not whole, then at least held together… for now.

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a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

Alastor startles,  not dramatically, not theatrically, but sharply, like a prey animal jerked from stillness. His body locks again for a split second before loosening, breath hitching as his gaze snaps toward Vox.His eyes widen, trying to focus on him rather than recognizing the owner of that voice.

“Oh,” Alastor murmurs.

The word comes out soft and unguarded, nothing like the polished radio host Vox remembers. He takes a step forward… falters… then steadies himself again, eyes never leaving Vox. Vox feels it immediately, a pull.

Alastor’s breathing evens as he looks at him, shoulders lowering fraction by fraction. The green glow at his chest dims slightly, stitches loosening just enough to stop screaming. Vox swallows.

It’s worse than I thought.

“You’re…” Alastor begins, then stops, frowning faintly. His gaze drifts upward, tracking the blue glow that outlines Vox’s form, lingering on the sharp contrast against Hell’s muted reds and browns.

“You’re very… blue,” he says thoughtfully.

Vox lets out a quiet, careful breath. “Yeah. I get that a lot.”

Alastor hums, tilting his head. “It’s pleasant.” The word hits Vox harder than it should.

“Pleasant,” Vox repeats, keeping his tone light. “That’s a new one.”

Alastor smiles faintly, a small, genuine thing that doesn’t reach for the performance he no longer seems able to summon. His eyes flicker over Vox again, curiosity warming his expression.

“You look different,” Alastor says. Then, after a beat, “Where’s your picture box?”

Vox freezes.

“My… what?”

Alastor gestures vaguely at Vox’s head, brows knitting together in confusion. “Your picture box. The square one. With the glass.”

CRT head.

How bad is his memory?

The realization lands with sickening clarity.

Vox forces a laugh,  light, casual, and carefully calibrated. “Oh. That.”

He taps the side of his own head, blue light pulsing softly beneath his fingers. “Upgraded.”

Alastor blinks. “Upgraded?”

“Yeah,” Vox says easily. “Turns out lugging around a literal box gets old after a few decades.”

Alastor considers this gaze drifting back to Vox’s glowing form. He steps closer without realizing it, drawn forward by something he doesn’t understand and Vox absolutely does.

“I liked the box,” Alastor says, mildly. “It made you look… earnest.”

The word stabbed him in the heart. Vox smiles anyway. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Alastor hums again, clearly unconcerned with Vox’s deflection. His eyes track the light along Vox’s shoulders, his chest, the soft glow that spills outward like a halo of static.

“You shine,” Alastor says. “Not like the others.”

Vox’s systems spike, just briefly.

“Careful,” he says, half-joking. “People might get the wrong idea.”

Alastor’s head snaps up at that, expression briefly sharp with something Vox doesn’t recognize, discomfort, maybe.

“I don’t mean that,” Alastor says quickly. “I just…”

He falters.

The green stitches flare brighter as his breath stutters, hand lifting instinctively toward his chest. Vox moves without thinking, not close enough to touch… just close enough.

“Hey,” he murmurs, voice low, steady. He dials his output down slightly, letting the static soften, deepen. “Easy. You’re alright.”

Alastor’s hand drops slowly. His shoulders loosen. The flare fades, and Vox’s heart pounds.

“That’s better,” Vox says quietly, more to himself than anything.

Alastor looks at him again, really looks, and something settles behind his eyes. Recognition without context. Trust without memory.

“You’re loud,” Alastor says, faintly amused. “But not in a bad way.”

Vox chuckles. “You should hear the complaints.”

Alastor smiles wider this time, the expression warming his features in a way that makes Vox’s chest ache.

“You don’t feel like a threat,” Alastor adds.

Vox doesn’t respond immediately.

Because that isn’t true.

Not really.

“I’m not,” he says instead.

Alastor studies him for a long moment, gaze flicking briefly past Vox as if searching for something that should be there and isn’t.

“Something’s missing,” Alastor says softly.

Vox nods, slow and careful. “Yeah. I know.”

Silence stretches between them, thick but not uncomfortable. The forest seems to lean in, listening. Alastor breaks it first.

“Do you have a name, picture box?” he asks lightly.

He doesn’t remember me, not entirely.

He has some recollection of me.

I can use that.

I can use this.

You’re not getting away from me.

Vox’s smile sharpens, fond and dangerous all at once.

“Vox,” he says. “And you already know it.”

Alastor laughs quietly, the sound surprised and unguarded. 

“Do I?”

Vox meets his gaze, blue light reflecting softly in Alastor’s eyes.

“You will,” he says.

And for the first time since the fracture, Alastor doesn’t feel the urge to run.

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a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

He reroutes power, amplifying the feed slightly. The static flares, then stutters, breaking into uneven pulses that make something low in Vox’s core tighten. The blue light reflects off his screens as a familiar pattern emerges, subtle, buried, and almost lost beneath the noise. Vox’s breath stills.

“No fucking way,” he whispers.

The frequency isn’t whole. It’s fractured, incomplete, like a broadcast that’s lost half its infrastructure.

Like…

He pulls up an old archive without thinking, fingers moving on instinct. A dozen screens light up around him, cycling through recorded signals, signature patterns, spectral analyses.

Radio.

Not just any radio.

That radio.

Vox swears under his breath, sharp and quiet. “You’re fucking dead.”

The words feel wrong the moment he says them. It’s not because he believes them, Vox has never been naïve enough to assume someone like Alastor could be erased so easily but because this signal doesn’t feel like survival.

It feels like aftermath.

Vox isolates the anomaly further, filtering out interference until the static sharpens into something almost painful to look at. The waveform jerks erratically, struggling to maintain cohesion.

It’s unstable.

Vox’s screens dim automatically as his system compensates, preventing overload. He barely notices. What he notices is what’s missing.

There’s no shadow.

The realization hits him hard enough to make him lean back, chair rolling slightly as if to give his thoughts room to breathe.

“No,” Vox says, slower now. “No, fucking way. That son of a bitch.”

He pulls up a live feed, not public, not official, but one of the many quiet cameras threaded throughout Hell like a nervous system. He knows exactly where to look: the forest perimeter.

The feed resolves slowly, grainy and dark. Trees loom in warped silhouettes, their forms distorted by distance and poor lighting. Vox adjusts the focus, teeth worrying briefly at his lower lip as the image sharpens.

There he is.

Alastor stands unsteadily among the trees, posture wrong, movements hesitant in a way Vox has never seen from him. His coat hangs unevenly, fabric tugged awkwardly around his torso. Vox zooms in. There’s green light pulses faintly beneath the torn fabric at Alastor’s chest and joints.

“What the hell happened to you…?”

Vox’s voice comes out quieter than he expects. He watches as Alastor takes a step forward, then stops abruptly, body locking mid-motion like someone’s hit a kill switch. His shoulders tense, breath hitching visibly as he freezes in place. Fear flickers across Vox’s expression.

“That’s not shock,” Vox murmurs, scanning rapidly. “That’s not injury response either.”

He just… stops.

Just like how a prey would respond.

This is getting fucking interesting.

Vox swears again, sharper this time, and pulls up additional feeds, tracking Alastor’s movement, or lack thereof, across multiple angles. With sharp eyes, he notices something’s wrong with his perception. Vox knows that because he’s seen it before in systems. When a signal loses its anchor, its reference point, it struggles to interpret incoming data, the only way he can compare it to something he knows how to explain to himself. Vox’s fingers curl against the edge of the console.

“You lost something,” he says softly.

He brings up a secondary overlay, mapping Alastor’s magical output against known baselines. The readout spikes, then drops erratically, refusing to stabilize.

And there it is!

The absence registers clearly now, a void where something integral should be.

His shadow.

Vox exhales slowly, the sound thin.

“Well,” he mutters, forcing humor into his voice that doesn’t quite stick. “That explains a lot.”

He leans back, gaze fixed on the screen as Alastor finally stirs again, moving with visible effort. There’s no bravado, only confusion. Vox watches him turn slightly, head tilting as if listening to something only he can hear. There’s static where it hums faintly through Vox’s speakers. The anomaly responds. Vox stiffens.

“Oh,” he breathes.

He adjusts the output, carefully this time, lowering the volume until the static becomes barely perceptible. On-screen, Alastor’s shoulders ease a fraction, breath evening out as the green glow at his chest dims. Vox’s heart skips.

“That’s it,” he says, awe threading through his voice despite himself. “That’s the frequency.”

Radiostatic.

The realization sends a strange, dizzying rush through him, excitement tangled uncomfortably with dread, because Vox knows exactly what this means.

Alastor is fractured.

He’s vulnerable.

And for the first time since I’ve known him…

He’s responsive.

Vox straightens slowly, gaze never leaving the screen.

“I told you,” he murmurs, unsure whether he’s speaking to Alastor, himself, or the ghost of a rivalry that never quite died. “You just needed the right signal.”

The static hums softly in response. Vox’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes.He doesn’t move to announce this. He doesn’t call Valentino or Velvette, nor does he alert anyone at all. Instead, he begins preparations quietly, rerouting power, setting up containment protocols he tells himself are just in case.

This is just to stabilize.

I can call this a way to help an old pal out.

After all… this time, I can play my cards right.

Old pal.

And in the forest below, Alastor lifts his head slightly, eyes unfocused but drawn unerringly toward the distant blue glow cutting faintly through the trees, staring towards the only frequency that doesn’t hurt.

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a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

The question floats, unanswered.

Alastor forces his eyes open. The world swims. Colors bleed together into a muddy blur of reds and browns, tree trunks stretching upward in warped, indistinct lines. He blinks hard, once, twice, but the distortion remains. Depth feels wrong. Distance lies to him. He doesn’t like that.

He pushes himself up on trembling arms and nearly collapses again when his body lurches, unbalanced in a way he can’t account for. His breath comes too fast now, static buzzing faintly in his ears.

“Easy,” he murmurs automatically, the word slipping out without thought.

The sound of his own voice startles him.

It’s… wrong.

The warmth is missing. The practiced lilt, the broadcast polish that usually smooths every syllable into performance, it isn’t there. What remains is bare, unfiltered, edged with distortion he doesn’t recognize.

He swallows hard.

Something is wrong with me.

Alastor looks down. His hands are shaking. That alone would be concerning. His hands do not shake.

Green light pulses faintly beneath the fabric of his coat, catching his attention. He fumbles with stiff fingers, tugging the material aside… and freezes.

Stitches glow across his chest.

Jagged, uneven threads of luminous green magic crisscross his torso, pulling skin together in harsh, ugly lines. They pulse in time with his breathing, tightening painfully every time his chest expands.

“What…?” he whispers.

The word dissolves halfway out, slipping away from him like smoke. He knows stitches. He knows magic. He knows this is his work, voodoo binding, emergency reconstruction.

But I do not remember doing it.

I don’t remember why.

Panic stirs in him, cold and sharp.

He pushes himself upright again, slower this time, bracing against a nearby tree. His legs wobble, threatening to give out beneath him as the world tilts unpleasantly.

Something feels… lighter.

Wrong.

Alastor glances down at the ground. There is no shadow beneath him. His breath stutters.

That should be impossible.

Shadows are automatic. Instinctual. As natural as breathing.

He steps forward experimentally and nothing follows.

“No,” he says again, louder this time. The forest does not answer.

His heart pounds, each beat sending a sharp tug through the glowing stitches. He presses a hand flat against his chest, feeling the unnatural tension beneath his palm.

His thoughts scatter like startled birds.

Who did this?

Why can’t I remember?

Names surface and vanish before he can grasp them. Images flicker at the edges of his mind, red skies, broken stone, laughter that sounds cruel and holy all at once, but the details slip away the moment he reaches for them. It’s like trying to tune a radio with the dial missing.

Alastor squeezes his eyes shut, breathing carefully through clenched teeth.

Focus.

Panic won’t help.

I have survived worse than confusion.

He opens his eyes again and immediately regrets it. The world lurches violently as his body locks in place. It’s not paralysis, more like… a freeze.

His muscles seize mid-motion, refusing command, breath hitching painfully in his chest. His vision sharpens suddenly, too sharp, then blurs again, edges smearing together until the forest becomes a flat, hostile smear of color. His heart hammers.

I can’t move.

I can’t look away.

He’s caught, trapped in his own body, awareness screaming while instinct slams the brakes. A deer in headlights, a distant, half-remembered thought whispers. The phrase sends a fresh wave of unease through him.

After several agonizing seconds, the sensation eases. His limbs loosen reluctantly, leaving him shaky and breathless. Alastor slumps back against the tree, sliding down until he’s seated hard against its roots.

“That’s new,” he mutters weakly. The forest remains silent.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, breathing shallowly, afraid to move too much. Time stretches strangely, folding in on itself. Then… a sound.

It’s faint… so faint he almost imagines it. A soft hum at the edge of perception, like a radio tuned just off a station. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t grate. Alastor’s breathing slows without him realizing it. The pressure in his chest eases a fraction, stitches dimming slightly as the green glow recedes. His hands stop shaking. His smile tightens, listening.

“There you are,” he murmurs, uncertain who he’s speaking to.

The static fades again, leaving the silence heavier in its wake, but the damage is done. His body remembers the relief. Alastor pushes himself to his feet once more, cautious but determined. He can’t stay here. The forest feels wrong in a way he can’t articulate, it's quiet pressing too close.

I need shelter.

I need structure.

I need… something familiar.

The thought pulls him forward, instinct guiding his steps even as his mind refuses to cooperate. He stumbles more than he walks, freezing once more when his vision distorts too sharply, but he forces himself onward. Somewhere deep inside, a direction settles.

The static brushes his senses again, faint but present, like a distant lighthouse beam cutting through fog. Alastor follows it without knowing why, and far above the forest, screens flicker.

A signal that should be gone trembles briefly into existence: unstable, fractured, and impossible, where someone, somewhere, is already watching.

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a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]

“One-sided?” he snaps. “You’ve been running your fuckin’ mouth for ten minutes straight.”

Lute stands a few steps behind him, blade angled downward, posture tight and efficient. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to.

Alastor grins wider, eyes glowing cheerfully. “Ah, but monologuing is half the fun, my dear boy. One simply can’t massacre an audience without proper presentation.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Jesus Christ, you are insufferable.”

He cracks his neck, gaze locking onto Alastor with something sharp and calculating,  not the blind rage most angels bring to Hell, but irritation edged with intent.

“Alright,” Adam mutters. “Enough fuckin’ around.”

Alastor’s shadow shifts beneath him, stretching long and eager across the ground, curling at the edges like ink dropped into water. He feels the familiar hum of it, the balance, the weight, and the comfort of something that has always been there.

That’s when the air tightens.

Alastor’s smile twitches, just barely.

Lute adjusts her stance, eyes narrowing. “Adam.”

“I know,” Adam replies, already raising the weapon.

It isn’t a blade. It isn’t anything Alastor recognizes.

Compact. Metallic. Its surface crawls with etched symbols that vibrate when Adam grips it, emitting a low hum that sets Alastor’s teeth on edge.

“Oh?” Alastor hums lightly. “And here I was expecting something crass and overcompensatory. Do forgive me if I’m disappointed.”

Adam bares his teeth. “You should be.”

The hum spikes.

Alastor moves.

Shadow surges instinctively, yanking him sideways as the first shot rips through the space where his head had been a moment before. The blast tears into the stone behind him, leaving a warped, glassy crater that smokes.

“Missed,” Alastor taunts.

Adam laughs, short, sharp, and ugly. “Yeah. On purpose.”

The second shot comes faster.

Alastor feels it bend, targeting something else entirely: the seam. The hit lands without sound, without impact nor mercy.

For a fraction of a second, Alastor doesn’t understand what’s happening, only that something inside him has gone catastrophically wrong. Pain doesn’t explode so much as unzip, ripping through layers of self he’s never had to think about.

His shadow lashes violently, stretching too far, too fast, shrieking without a voice, and then it’s gone.

Alastor slams into the ground hard enough to knock the breath from him, the world stuttering violently as his magic surges out of control. Static screams through his skull, a shrill, broken feedback loop that sends sparks skittering across his vision.

Green light flares across his chest.

Stitches rip into existence,  jagged, glowing threads of voodoo magic yanking his body back together as it tries, and fails, to come apart. His scream tears out of him raw, unfiltered, and nothing like the polished broadcast tone he’s worn for decades.

It hurts.

God, it hurts.

Adam lowers the weapon slowly, breathing a little harder now, eyes bright with something dangerously close to satisfaction.

“Fuckin’ nailed it,” he mutters.

Lute steps closer, gaze fixed on Alastor’s writhing form. “He’s still alive.”

Adam shrugs. “Didn’t say I was trying to kill him.”

He looks down at Alastor, head tilting. “Shadow’s the weak point. Always is. Soul gets real fuckin’ fragile when it’s divided like that.”

Alastor forces himself upright on shaking arms, stitches burning hot as they pull him back from the brink. His grin snaps back into place out of sheer habit,  stretched too thin, and warped at the edges.

“My, my,” he rasps, static breaking through his voice. “You angels certainly do come prepared these days.”

Adam snorts. “Run.”

Alastor doesn’t argue.

He vanishes in a burst of corrupted static, body tearing itself free from the battlefield with a shriek of broken frequency. The escape isn’t clean. It can’t be.

He hits the ground hard somewhere else, trees looming overhead, their shapes warped and indistinct, colors bleeding together in dull, muddy shades that make his head swim.

The forest is quiet… too quiet.

Alastor staggers forward and stops dead.

His body locks mid-step.

Muscles seize, refusing command as if he’s slammed into an invisible wall. His breath catches sharply, shallow and panicked, vision blurring as the world loses depth and clarity.

He can’t move.

Something is wrong.

Something is missing.

Alastor looks down. There is no shadow beneath him. The realization hits harder than the pain.

“No,” he whispers. The word comes out thin and unsteady and stripped of performance.

His knees buckle, body collapsing into the damp earth as the stitches along his chest flare brighter, yanking tight to keep him from unraveling completely. Pain lances through him in sharp, erratic bursts, but not enough to kill him, enough to keep him aware.

His thoughts scatter where names slip away first then places follow. The world narrows to sensation, cold ground, buzzing static in his skull, the unbearable wrongness of being incomplete.

Alastor curls inward, fingers digging into the dirt as his body shudders violently. Somewhere far away, laughter echoes, distorted, familiar, and entirely unplaceable.

And in the absence where his shadow once lived, something watches.

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a/n: sharing my work is the best thing you can do. Reblogs and comments motivate me to write more! :]