Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Very late in the hectic rush to prepare the hotel for the Extermination it occurs to Charlie that they’ve neglected to plan for dealing with battlefield injuries.

“It’s a waste of resources,” Vaggie tells her grimly. “Angelic weapons, at least in the hands of an exorcist, are a one-shot kill. The only way to survive is to not get hit.”

“That ain’t true,” Angel interrupts. Vaggie arches a challenging eyebrow at him, but before she can bring her sarcasm to bear and ask how he thinks he knows more about angelic weapons than a literal former exterminator, Angel crosses one set of arms and doubles down. “Well, it ain’t. Vox got fucked up by an angel awhile back. I heard he used to go outside on Extermination Days for some dare. Then one year he got his face nearly sliced in half and he gave it up.”

“Vox? No way that scrawny asshole survived a fight with an exorcist,” Vaggie scoffs. “He probably just made that up to sound tough.”

Angel makes a gesture diagonally across his face, through his left eye. “He’s got a scar on his screen. Hides it behind a bunch of pixels, but you can catch it when he’s glitching.”

Charlie hums in consideration. It takes something especially violent to leave a permanent mark on an overlord. “Do you think we should go ask him—”

Vaggie claps a hand over Charlie’s lips to stop her voicing the suggestion, but pulls away with a groan when Charlie licks her palm. “Charlie, we can’t ask Vox anything. Alastor will lose his shit if he finds out you’re even considering—”

A peak of static is all the warning they get before Alastor manifests right between Charlie and Vaggie. “Oh-ho! My ears are burning. Did someone call my name?”

XXX

These Extermination Day outings with Alastor weren’t dates, but they weren’t not dates either.

Ever since Vox got over his mortifying puppy crush on the Radio Demon, he hadn’t concerned himself with the semantics, and he’d been happier for it. For one thing, post-crush clarity had Vox suspecting that a physical relationship with Alastor would likely include way more vore than Vox was comfortable with. Hell, Vox already got plenty of bites taken out of him every time they scrapped. [“So sorry my dear, I got a little carried away.”]

Thank fuck Vox had pulled himself together before Alastor got tired of his shit and outed him as a sap to the whole Pride Ring—because honestly? Vox liked this, whatever it was between them, the way it was.

They fought over Pentagram City airwaves; they scrapped in the streets; they teased and antagonized and critiqued each other. They gossiped and occasionally even schemed together (always only briefly, because neither could resist the temptation to screw the other over). Sure, Alastor was patronizing, inflexible, and pushed Vox’s buttons mercilessly. He never passed up an opportunity to remind Vox that his power left Vox’s in the dust. [“Only for now, old man.” / “We all can dream, my good fellow.”]

But Vox welcomed it. All the insults and challenges kept him sharp, kept him innovating. He was determined to one day see the look on Alastor’s face when Vox finally one-upped him. Alastor may have been mostly a mystery, but Vox thought he had enough of the man’s measure to guess that Alastor would find the moment just as thrilling as he would.

—cuz at the heart of it all, the two of them were showmen, and there was no feeling in the fucking world like putting on a good show, even if sometimes the only audience was themselves.

Unfortunately, Vox was never quite certain which parts of their show were an act and which parts were based on something genuine. Sometimes the semantics mattered. Like right now, when Vox had less than a week to figure out whether he should mention that this Extermination Day would be the tenth one since they started… whatever this was. Vox was pretty sure that recognizing a ten year anniversary was super important if you were dating, but kinda cringey if you weren’t.

The worst part was that Vox had spent the better part of six months and some hefty favors to set up a surprise that would finally force Alastor to admit that television had something to offer even an old fashioned Radio Demon. The vindication was going to be sooo sweet, and Vox intended to be extra smug about it to make up for the fact that the surprise itself was, unavoidably, nice. He’d planned to spring it on Alastor when they met up for drinks, but that was before it occurred to him that this year was a significant (potential) anniversary.

If mentioning an anniversary to someone who didn’t think it qualified as one was cringey, then surprising that someone with something nice on said anniversary was so far beyond cringe that Lucifer would have to create a new ring of Hell to banish Vox to just so the rest of Pride Ring didn’t die of secondhand embarrassment.

Vox could avoid the issue by pushing back the scheme, but post-Extermination was the busiest time of year for a fledgling overlord like Vox. If he put off the surprise it would be months before he could get to it, and he wanted that vindication now. Or, he could act like there was nothing special about the occasion and go ahead with the scheme as planned, but that was risky. He would be gambling that Alastor’s obliviousness to romantic customs would trump his maddening ability to pick up on the slightest opportunity to embarrass Vox.

Damn Alastor for being obstructive without even trying.

Vox’s alarm sounded from the other room. He’d spent so long over-thinking this crap that he’d stayed up all night—forgot to fucking go to bed in the first place, and now he had a whole day of politics and schmoozing and wrangling deals to get through on no sleep. If it wasn’t a bad look for the brand he was building, Vox would look into getting a roommate, one with an actual normal body and a real circadian rhythm he could use as a point of reference for his own routines. (An internal digital clock didn’t help with time-management when Vox could infinitely press snooze on alarms for important-but-boring shit like sleep and eating.) Maybe he could get a pet instead? Something badass, though, befitting an overlord. Like a tiger or something.

XXX

When Alastor first met Vox, he was just coming down off the bloody high of delicious broadcast, sated and about as satisfied as one was able to get in Hell. This is most likely the reason the conversation didn’t end in Alastor eating him. That, and the fact that when Alastor alluded to the likelihood of said fate, the bold little fellow only laughed and gestured to his odd physiology. [“I don’t think I’d taste very good.”]

He still had that new-sinner shine to him, and when the fool introduced himself as a ‘future overlord’ Alastor laughed so hard he peaked his microphone. What a lark.

The ‘future overlord’ was obviously frightened—Alastor could smell it on him—but he hid it well, and he’d had the guts to approach the Radio Demon fresh off a massacre, so Alastor humored him. “And what makes you think you have the mettle to be an overlord of Hell?” Alastor asked.

The sinner—Vox, what a pretentious name—responded with a grin as broad and toothy as Alastor’s own. “You’ll see.”

Chapter Text

It all started by happenstance.

Alastor did not normally leave his recording studio on Extermination Days. Though he was confident he could avoid any exorcist that set its sights on him, he didn’t find much entertainment value in bloody chaos that he hadn’t orchestrated himself. This particular Extermination Day, however, the sanctity of his workplace had been disrupted by the appearance of Alastor’s …benefactor.

Alastor had welcomed her like a gentleman, made tea precisely the way she preferred, and endured forty minutes of pointless, patronizing small talk without touching his own. (She liked it too damn sweet, and knew he didn’t, and insisted he drink it her way every time she visited for precisely that reason. The only rebellion Alastor dared offer was to serve the tea with his dear friend Rosie’s delicious lady-fingers as the accompanying snack.) As usual, there was no reason for this unannounced visit other than to remind Alastor who owned him.

The moment he had his studio to himself again he summoned one of his own underlings, who squealed with glee upon seeing the mild disorder and dust around her. Alastor considered himself a tidy man outside of mealtimes, but no power in Hell could satisfy Niffty’s standards, so she was always pining over the fact that Alastor preferred to housekeep his private spaces himself. He only ever indulged her after—

“The scary lady came again?” Niffty asked, eyeing the shattered shards of porcelain on the floor and the tea dripping down one wall.

Alastor snapped his fingers; the tea set returned to the state it had been before he flung it across the room. “I’m going out. Have fun, darling.”

So here he was, strolling down one of Pentagram City’s dismal avenues with no particular direction in mind, keeping a lazy watch on the sky and lamenting (internally, only ever internally, must keep up that smile) that there were no victims around to satisfy his murderous mood because they were all indoors, crammed into corners and closets like vermin cowering from the exterminator. And that’s what they were, Alastor thought sourly, all of them, even—

“I don’t give a FUCK what day it is! TURN MY POWER BACK ON YOU CHEAP BASTARD!” A shriek from down the block: one of fury, not terror as was the norm during Exterminations. Alastor perked up at the novel counterpoint the sound provided to the city’s current soundtrack of desperation and death. Even more intriguing: Alastor recognized the voice. Perhaps the day was finally looking up.

XXX

The first time Vox dared to suggest that radio might be going out of style (and would Alastor like to come on one of Vox’s broadcasts to give new medium a try?), Alastor chuckled indulgently and patted Vox on the head like a child. [“This face was made for Radio, and radio isn’t going anywhere.”]

The second time Vox brought it up, Alastor ripped him into so many pieces it took him three weeks to regenerate.

Vox changed tack after that, arguing that television didn’t need to replace radio because it had its own unique cultural value. Thus the bet was made: if Vox could convince Alastor that television had the potential to be art, then Alastor would recommend Vox’s little talk-show start-up to his listeners. [Deal.] In the meantime, the number of their conversations that ended in (Vox’s) murder declined.

They even, occasionally, talked some shop. Vox learned more than he ever wanted to about the difference between AM and FM waves, and came to the conclusion that if he ever needed to distract Alastor, it took little to no prompting to get him started on a rant about how AM was an affront to humanity. Similarly, Alastor was delighted to discover that by merely uttering the word censorship he could get Vox so worked up over an Earth organization called HUAC that he’d short out the local power grid.

Alastor would never say so aloud, but it was …pleasant, having another showman to talk to. Even if his medium was a trashy fad.

XXX

Charlie is not an idiot. She knows Vaggie is probably right about staying away from Vox. Alastor gets a little intense (well, more intense) when the TV mogul is brought up. Judging from the on-air showdown several months ago, the feeling is mutual. But that might just be to their advantage in this case. So she beams at Alastor and tells a teeny-weeny white-lie (she’s not Lucifer’s daughter for nothing after all): “We were just thinking about asking if you knew anyone who can heal angelic injuries. In case one of us gets hurt when Adam comes.”

“Oh how funny you are sometimes, my dear girl. War is coming to our doorstep—people are definitely going to be hurt,” Alastor says. He looks delighted by the prospect. “My recommendation to you is to keep the people you love most”—he gives Vaggie a gentle bop on the head with his microphone—“out of the line of fire. One does not simply walk off divinely-inflicted injuries.”

Charlie gives Angel a sideways glance. If Vox had really survived a fight with an exorcist, surely Alastor would make it his business to know how. “So you’ve never heard of someone surviving an attack by an angel? Nobody at all?” she asks.

“Of course I have!”—Charlie’s hope rises—“She’s standing right next you, nearly felled by one of her own.”—this time Vaggie dodges the microphone with a growl—“But I don’t imagine we will be able to replicate her good fortune.”

Charlie’s shoulders slump in disappointment. Getting a straight answer out of Alastor is like pulling teeth, but she knew that when she posed the question. Fortunately, ever since the pep-talk Alastor gave her, Charlie has been watching his responses a little more critically. His smile never wavers—but his ears and his shadow tell a different story. Even the flavor of static seeping from his microphone… Charlie is sure that she heard, for an instant, a few melancholic notes amongst the interference.

XXX

As suspected, the originator of the ruckus down the street was none other than Vox, the ambitious, tightly-wound sinner who currently served as Alastor’s favorite source of amusement. Whatever was he doing on the streets during an extermination, shouting like a lunatic at the locked and barricaded front doors of a ratty office building?

Alastor chose to materialize from the shadows behind Vox, offset just enough to one side that Vox should have noticed the movement in his peripheral—but the sinner was too focused on the tantrum he was throwing. Oh yes, this was going to be entertaining.

“I am TRYING to run a broadcast studio, you dumb fuck. Every minute you sit on your ass instead of fixing the grid costs me money!” Little sparks of static electricity were zipping along Vox’s antenna.

From within the building came a muffled response; Alastor tuned in to the sound in time to catch the end of it: “—crazy?? Businesses are closed on Extermination Day!”

“NOT MINE,” Vox roared. “Repairs in less than six hours! That was the deal! You’re in breach of contract with the wrong guy, motherf—”

Deciding it was high time for his entrance onto this little stage, Alastor flicked the foot of his cane out to tap against Vox’s calf, and was rewarded with an ungainly squawk from Vox as the wannabe overlord spun to face him, tripped, and fell on his ass.

“Alastor!”

“You’re making an awful lot of noise for someone who claims a picture is worth a thousand words,” Alastor said cheerfully.

Vox tried to rise to the bait, as predicted, but tripped over his own tongue as thoroughly as he’d tripped over his own feet—also as predicted. (The sinner seemed to be in a phase where he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to murder Alastor or jump his bones. As long as he kept his hands to himself, Alastor didn’t much care. He himself hadn’t yet decided whether Vox’s entertainment value was worth suspending his curiosity about how Vox tasted.) Eventually, Vox recovered his normal level of eloquence:

“The fuck are you doing here?”

Perhaps eloquence was an overly generous term.

Alastor gave his cane a jaunty twirl and wondered when Vox would realize he was still sitting on the ground like an idiot. “Just taking an afternoon stroll. What’s this I hear about a breach of contract?”

Vox shot a dark look at the office building. With a sweeping gesture towards city center, he said, “Everyone is stuck inside today! It’s a captive audience, and they’re already desperate for distraction. I have the best broadcasting equipment in the city, a perfect show planned, and so of course some fucking angel knocks down a power line outside my studio! And this asshole”—Vox turned back to the office building and raised his voice to address its occupant—“has FORTY-FIVE MINUTES to fix it before I rip that door off and END YOUR FUCKING EXISTENCE!!”

Ah yes, Vox’s hopeless quest to become an overlord by putting a picture box in every building in Hell. Over a decade of clawing and scraping in the dirt for the scraps of power superior demons allowed the common rabble to squabble over, and Vox barely had enough status to be permitted to lurk in the nosebleed seats of Pentagram City’s political theatre. Yet he kept going. It was an admirable show of tenacity, Alastor supposed, but it was also rather pathetic.

“An Extermination Day broadcast. What an excellent suggestion, Vox. I think I’ll retire to my studio and start one right away,” Alastor said.

That got Vox on his feet again. On his feet, in Alastor’s space, with his claws wrapped around Alastor’s cane to stop him leaving, and perhaps today would be the day Alastor found out what he tasted like after all.

“Don’t you dare,” Vox hissed. “It was my idea.”

Alastor’s shadow began to writhe, growing larger. The air around them hummed menacingly. “Take your hands off of me now.”

“Make me.”

Chapter Text

The ‘dad’ thing is just a gag to piss off Lucifer. Alastor has no need to compete with the king of hell. His hold on Charlie is no more threatened by Lucifer’s presence than it has been by Vagatha’s over-protectiveness.

It’s fine.

Alastor wasn’t bothered in the slightest when that clown of an angel swooped in, acting like savior and mocking the months of work put into the hotel by its founders (by Alastor). Why would he be? He’s here to fulfill an obligation, and ideally squeeze some entertainment out of the situation in the meantime. Every charitable or affectionate gesture he has made has been calculated, made in pure self-interest. Only an idiot would suggest otherwise.

XXX

“Make me.”

If Vox wanted to die today, Alastor was perfectly willing to oblige him. It had been awhile since Alastor put the fool in his place anyway.

Alastor let himself relax, let the void pour into him and fill his veins with hunger. He could snap Vox’s neck as easily as snapping a twig, but he rather thought he’d enjoy snapping each of his fingers first, for daring to touch Alastor’s microphone. The menacing hum of Alastor’s radio presence deepened, but it was not the only source of distortion in the air. Vox had clearly been honing his control over his abilities since they last scrapped, and he was rising to meet Alastor’s threat with a buzzing static of his own.

Before either of them could make a move, a fast-moving shadow passed overhead, followed by a screeching war-cry, and—Extermination Day, angels, Alastor had forgotten—the gleam of Hell’s red sky on angelic steel as an exorcist’s weapon came swinging towards the two of them. Ordinarily, Alastor would whisk himself away into a nearby shadow, maybe send a tendril of the void snapping at the angel to distract it. In that particular moment, however, Alastor was a little tangled up, metaphysically-speaking, in Vox’s aura. Physically tangled up too, because Vox still had his claws wrapped around Alastor’s microphone.

Several things happened in the space of a few seconds—Vox swearing at an octave Alastor would have to remember to tease him for later—a strong jerk as the idiot lurched out of the way without letting go of the fucking microphone—a ice cold whoosh of air as a blade came very close to Alastor’s face—a hard impact with the ground (and what felt like a corner of Vox’s head)—and a very sharp scent of ozone followed by an undignified squawk from the angel.

The moment Alastor sensed Vox’s grasp loosen on his microphone, he slipped through his own shadow and reappeared a dozen feet away, taking a moment before he fully materialized to straighten his coat and his bow-tie. Ugh, there’s dust on his pants. He’s going to skin Vox alive for this, if the exorcist hasn’t already killed—Alastor’s train of thought stuttered to a stop as he looked up from dusting himself and caught sight of the angel.

It was… It was absurd to apply such an adjective to Hell’s most feared enemy, but nevertheless, the exorcist was fluffy. Its feathers stuck out in every possible direction, as if each one was straining to get as far away from its fellows as possible. The creature looked like nothing so much as an overgrown feather-duster wielding a giant axe. Obviously it was unharmed, but it did look rather stunned.

A crackle of static electricity arced from the tip of the angel’s axe to its helmet, and realization dawned on Alastor. He turned to look at Vox, who was (on the ground again) glancing with wide eyes between the angel and the little blips of blue lightning dancing along his fingertips. Alastor had never witnessed Vox harness electricity in such an untamed form before; it appeared that Vox hadn’t ever attempted to until just now.

The street was (relatively) silent for just a moment before the angel recovered from its (literal) shock and shook itself with a growl. The motion dismissed most of the lingering static, although its feathers did not return to anything nearing their usual sleek formation. It glared at the two of them, took a step forward, and—Vox snapped his fingers. Ozone surged; the street lit up a dazzling blue. Once again the exorcist turned into a puffball, and oh goodness, it was worse this time. How was it even possible to look worse? It was ridiculous. It was absolutely—

Alastor made the mistake of looking at Vox, who was looking at Alastor, and for whatever reason that was enough for them both to lose it. They both broke into peals of laughter. Genuine laughter, without a hint of malevolence, the kind that Alastor rarely had occasion to indulge in these days, and it was a minor miracle that Alastor retained enough presence of mind to snag Vox round the middle with a tendril of the void and yank him out of the angel’s reach. Just in time, too, because now it was well and truly pissed.

What followed was an exhilarating chase, the first Alastor had ever spent as the hunted rather than the hunter, although one could hardly call it a hunt when Alastor never fled more than fifty feet at a time, hauling Vox through the shadows with him as they both cackled. Every time the angel (and the reinforcements it summoned) got too close, Vox would fling out another pulse of lightning. Soon they were being pursued by a pack of screeching puffballs.

The two of them carried on baiting angels for a good while before Alastor began to feel the strain of jumping a passenger through the void so many times in a row, and had to call it quits. Dropping Vox, still giddy and sparking, on the floor of his pitch black studio, Alastor teleported himself home, feeling much better than he had when he left that morning.

XXX

Somehow it became a thing.

Every year, Alastor and Vox found themselves spending Extermination days together, baiting angels in increasingly convoluted and hilarious ways. At some point they started meeting up for drinks the evening before to go over strategy. There was never any explicit discussion about it, no statement of truce or anything like that. They just… fell into it.

XXX

“I met your young friend at the meeting the other day,” Rosie said one day during tea. “They nearly didn’t let him in—I think he was expecting you to be there and vouch for him.”

“Whoever are you talking about, my dear?” Alastor asked her.

“The TV demon. Vox. A little excitable, but very charming,” Rosie said. “Why haven’t you brought him to visit me yet?”

A brief laugh-track wafted from Alastor’s microphone where it leaned against the wall by Rosie’s umbrella stand. “Because he’s not a friend. Just an amusement.”

Rosie sent a knowing look over her teacup as she sipped. “An amusement of how many years now?”

Enough that Alastor had stopped counting. He waved a hand dismissively. “He’s very amusing.”

Rosie hummed and set down her tea. “His smile takes after yours.”

Alastor raised an eyebrow at her. “Whatever is that supposed to mean?”

“Just that you would have been quite entertained if you had come along to the meeting with me,” she said. Ignoring the pfft from Alastor that made his opinion of the overlord meetings abundantly clear, she continued. “The whole time he was arguing to be let in he played himself as this polite, unassuming type. Explaining, patient as a saint, that even though he doesn’t own too many souls yet his influence is very widespread.”

That kind of attitude didn’t sound like Vox at all. “Talk is cheap,” Alastor commented.

“That’s what Carmilla said.” Rosie’s tone rose in excitement—she had always been a lover of gossip. “But Vox, he just beamed at everyone, and then the lights went out, so the only thing you could see was his face. And when you looked out the window, the whole city was dark.”

Ah, so that was the source of last week’s blackout. It seemed Vox had finally gotten it through his head that he couldn’t base an empire on electrical technology if he didn’t also control Pentagram City’s electricity.

As if able to read Alastor’s mind, Rosie shot him a sly look and said, “When I spoke to him after, he mentioned it was you who gave him the idea to go after the power grid.”

“He was never going to get anywhere if he didn’t,” Alastor responded, still affecting disinterest. “I fail to see what that has to do with my smile.”

Rosie laughed. “Oh Alastor, you do try my patience sometimes,” she said. “It was a delightful show. I’ve never seen better from anyone but you. And Vox clearly admires you. Why not call a spade a spade and admit you’ve got yourself a little protege?”

“Because, my dear Rosie, I have no desire for a protege,” Alastor said, “and if I did, I would certainly not choose Vox.”

“Why not?” she challenged.

“Because…” Alastor found himself drawing a blank. He was sure that before Rosie started this ridiculous line of conversation he could have recited any number of reasons for her, but right now not a single one came to mind. With a huff, Alastor took a long drink from his teacup.

Rosie cackled at him.

Chapter Text

There were very few things in life (and death) that were certain. The superiority of radio was one of these things. As time went on, Alastor discovered another certainty: at any given moment, Vox was either already in trouble or else hurtling toward it.

XXX

“What sleeping bear did you poke this time?” Alastor asked, side-stepping to avoid the puddle of silvery liquid he assumed served as Vox’s blood, “and why did you choose my doorstep to bleed out on?”

Vox, who was slumped on the curb in front of Alastor’s studio like a leaking garbage bag awaiting trash collection, looked up at Alastor with a manic, unfocused expression.

“Alastor! I told you—I told you I was gonna make it big. And I have proof!” Vox exclaimed. The edges of his vowels were sticky, staticky. The idiot was giddy with blood-loss. A closer glance at the state of his injuries—torso soaked in blood, screen cracked—told Alastor that Vox was not long for this world.

“Proof,” Alastor responded flatly. For some unfathomable reason, ever since they met a little over a year ago, the sinner had been insistent about updating Alastor on his ‘progress’, completely oblivious to Alastor’s disinterest.

Vox made a wide uncoordinated gesture—oooh, that arm was definitely not supposed to bend at such an angle—at the blood he’d tracked everywhere.

“You’re nobody until somebody wants you dead,” Vox declared with the total assurance of someone quoting a bible verse, “and Nicky No-Nose sent some guys to kill me! I’m important now.”

Good grief.

Bending down until he could look Vox directly in the eyes, Alastor said, “There is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that whatever thug arranged to kill you did so because you are obnoxious, not because you pose a of threat to anyone.”

XXX

Another time, Alastor tracked Vox down to discuss some unflattering comments Vox had recently made on his pathetic little talk show, only to discover that Vox had just come off a rather vigorous discussion of his own.

It was barely three in the afternoon and Vox was sprawled in the corner booth of a deserted dive-bar, slurping down a bottle of bottom-shelf whiskey while trying to repair the heavily-damaged frame of his television-head with duct tape. Alastor slid into the opposite side of the booth, commanded the bar’s beat-up overhead speakers to play ragtime, and snapped his fingers to replace Vox’s trash whiskey with a bottle of fine rye (along with a pair of glasses, because unlike Vox Alastor had some class.) Vox was wrestling with a long strip of duct tape, until he noticed part of it had become glued to itself and tossed it away with a groan.

Setting the roll of duct tape aside, Vox greeted Alastor warmly. However, the only sound he emitted was a noisy droning buzz that swooped sharply up and down in pitch. With a huff, Vox snagged the nearest low-frequency channel and co-opted it to send Alastor a short-range transmission: [Lucky hit to my voice box. You should see the other guy.]

Alastor elected to respond aloud, pouring himself a couple fingers of rye as he did so. “You look very smug for someone who was clearly on the losing side of a brawl.”

With a smirk, Vox named a middling-powerful slum lord who, if memory served, controlled much of the turf surrounding Vox’s broadcasting studio. [I made him look like an idiot in front of half his peons. I’d call that a win.]

“You seem to have a suicidal knack for provoking people far out of your league,” Alastor commented.

[Not just provoking. Getting away with it, too. It’s kind of been my gig ever since I landed in Hollywood.] Vox’s expression took on a dreamy, nostalgic quality. [By the end, I was a big-shot producer, untouchable, but it all started with my talk show. I’d interview anyone. Celebrities, nobodies, demagogues, freedom fighters, pornstars, housewives, senators, even hobos off the street. If you wanted a platform to say something real to the whole world without giving a damn about politics and censorship, you came on Vox Populi.]

Alastor nearly spit out his drink. “You named yourself after your television show?”

Vox’s shoulders hunched and his sappy smile disappeared. [Yeah, so? It was the greatest thing I ever did. The only thing I ever really loved. Even if it did get me killed in the end.]

Alastor felt his interest sharpen; few demons referenced their deaths so openly. With good reason—how someone died often revealed a lot about them. “Oh? Do tell,” Alastor prompted.

Vox shook his head, wincing at the resulting rattling sound from somewhere inside his skull’s eclectic inner workings. [No way, old man. Not for free.]

Then he gave Alastor contemplative look, and held out a hand across the table. [Listen, I can fix my frame, but I’m at a loss with the audio stuff. Give me a hand and you can have all the juicy details you want.] Tapping the side of his head, he added: [Including this piece of crap.]

Vox rarely managed to surprise Alastor, but on the occasions he did so, it was always with gestures like this. Offering a deal to the Radio Demon with the fanfare of someone ordering a cup of coffee—boldly, casually, and with utterly misplaced faith that Alastor would honor the spirit of the agreement rather than the phrasing.

(For some reason Alastor couldn’t quite explain, he always did.)

Alastor’s smile took on a sharper quality as he took Vox’s hand. The ragtime music shifted into a sinister, distorted parody. Vox rolled his eyes at the theatrics.

On Vox’s co-opted frequency, Alastor responded: [Deal.]

XXX

When Vox felt one of his soul-contracts evaporate with a finality that indicated the sinner in question was dead-dead, he hid his grimace and continued the poker hand he was playing with another overlord (one of the few who had warmed up to him in the weeks since his debut at the most recent meeting of Pentagram City’s overlords). This was Hell. People got themselves killed, and though Vox couldn’t really afford to lose any of his contracted souls, shit happened. He could deal with it later.

Then three more of his contracts winked out of existence.

“Fold.” Vox laid his cards on the table as he stood. “I have to go.” Gesturing to his pile of chips, he said, “Bill me for the difference.”

The overlord gathered up Vox’s cards and began shuffling the deck. He didn’t touch Vox’s chips. “Sit down, kid. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Sorry, but I need to take care of something right now,” Vox said. “You know I’m good for the money.”

With a gruff sigh, the overlord leaned back in his seat and signaled for one of his underlings to refill his whiskey glass. “Listen, make this easier on both of us and sit back down. It’s just a bit of hazing, you’ll get through it.”

Yet another contract died and Vox realized what was going on. Someone was hunting down his soul contracts. People Vox had painstakingly recruited and/or press-ganged for their particular skills. Former engineers, switchboard operators, programmers… Vox was dependent on the quality of his owned sinners, not their quantity.

And that quantity was ticking steadily downward.

“Motherfucker.”

Chapter Text

The moment Vox went for the door, two security guards Vox had previously dismissed as window dressing shifted to block his path. They seemed a lot beefier than they had last time Vox looked. He spun back around to face his host. “Husk, let me go.”

“No can do, kiddo.” Husk downed his drink, and signaled for another. “You’re lucky I’m the one who volunteered to keep you busy. The others wouldn’t have been satisfied with playing cards.”

Vox chilled at the implication. Then he felt another contract die.

“You can’t keep me here.” He tried to keep his voice at an even pitch, but some of his desperation was leaking in. “What do you want? What will it take for you to let me go?”

“Other than the usual? Everything you got to spare is going up in flames right now,” Husk said. “You’re outplayed, kid. Sit down, have a drink, take the loss. You’re dead, you’ve got eternity to rebuild.”

Vox’s heart was pounding. Ever since he learned that souls in Hell regenerated from fatal injury, he’d never flinched from a fight, even ones way out of his weight class. But until now, he’d never fought with someone who could actually end him. (Except Alastor. But that was different.) Husk was the fucking casino overlord. Vox wasn’t even sure what all he could do, and he didn’t relish the prospect of finding out, especially when the most impressive attack Vox could counter with was low-voltage lightning bolts. And if he somehow managed to escape Husk, he’d still have to contend with whichever overlords were out hunting down his people. Vox was screwed.

But he sure as Hell wasn’t going to just sit here and let these fuckers ruin him.

Vox sneered at Husk and sat down. The overlord pushed a glass of bourbon towards him and Vox took it without a word. Let the bastard think he was sulking. Vox had an ace up his sleeve. A dubiously reliable ace that was definitely going to cost him to play, but an ace nonetheless.

Getting hold of a frequency that only Alastor would notice was tricky, and broadcasting over such a long range without the help of any equipment was stretching the limits of Vox’s abilities, especially since he he had to do it without letting anything on to Husk. It was going to seriously drain his power, too. He had to make this quick.

[Alastor. Alastor. Alastor. Aaaalastorrrrr. Alastor. Alas—]

[What the fuck are you harassing me for.]

[I need a favor. Like, right now. One that includes you going on a rampage and eating people.]

[…I’m listening.]

Thank fuck. Vox quickly summarized the situation for Alastor, urging him to get his cannibal ass out to Husk’s casino pronto. There was a considerable pause before Alastor responded.

[As tempting as it is to be able to hold such a large debt over you, I’m going to have to pass on this one.]

It took every ounce of control Vox has not to screech out loud. [Why?!]

[My dear, if I bail you out right now, not a single one of them will ever respect you.]

Vox was pretty sure he must be shaking with rage. [Don’t pretend you’re looking out for me, asshole! You just wanna see me crash and burn. I can’t fucking believe this.]

[Vox. Against all odds, you have become an overlord. Act like it.] The words were accompanied by a jolt of static that rattled Vox down to his bones and left the taste of rot in his mouth, signaling that Alastor was done with the conversation.

It took Vox a moment to bring his consciousness back to reality.

“You okay there, kid?” Husk was asking.

Vox forced himself to steady, then set his bourbon back down on the table. “You are going to pay for this, Husk,” Vox promised, voice low and even. There was a timber to his words that Vox hadn’t heard himself use in decades. Not since Earth. He’d used this tone of voice to wreck careers, ruin lives, even once to incite a riot. Vox was in Hell for a reason. “Not tonight,” he continued. “Not for a long time. Long enough that maybe you’ll forget all about this. But I won’t.”

Another soul contract gone. That put Vox below a hundred.

Husk was nodding at him, unconcerned. “That’s the spirit.”

After that, everything became a blur. A painful, desperate blur that felt nothing like fighting Alastor.

Vox’s first thought was to kill the lights, but when a playing card ripped into the flesh of his shoulder he realized Husk’s cat eyes weren’t for show and set them to flickering at the highest frequency he could manage. The strobe effect was much more effective at blinding his opponents—can’t forget the two thugs behind him—and Vox was able to get off a pulse of lightning without being speared by any more cards. Husk’s goons started seizing, but the overlord himself was only marginally more affected than an exorcist would be. Vox didn’t have time to breathe, let alone appreciate whether or not Husk made a good puffball, before the poker table came hurtling towards him.

He ducked behind the nearest goon, who took the worst of the impact but only added to the weight that sent Vox plowing into the floor. He felt something crunch inside his chest and hoped it was just a rib and not some heretofore undiscovered mechanical component he had no hope of fixing.

Precious seconds ticked away while Vox struggled to get out from under both the goon and the table. As he scrambled to his feet he sent a panicked burst of lightning blindly in the direction he’d last glimpsed Husk. He was near the door, if he could just get out into the hall—

A searing, heart-stopping pain exploded in Vox’s skull, followed by the bottom left quarter of his screen shattering. Shattering outward. The light from Vox face reflected off silvery blood coating a card embedded in the door in front of him—and oh fuck that card had gone through him. Dysphoria Vox thought he’d gotten over decades ago knocked him breathless. (What even was he that that hadn’t killed him instantly?) He didn’t have time. He didn’t have time for this. Vox viciously shoved his horror into the deepest pit of his mind he could find and spun around to face Husk.

The overlord didn’t even look winded, and Vox felt like his knees were going to give way any second. His only consolation was that Husk’s expression now at least had a touch of wariness.

“You done?” Husk asked.

“Fuck no,” Vox spat.

“Too bad. I am.” Husk made a flicking motion with his wrist, and all the poker chips that had been scattered throughout the room during the scuffle zoomed directly towards Vox. There was nowhere to dodge, so Vox threw up his arms to guard his fragile screen and braced himself.

Despite their speed, the poker chips didn’t hit him with any force—but they did stick to him, like burrs on a knit sweater. Vox blinked, confused, before a crushing force dragged him to the floor. He gasped at the impact, tried to get up, and realized that each one of the poker chips attached to him had taken on a ludicrous amount of weight, effectively pinning him to the ground. He could barely breathe.

From his position flat on his face, Vox could only see Husk’s feet as the overlord stalked toward him. He came to a stop just out of Vox’s reach. “You’re tougher than you look,” Husk said, and it pissed Vox off to no end that the compliment sounded genuine, “and you’re a careful gambler. I know you’re good for the money. But in my house, even temporary debt has a habit of weighing you down.” A pause, followed by a gruff sigh. “We coulda had a few nice hours just playing cards.”

“Who’s in on this?” Vox growled. “Which overlords are out there destroying my shit?”

“What does it matter? You can’t do anything to stop them. Just calm down,” Husk said, “and stop this shit with the lights already.”

A dim, desperate spark of inspiration came to Vox. He stopped flashing the overhead lights, but didn’t relinquish his link to them. Instead, he mentally followed the path of the electric current, tracing the wiring in the walls until he found what he was looking for: a power outlet on the wall to his right. He couldn’t see it, but he was fairly certain he could reach it if he could just force his arm to move.

Vox’s plan to crash the overlord meeting had been nearly a year in the making. He’d used up all of his painstakingly acquired resources and worked his people (and himself) around the clock. But it turned out that most of the work that Vox himself had to be present for was actually completed a couple weeks before the date of the meeting.

So he’d spent the unexpected free time playing around with electricity, pushing for his limits—the voltage his body could tolerate, and so on. One of the things he discovered was a queer weightless feeling he got when he was channeling certain voltages near power lines. Further experimentation had produced a theory—a stupid, dangerous theory that Vox hadn’t quite had the nerve to test yet.

Well, this was a now-or-never moment if Vox had ever seen one. You’re an overlord now. Act like it.

He took as deep a breath as he could manage under the weight pinning him. Then, with every bit of strength that remained to him, Vox wrenched his right arm toward the wall and dug his claws into the outlet. The plastic cover splintered, the rubber coating on the wires shredded, and Vox felt the circuit close. He pulled—

A blinding blue flash overtook the room, and Vox was gone.

Chapter Text

Until Charlie came up with the idea for the hotel, she hadn’t been familiar with the overlords of Pride Ring. It was always Charlie’s Mom that handled the politics of Hell. Charlie has met all of them in passing at one point or another, and knows the minimum about each one necessary to be politically polite, but compared to the expansive hierarchy of hell-born in the other Rings, the sinner overlords just aren’t as important. Especially when Charlie only has so much brainpower available for memorizing names and faces (and who was whose mortal enemy).

There are a handful of exceptions to this: overlords who, for whatever reason, managed to pierce the veil of Charlie’s sheltered upbringing and make an impression on her. One was an asshole, long dead, who had insulted Lilith to her mother’s face while she and Charlie were taking a walk. Another is Carmilla Carmine, the weapons dealer, who has been invited to the palace on several occasions. Alastor is another, because, you know, the whole Radio Demon thing.

But on the whole Charlie hasn’t really paid attention to the sinner overlords, and now her lack of knowledge is biting her in the ass.

Alastor, despite his assurances to the contrary, is not okay. Charlie would bet everything she owns, including the hotel, that the reason Alastor had fled the battle was because he took a hit from Adam—and that even now, weeks later, it hasn’t healed. Alastor needs help, and Charlie is going to help him whether he likes it or not, and that means she needs to talk to the only sinner in Hell who has (theoretically) survived being struck down by an exorcist. Vox.

Charlie knows frustratingly little about him outside the details that make up his brand: Overlord Vox, the TV demon, media mogul, technological savant, and founder of the hugely powerful overlord triumvirate known as the Vees. For all that his face and logo are plastered over half the city, Vox himself seems to be a relatively private character.

Charlie sits down at the hotel bar, puts her chin in one hand, and gives Husk a considering look. He puts a lemonade in front of her, then eyes her suspiciously when she doesn’t stop staring at him.

“What?” he grouches. “Got something to say, say it.”

Choosing her words carefully, she asks, “You used to be friends with a lot of overlords, right?”

Husk gives her an unimpressed look, but deigns to indulge her curiosity anyway. “Overlords don’t have friends. But there were more of them who I got along with than who wanted to kill me, so yeah.”

“Were you ever friends with Vox?”

Husk’s expression sharpens into something wary. Charlie’s only seen him look like this when Alastor feeling moody. Is he afraid of talking about Vox because of Alastor? “You don’t have to talk about it if—”

“We didn’t get along,” Husk says. “Why the interest, princess?”

“I need to know what kind of person he is underneath all the branding,” Charlie explains. To even have a chance of convincing Vox to help his own rival, Charlie needs leverage. Ideally that leverage will be Vox’s own conscience, but to appeal to his better nature Charlie needs to know what makes up that better nature. (Charlie refuses to believe Vox doesn’t have a good side. Everybody has a good side, even if it’s buried really really really deep down.) And if it comes down to making a deal with him for Alastor’s sake… well, it’s best to be prepared for that, too.

“This is about Alastor, isn’t it.” Husk says.

Charlie grimaces, aware that for Husk Alastor’s death would be a good thing.

Husk gestures for her to shut up before she can even start apologizing for the awkward situation she’s putting him in. “If you wanna know who an overlord really is, you talk to their people,” Husk says. “In Vox’s case, you’re gonna want to talk to the ones who were with him before he started the Vees.”

“Vox owns thousands of souls,” Charlie says. “How am I supposed to find the right ones?”

Husk rolls his eyes. “Little punk loves putting his name on shit, including his people. You’re looking for the ones wearing his logo.”

Charlie groans. “Husk, VoxTek endorses a ton of people and products. The logo is everywhere.”

“That’s the Vee logo, kid. Vox had a brand way before he teamed up with those other two idiots.” Husk pulls out a playing card from nowhere. He shows her the ace of spades on one side, shows her the back, and then turns the face toward her again—but the ace has been replaced. He hands Charlie the card and she inspects the new image: an electric blue V superimposed over a monochromatic globe, both of which were set into the screen of a chunky, old-fashioned television set. It looks nothing like the sleek, minimalist Vee logo.

“This is Vox’s logo. He still uses it as his signature on contracts, far as I’ve heard,” Husk says. “Now buzz off.”

XXX

Charlie does try official channels first, obviously. She discreetly contacts his offices for a personal appointment, and is informed she’s been put on a waiting list. She pulls the princess-of-hell card and is informed Vox is not accepting any appointments at this time, either in person or virtually. She decides to pull the princess-of-hell card a little more aggressively and shows up to Vee Tower in person, managing to coax her way all the way to Vox’s personal office before she is stymied in the waiting room.

It’s empty except for a secretary with fluffy white rabbit ears that are so long they’ve flopped over from their own weight and lay like a furry scarf on the woman’s extremely ample chest. She’s wearing high stilettos in a shocking red color that matches the silky hair she’s got tied up in a bun, but the rest of her outfit consists of shades of Vox’s trademark electric blue, right down to her painted nails and sparkly eye-shadow. Her outfit technically qualifies as a womens’ power suit, but it’s not exactly what Charlie would call office attire. The skirt is split high enough to reveal she’s not wearing underwear and the fourth-from-the-top button of her white blouse is straining valiantly to contain her bust—a pointless battle, since the shirt itself is sheer enough to show every detail of her lacy bra.

Her name-tag says “Bunny.” She’s chewing gum and typing on her phone with single-minded focus. There’s not a thing on her desk to indicate that she does any work besides sitting outside Vox’s door looking sexy.

Charlie knows that appearances can be deceiving, and to be honest the woman isn’t half as undressed as she could be given this is Hell and the dress code is rather raunchy to begin with, but when she approaches Bunny’s desk the woman greets her with such a vapid expression that Charlie can’t help her immediate impression that not a single thought has ever passed behind those green eyes.

Talking with Bunny is a nightmare. It’s like she only has a few memorized responses to offer visitors, and any attempt Charlie makes to deviate from that script—both to get into the office but also get Bunny’s own opinion of Vox—is met with blank confusion. Eventually Charlie admits defeat and takes her leave.

(Not once during the entire conversation does Charlie notice that the back of Bunny’s right hand bears the image of an old-fashioned TV.)

XXX

The next thing Charlie does is image search the logo Husk gave her. Miraculously, that gets her a few hits—three private business profiles that feature Vox’s logo but not the Vees'. She notes the addresses and hits the streets.

The first one leads her to a private home in an older area of town, one of the regions Zestial controls if Charlie remembers right. She’s welcomed inside a luxuriously upholstered sitting room by a distinguished looking sinner whose German accent is so dated Charlie is pretty sure she only understands him because she’s got magical angel mojo that allows her to understand any language. He introduces himself as Sig, puffs a large cigar, and happily recounts his career as Hell’s first and only hypno-therapist—but when Charlie asks about Vox he clams up. “Professional ethics,” he tells her, “I can’t discuss my clients without their permission.”

“Is Vox a client?” Charlie asks, “Or your employer?”

He kicks her out. Politely.

Charlie’s next destination is a small fashion house outside of cannibal town. Weirdly, it does not seem to belong to Velvette. The structure is made almost entirely glass (which in Hell is just asking to be demolished), is spotlessly clean, and is filled with sleek modern tech but very little furniture. There’s also not a scrap of fabric in sight.

The moment Charlie steps through the door, a tiny woman with a short black bob, thick glasses, and severe expression appears out of nowhere and begins taking her measurements. When Charlie attempts to explain that she doesn’t need new clothes, the woman steamrolls right over her objections.

“Nonsense, darling, look at you,” the woman says, wielding her tape measure with dizzying speed. “I may be able to salvage some of this—suits do seem to be the appropriate aesthetic for you—but this color palette is atrocious. And we’ll definitely have to do something with that hair. There, I’m done. Come back tomorrow and I’ll have your new wardrobe ready for pick up.” The woman’s tape measure disappears; she spins on her heel and starts walking away.

“Wait!” Charlie says. Despite the fact that she’s not here for clothes, she can’t help but be curious about (and a little offended by) the rapid-fire evaluation she’d just received. “That’s it? You’re not going to ask me any questions? Show me any designs?”

The woman stops, turns around, and raises one eyebrow at Charlie. Below the outer corner of her eye, like an electric blue teardrop, sits a TV logo. “Why would I ask your opinion when I’m the expert? When you come to Edna, you wear what Edna gives you.”

The sight of Vox’s logo reminds Charlie why she’s here. “You work for Vox, right?”

Edna rolls her eyes. “Ugh, that man’s a slob. He’s lucky I’ll have anything to do with him.”

“What do you do for him?” Charlie asks.

“I’m his designer, darling, what else?” she says.

Charlie blinks. “Really? I kind of assumed that Velvette dressed all the Vees.”

Apparently Velvette is a sore topic for the designer, because Charlie finds herself kicked out into the street, quite literally—Edna’s tiny feet stab into her calves the whole way as Charlie apologizes fruitlessly.

The final address leads Charlie back to Vee Tower and into the VoxTek R&D floor. It is crammed with screens and sinners, and Charlie doesn’t understand a word of the technobabble streaming from either. Nobody even pays attention to her as she picks her way through the sea of tables and cubicles to an office in the back. Behind a desk labeled [Alexey | Head App Designer], a bear-shaped sinner sits surrounded by monitors, keyboards, and mostly-empty cartons of Chinese take-out. A giant game of tetris is being projected across the entire back wall of the office.

He seems nice enough, weirdly normal even, if a little anxious to get back to his work.

“You do realize this is VoxTek, right?” he says to Charlie. “Everything that happens in this building, Vox finds out about. And you’re here, asking me for personal details about him. My boss. The guy who owns my soul. Who could make my life miserable if he wanted to. Can you see why I might be a little hesitant to talk to you, even if you are the princess?”

“Are you miserable?” Charlie asks.

Alexey gives her a flat look and says, in the tone of a middle-schooler forced to recite a poem for English class: “Yes. I’m so miserable working at this stable well-paying job that I forget to go home some evenings because I can’t tear myself away from the boredom of doing whatever the fuck I want in between meeting product quotas that I get to set because I don’t answer to anybody but Vox. My life sucks. I wish I never met the bastard. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Charlie has the feeling something is going over her head. “Um, no?”

With a huge sigh, Alexey shoos Charlie from the office. “Sorry your Highness, I’ve got work to do.”

Chapter Text

The black outs went on for months. They’d strike seemingly at random, affecting different regions of the city at different times, lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. Often the power would cut off and on in rapid intervals, shorting out back-up generators that couldn’t keep up.

The only devices that were guaranteed to always have power were televisions. And they weren’t sitting idle: every salacious scandal and under-the-table business deal, every bank account number, every confidential password, anything caught on camera or stored on a computer in the entire city was liable to be broadcast at any moment on every television set in Pride Ring.

For the first two weeks, there was widespread confusion. Then the grapevine caught up to the chaos and even sinners who had never even heard of the TV Demon knew that he had snapped. Only then, when Pentagram City’s curiosity about the maniac who was holding the power grid hostage was at its peak, did Vox actually show his face.

XXX

Carmilla Carmine was one of the few people who could knock on the door of Alastor’s radio tower and enter in complete confidence that she would walk back out of it. Not because Alastor had any fondness for her, but because the thrill of killing her would not be worth the resulting chaos. (Alastor enjoyed chaos on principle, but the sudden death of Hell’s biggest weapons dealer would cause chaos of the tedious variety, rather than the amusing.)

As was her nature, Carmilla skipped past the niceties Alastor preferred to engage in with his guests. “You have to do something about Vox,” she said. “Talk him down, kill him, I don’t care what. He is out of control.”

Alastor hummed. On occasion, other overlords tried to offer him their enemies as victims, as if Alastor was some contract killer. He never accepted. “Judging by the state of the city,” he replied, gesturing at the stunning view available from the studio windows, “Vox seems to be very much in control.”

XXX

The broadcast was advertised several days ahead, and started precisely on time. The opening visual featured Vox seated in a throne-like chair, its opulence a glaring contrast to its surroundings: the smoked-out ruins of Vox’s former broadcast studio, which had gone untouched, even by squatters, ever since the night it burned down.

XXX

Carmilla crossed her arms. “You know what I mean, Alastor. We are on the edge of anarchy out there.”

It was indeed. Vox had played the long game so well even Alastor himself had not immediately realized what he was doing—quietly spreading his roots throughout the city by by investing in infrastructure and foisting his technology onto everyone he met, often at a loss. Vox hadn’t even had to hide his ambition while doing so, because he never made enough traditional progress to seem a threat.

Alastor felt his smile quirk in response to a feeling he refused to acknowledge as pride. “It must be quite embarrassing to be caught off-guard by an upstart because you failed to recognize that soul contracts are not the only source of power in Hell,” Alastor said. “One would think you might already have learned that from my arrival.”

XXX

Vox’s charming TV host smile was as bright and light-hearted as it ever had been. [Good Evening, Pentagram City! It is my pleasure to have your wonderful eyes on me once again. I hope you haven’t missed me too much during this break in our usual programming. Things will be back to normal very soon, I promise.]

XXX

Part of Alastor’s (mild) respect for Carmilla stemmed from the fact that she never rose to bait. It was also the reason he found her boring. “I’m a radio host, not a mercenary,” Alastor told her. “If you want Vox out of the picture, kill him yourself.”

“Oh, believe me, there’s a queue for it. But no one can find him,” Carmilla said. “Turns out he can travel between his televisions through the wiring. We think he’s living in the fucking power grid.”

XXX

The TV Demon’s smile grew sharper. [Provided, that is, certain individuals demonstrate they’ve learned something from this unfortunate business.]

XXX

“What makes you think I can coax him out?” Alastor asked.

Carmilla gave him her best unimpressed look. “You’re friends. I half hoped to find him crashing on your couch.”

A laugh track erupted from Alastor’s microphone, but before he could deny her, Carmilla went on. “You’re the only overlord he hasn’t targeted. Not to mention he’s been hanging on your coattails since he got down here.”

XXX

A pause, while several suspiciously overlord-shaped silhouettes flashed on screen in electric blue. [And to those individuals whose heads are so far up their own asses that they need the lesson spelled out explicitly…]

XXX

Carmilla’s attitude was growing tiresome. Alastor told her so, using his shadows and radio aura to politely remind her whose turf she was on. She took the hint, but before she was quite out the door she paused, and spoke without looking back:

“Vox may be more powerful than we gave him credit for, but he is not infinitely powerful. He has to be exhausting every reserve he has for this, and when he finally burns out…”

XXX

The visual cut to a close up. Vox’s face filled the screen, giving the illusion that he was speaking personally from every television set in the city.

XXX

Carmilla shrugged. “Whoever finds him first will have quite a bit of leverage over Hell’s newest overlord.”

XXX

[It’s too late to get rid of me.]

XXX

Six months after the broadcast, the lights came back on for Pentagram City for good. Coincidentally, it occurred right after the last of the city’s major overlords signed non-aggression contracts with the TV Demon.

The same day, Alastor strolled into Rosie’s garden, dragging a half-dead overlord along behind him with a shadowy tendril of the void.

“Roooooosie!” Alastor sang. “Guess who I brought to tea?”

Chapter Text

In the end, Vox said fuck the anniversary and went ahead with the scheme anyway. As long as he acted casual, it would be fine. Casual would be a little difficult to pull off given how excited he was to win his decades-long bet with Alastor, but Vox was a performer. It would be fine.

“So, remember that bet we made?” Vox said. “About you recommending my show?”

Alastor didn’t answer immediately, still savoring his meal. They were having a late dinner at a quiet, plush lounge in Cannibal Town, waiting for the Extermination clock to tick down to zero. Rather, Alastor was having dinner and Vox was sipping bourbon. Ever since the forced ‘vacation’ he’d spent recovering from his ten-month stint as Pentagram City’s literal ghost-in-the-machine under the terrifying supervision of Alastor’s friend Rosie, Vox had pretty much lost his squeamishness over the whole cannibal thing, but that didn’t mean he wanted to sample the ‘cuisine’ himself.

“That was quite a long time ago,” Alastor said, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “Don’t tell me you’ve been obsessing over it this whole time.”

“Not obsessing,” Vox said. “Just waiting for the perfect moment.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he had to stop himself from cringing. Was that a romantic turn of phrase? Fuck.

To Vox’s relief, Alastor didn’t seem to notice. Even better, he actually agreed to humor Vox’s proposal and allowed himself to be lead from the lounge to a nearby roof-top. [Close your eyes, it’s a surprise, Alastor.]

The surprise turned out to be a riot of television screens arranged as near to edge-to-edge as possible to create the illusion of one giant screen that stretched in a semi-circle across the width of the roof. It had been a bitch to set up, and in the light of day the mess of cables, computer banks, and scaffolding made it look like a junkyard. But right now, in the twilight evening, with the screens glowing softly in stand-by mode… Vox thought it looked magical. Someday he was going to devise a way to pull this off effortlessly, maybe even figure out how to make the viewer feel as if they were inside the scene, but tonight this janky prototype suited Vox’s needs just fine.

Feeling his eagerness and his nerves rising in tandem, Vox blew out a quick settling breath and beckoned for Alastor to stand in the center of the semi-circle.

XXX

“So? What do you think?” Vox said, gesturing at the technological monstrosity surrounding them.

Alastor cast his eyes about the makeshift amphitheatre at the silhouettes of cables and scaffolding lurking behind the glowing screens, and very nearly made a derisive comment about feet of clay. Vox should know better than to ask the Radio Demon his opinion of motion picture technology.

…but the terms of their bet did say Alastor had to give a good faith chance to whatever Vox showed him. It wasn’t good sportsmanship to heckle a performer before the show even began. Crossing his arms, Alastor said, “You certainly went to a lot of trouble.”

Vox appeared satisfied with this response. He was always so easy to please, Alastor mused. Easy to please, easy to be around, as quick to laughter as he was to violence, and always up for a bit of entertainment. Loathe as Alastor was to admit it, Vox was good company.

“Alright, so, to start with,” Vox said. “I’m not even going to bother to show you anything artistic. If you turned your nose up at the greatest radio drama of all time, then cinema doesn’t have a chance.”

“Is that an admission that all those cinematic masterpieces you brag about are so uninteresting they can’t even beat the trash Welles comes up with?” Alastor said, anticipating the tiny spark that always blipped between Vox’s antennae whenever Alastor riled him up.

“War of the Worlds is not trash, you just have no appreciation for—No, no no, you’re not gonna distract me that easy.” Vox crossed his own arms and gave Alastor a stern look. Alastor beamed in response. Rolling his eyes, Vox began counting off on his fingers: “No cinema because you’re a snob. No news because you prefer it stale on printed paper. No serials because that’s what magazines are for. No history, no biographies, no education, and heaven forbid anyone do an interview anywhere but on the radio.”

Each point Vox made caused the screens around them to light up with different examples. Sometimes a single image or video was split across several screens at once, which explained why Vox had gone through such effort to bring the edges of the televisions so close together. Alastor eyed the display, drumming his fingers on his crossed forearms. Now this was an impressive feat, but not for the reason Vox likely hoped. Rather than admiring the technology, Alastor was appreciating the precise command of his abilities Vox must have to orchestrate so many different broadcasts at once while giving his presentation.

Of course, Alastor would never say as much to Vox’s face.

“According to you, all the world’s information and creativity can be conveyed better by existing technology,” Vox continued. The screens began winking out one by one. “Television can show you nothing new, nothing of its own. And that’s where you’re wrong.”

Very few people dared to tell Alastor he was wrong about anything, and precious few of those who survived doing so dared try it again. As always, Vox had made himself the exception. Alastor let his smile grow a little more sincere, and gestured for Vox to go on.

Vox’s expression gained the starry-eyed quality that Alastor associated with his most passionate speeches. “Television doesn’t just show you what is or what has been. It shows you what could be.”

—and the screens behind Vox lit up once more, all of them working together like a massive jigsaw puzzle to produce an image of a building Alastor was recognized. A building on Earth. For just one instant, barely the space of a blink, Alastor’s imperturbable mask slipped.

“Is that the Savoy?” he asked.

Vox’s grin was big enough to eat the world. “The one and only. You can blame Rosie for the idea, by the way. I was researching places you might be missing from Earth and she mentioned that you never got to visit.”

Of course Rosie was involved. Perhaps introducing Vox to Rosie had been a mistake, if they were going to plot against him like this.

Alastor remembered mentioning his (first and only) trip to New York City during one of the rare occasions he and Rosie talked about their lives before Hell. He had visited at the peak of his radio career by invitation of a professional colleague. Despite his bombastic radio persona Alastor was no socialite; he had no desire to run amok in the pleasures of the big city. But one communal activity he had always delighted in was dancing—and it was practically a crime to visit New York without hitting the Harlem dance halls. Alastor passed well enough in life to be invited to even the segregated ballrooms, but the one he had anticipated most eagerly was the racially-blind Savoy. So of course the day he arrived in the city he came down with the wickedest cold of his life, and never managed to make it back to New York for a second chance to dance.

“Do you want to see the inside?” Vox asked, prompting Alastor to realize he had been staring a little too intently.

“Are you really going to show me an over-sized slide-show of a ballroom and claim it as feat of technology?” Alastor snapped.

Unfazed, Vox shook his head. “Not a slide-show. And not over-sized. It is precisely life-sized, thank you.”

Alastor peered at the screens once more. The image of the Savoy ballroom was not an image. It was a moving picture: leaves rustled in an old beech tree, newspapers and other trash blew down the sidewalk, blurry figures passed by on the street or ducked into the building’s entrance.

Unwilling to give ground, Alastor scoffed. “I thought you weren’t going to bother with cinema.”

“This isn’t from a movie,” Vox said. He tapped the side of his own screen. “This bullshit excuse for a brain has its perks. I can recall everything I see like a fucking photograph. Including memories from Earth, as long as I can get a hypnotist to dig them up for me. And guess who visited the Savoy for his thirtieth birthday?”

Vox was radiating smugness at a level heretofore only achieved by cats and moneylenders. Normally Alastor would take steps to cut him down a notch, but at the moment he was distracted by the display behind Vox.

The shot of the Savoy’s exterior had shifted to what must be the building’s foyer. The picture began to slide back and forth, as if the camera were a person looking around. It was, if Vox was to be believed. It was Vox looking around, handing off his coat to the blurry-faced greeter—and with the arrangement of screens surrounding Alastor on three sides, it very nearly felt like Alastor was the one stepping aside to clear the way for a short brunette woman whom Alastor could only guess had been Vox’s date for the evening.

“So?” Vox said. “You wanna see what could have been? I can show you every corner of the place.”

Chapter Text

It takes a little while for Charlie to fully understand the game Alastor is playing with her. They both know he has ulterior motives for sponsoring the hotel. They both know that Charlie considers him one of her rehabilitating sinners. And they both know that each of them has no intention of letting the other reach their end goal (although Charlie has no idea what Alastor’s end goal even is). The two of them may be business partners, but they’re also… something else. Charlie’s not sure what.

Something about the relationship has a competitive edge, of that she’s certain. Alastor, aggressive in his helpfulness, alternates between loudly professed goodwill and blatant insincerity, while Charlie just as aggressively showers him with trust and responsibility. When he makes mocking offers of a shoulder to cry on or a mentor to confide in, she calls his bluffs and pours out enough of her soul to make him squirm at the intimacy and flee with transparently false excuses.

It’s a game, one Charlie suspects might be bringing out a side of herself she’s not quite comfortable with. A side that, ironically, fits in with the sinners around her better than when she’s being herself. Charlie sometimes suspects even that is part of the game to Alastor.

Despite their unspoken battle of wills, Charlie and Alastor work well together. (Running a hotel, even one at near to zero occupancy, is a lot more work than Charlie anticipated. Hell wouldn’t be Hell without needless bureaucracy, after all.) When Alastor’s not in one of his I-Am-The-Radio-Demon-Fear-Me moods, he is pretty fun to hang out with—and whether it’s genuine or just another piece of his strategy, Alastor seems to find Charlie’s company acceptable as well. To Vaggie’s dismay, they end up doing a lot of work over tea in Alastor’s parlor.

Usually Charlie is not allowed to let herself in, but on this particular day Alastor responds to her knock with a call that his hands are full (which is weird, given his habit of using his shadows to grab things) and that the door is unlocked. Charlie’s own hands are full of paperwork, but she manages to elbow the door latch and shimmy inside without dropping any of it.

Alastor’s tea table is set up at the further end of the room, where the parlor drops off abruptly into his foggy pocket-dimension bayou. Currently it is occupied not just by his tea set but also by an assortment of weird baubles, bones, and scraps of cloth. Alastor himself is leaned back in his chair, arms crossed (hands empty, Charlie notes), focused intently on a small doll-like-thing that’s being poked, prodded, and manipulated by at least eight different shadow tendrils. He’s smiling of course, but also managing to give the impression of someone frowning at a troublesome math problem.

“Whatcha doin?” Charlie asks as she gingerly slides her stack of paperwork onto the tiny remaining corner of free table space and sits down. Up close, the doll looks vaguely familiar.

Alastor waves a hand and the shadows disperse, dropping the doll on the table amongst the mess of crafting materials. “Trying, for umpteenth time, to make a working poppet of Niffty.”

“Puppet?” Charlie repeats, tilting her head to look closer at the doll. It does have a passing resemblance to the little cyclops, but mostly because the large singular eyelash across its face looks very realistic. Too realistic. “Is that one of her eyelashes…?”

“Poppet,” Alastor corrects, “And yes, it is. She sheds them every so often. The magic requires a sample of the victim’s flesh, though in truth any part of them works fine.” He puts his chin in his hands and squints critically at the Niffty-doll. “With the way this design is turning out, I may have to upgrade to actual flesh next time.”

Charlie tries not to be alarmed at Alastor’s choice of words, telling herself that he would never harm Niffty. Instead she focuses on how lovely it is to catch Alastor in a sharing mood. He never talks about his magic.

“So what’s a poppet do? Are they hard to make? Why isn’t Niffty’s working?” Charlie restrains herself with great effort to only asking three questions in a single breath. (She and Vaggie are working to get her down to one question per breath, but the progress is slow.)

Alastor abandons his intense contemplation of the Niffty-doll in favor of giving Charlie a falsely conspiratorial grin. “Interested in dark magic are we, princess? Not sure your father would approve.”

“You’re my friend. I’m interested in whatever interests you,” Charlie says, refusing to rise to Alastor’s new favorite bait.

“Well. Poppets, at least of this variety, are fairly mundane. Even some humans can make them. So I suppose there’s no harm in sharing a few tricks of the trade. Provided it allows me to shirk my busy-work quota for the day,” Alastor says, giving a nod to Charlie’s stack of paperwork.

Charlie snorts and waves her assent. Grin much more sincere, Alastor gestures to the Niffty-doll. “This kind of poppet serves as an investment bank of a sort. I sacrifice a small amount of power, the doll uses it to latch onto its living likeness, and it gradually stores magic in response to the strength of the victim’s feelings about me.”—he holds up a hand to silence Charlie—“No need to panic, my dear. The poppet doesn’t harm or drain the life of the victim. The magic is generated through resonance. It does need proximity to function, however, so I only make one if I know I will be spending quite a bit of time around the victim.”

“Do you have one of me?” Charlie asks without thinking about whether she really wants to know the answer.

Alastor winks, snaps his fingers, and a little blonde-haired doll pops out of thin air and drops onto the table in front of Charlie. “Kindly don’t touch it. They fall apart if their likeness comes into contact with them,” he warns.

Charlie peers at the little poppet in fascination. It is her. “Whoa.”

The poppet has a somewhat rough quality despite being made of porcelain. Charlie’s features are painted on in broad strokes rather than with precision, and the joints appear fragile. Its hair, on the other hand, is meticulously styled to match hers, and Charlie has a disturbing suspicion that it is her actual hair. She decides not to contemplate how Alastor came by so much of it.

“Stick around me long enough and it will look just like you,” Alastor comments.

“So… the more magic it picks up, the better the resemblance?” Charlie guesses. At Alastor’s approving nod, she hazards another question she may not be ready for. “How much magic is in it right now?”

Placing a hand on his chest, Alastor says, “While your regard warms my shriveled heart, princess, this poppet is a slow-returning investment. It’ll be a decade before it’s of any use to me.”

Charlie’s heart clenches and she fights the urge to squeal with delight. “A decade! Are you really going to stay with the hotel for that long?”

Charlie can tell Alastor is taken aback by her enthusiasm because he immediately reverts to his persona of overblown sincerity: “Of course, my dear. How could I possibly abandon you to fight your noble cause all alone?”

Charlie counts it as a point for her side of the scoreboard. Moving on, she asks, “How come you can’t make one for Niffty?”

With a brief disapproving glare at the poppet in question, Alastor goes about pouring the two of them tea. “Every time I activate her poppet, it destroys itself,” he says. “After years of experimentation, I can only conclude that either there is nothing in that adorable little head for the magic to latch onto, or whatever does go on in there is so demented not even the void wants anything to do with it.”

Charlie holds back a snort. “Alastor, that’s such a mean thing to say,” she scolds, though the delivery is marred by her struggle not to giggle.

Alastor rolls his eyes and snaps his fingers. The Niffty-poppet glows sickly green for a moment. Then, the head pops off of its own accord, bounces over the tea pot, upsets the sugar dish, falls onto the floor, and rolls around erratically until it collides with a chair leg, at which point it opens its maw and chews with manic fervor on the polished wood. After about twelve seconds, the disembodied head disintegrates into a pile of glittering green ash.

Alastor gives Charlie a look. “The facts stand.”

Chapter Text

Alastor leans back in his chair as he flips the switch to end his broadcast, the last he’ll have time for until after the princess’s showdown with the forces of heaven. His nerves refuse to settle; his blood sings with anticipation for the approaching attack.

He has to admit that there’s a certain thrill to gearing up for a battle with allies at one’s side. Up until now, Alastor has always fought alone, and on his own terms. This comrades-in-arms business is novel.

Alastor’s gaze wanders the walls of his studio, looking for a distraction to soothe his itch for violence—Imagine! Being the demon to kill the First Man! Alastor can hardly wait for the clock to run out—and lingers on the little blonde poppet perched on the shelf above his sound board. Even in its unrefined state it somehow manages to capture the princess’s unwavering exuberance: Charlie Morningstar’s hunger for life in all its richness rivals Alastor’s hunger for flesh. It’s one of the reasons he likes—tolerates her.

(The poppet will be of no benefit to him for this fight, but Alastor is confident he won’t need the power boost that it will one day be capable of giving him.)

Though the princess’s poppet that sits in pride of place on the shelf, the spot used to belong to a far more powerful one, long since destroyed. The memory of its likeness reminds Alastor that it is not entirely true to say he has never fought at anyone’s side before—and that perhaps Rosie is not the only ally he can bring to the princess’s aid. This demon, Alastor wouldn’t mind watching his back on the hotel rooftop when Adam arrives. (Provided the ambitious little bastard swears to restrain himself from edging in on Alastor’s kill.) Having another overlord on the field would reassure Charlie greatly.

Besides, it would good to see Vox in person again.

XXX

Vox was over the moon. Alastor was squinting at the life-sized scene of the Savoy with clear conflict in his expression, and Vox would bet his soul it meant Alastor was impressed but unwilling to admit it. For once in his life Vox had managed to dazzle the Radio Demon. He was going to fucking treasure this moment for the rest of his afterlife.

Now, whether or not Alastor was dazzled (or curious) enough to take Vox up on his offer to tour the place was another question. While he awaited the answer, the sequence of Vox helping his date out of her coat looped (silently, since Vox unfortunately couldn’t record audio) across the screens.

Good old Chelsea. She was a lovely girl, nearly as stunning as her older brother, and a good sport about bearding for him and Vox. Even after the relationship ran its course, Chelsea had agreed to be Vox’s stand-by date in return for a few helpful nudges to her acting career. Vox likely would have ended up marrying her when the time came to transition his TV persona from debonair bachelor to distinguished family man, if he’d survived that long.

“Fine,” Alastor said. “Let’s see this memory of yours.”

Yes! With a bow, Vox backed up away from the screens so he wouldn’t block Alastor’s view, and sent the scene forward. He mainly stayed silent, focused on moving the view to mimic the directions Alastor looked. Cleaning up the memory to eliminate greetings from strangers and his longer conversations with Chelsea had been a pleasant challenge, and Vox was very glad he hadn’t chosen to leave that part to improvisation. Taking care of it beforehand allowed him enough free processing power to remain in the moment, and thus take in Alastor’s reactions.

Unfortunately, Alastor’s fascination seemed to be waning much sooner than anticipated. His gaze no longer darted over every screen; he stopped shifting his body and tilting his head in unconscious response to the scene’s motion. Vox was on the verge of pausing the scene to ask what was wrong when Alastor suddenly spun on his heel to face Vox.

“Vox. While I admit that the production of this little show is somewhat clever, your choice of content is rather moronic,” Alastor said.

“What???”

Alastor motioned at the screens with his microphone. “Nobody goes to the Savoy Ballroom to admire the ambience. They go to dance.”

Oh. That… yeah. Vox had kind of overlooked that part. The Savoy was a dance hall, Rosie said Alastor wanted to dance there. Vox didn’t have the slightest idea how to simulate something like that. He couldn’t even reproduce the music that had been playing. Fuuuck, he was a moron.

“Well?” Alastor was saying. “The show must go on. Surely your next steps are obvious?”

Vox could only blink at Alastor’s expectant look. What was he supposed to do?

With a sigh like a martyr, Alastor tossed his microphone towards the unoccupied side of the rooftop, into the waiting hands of his shadow, who planted it in the ground like a banner. Shadows snaked from its base and twisted into the silhouette of a small band of musicians. Antique swing music sang into the night. Alastor presented his open hand to Vox.

Oh. “You want me to dance with you,” Vox said.

“Unless you don’t know how to,” Alastor responded. “Goodness knows what skills have fallen to the wayside with these new generations.”

The familiar insult shook Vox out of his incredulity. With a scoff he crossed his arms and said, “I don’t know how it went with you radio stars, but to make it in Hollywood you gotta be a triple threat. Can you even keep up with anything more recent than the Charleston?”

Alastor only cackled in response to the challenge. “Ha! Vox my dear, I will still be going strong when your feet give way to exhaustion, no matter what the dance is.”

Vox grinned and took Alastor’s hand. “We’ll see about that.”

XXX

Tuning into a frequency he hasn’t used in years, Alastor reaches out across the city. [Vox my dear, how are you this fine evening?]

After two minutes with no response, Alastor repeats the greeting, with the same result. He finds himself growing somewhat perturbed. Vox always answers Alastor’s hails. Either the sinner is being intentionally rude or he has once again managed to get himself into some kind of trouble. One would think having two junior overlords at his disposal would allow Vox to kick that habit, but maybe Alastor is giving those parasites too much credit.

Well, a little goading will do the trick, then. Alastor lets his voice slip into a patronizing drawl. [Don’t tell me you’re sulking over our little broadcasting spat. You did start it, remember.]

Still no acknowledgment from Vox. With a touch of irritation at having to go this far, Alastor transmits a few bars of My Funny Valentine.

The response is instant and venomous. [Piss off.]

Alastor’s default expression broadens into a more sincere smile. [Is that any way to greet an old friend?]

[I’m in the middle of a broadcast, asshole.]

Goodness, Vox’s vocabulary has certainly taken a turn for the crude since Alastor’s departure. [I seem to recall holding entire conversations while we were both on air. But if your skills have degraded so much in my absence, I won’t keep you long. I merely want to know when to expect you at the hotel for the Extermination.]

XXX

So, like, Vox had touched Alastor before this. They got into physical scraps, and even though they both had mid-range attacks and enough mobility to keep away from each other, sometimes things got up close and personal. But the thing was, 'up close and personal' felt a bit different in the context of dancing than in trying to beat the shit out of someone.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a big deal if Vox weren’t a workaholic with no time for socializing, but as it was Vox couldn’t technically remember the last time he’d had any extended contact with someone who wasn’t trying to hurt him. And this was Alastor.

It was just that, well, Vox hadn't expected it to be an issue. And at first it wasn’t. Taking Alastor’s hand was nothing, falling into a matching swing step, maintaining the open two-handed grip that allowed Alastor to whip Vox into snazzy spins (because of course the man would refuse to follow)—all of that was fine, was fun.

The trouble began when Alastor sensed that Vox really could dance, and stepped up his game. Suddenly Alastor was pulling Vox close into his side to wind up momentum for the elasticity that made swing so exhilarating. It was a stupendous credit to Alastor’s skill that he was able to fit Vox so snugly against him despite Vox’s warped proportions, and it was an even bigger credit to Vox’s self-control that a split-second visual glitch on his screen was the only outward indicator that the body-to-body contact had left him so light-headed it was a miracle he didn’t fall on his dumb fucking face.

What was wrong with him?

The song changed (for the third? fifth? tenth time?) and Vox seized the opportunity for a breather. Before Alastor could pull him in again, he loosened his grip in a silent cue to pause.

Alastor laughed. “Tired already?”

Scrambling for an excuse, Vox said, “No way. I just wanted to point out you’re not exactly proving your point. You’ve moved up to the the fifties, I’ll give you that, but don’t you know anything other than swing?”

With a smirk Alastor gave a signal to his shadow orchestra, and the music changed. The beat was still bouncy, but it had traded the iconic swing back-beat for syncopation. A classic hustle. “I’m a radio host. Musical trends are my business. Just because I prefer the old doesn’t mean I’m unaware of the new.”

“I wouldn’t say the seventies count as new,” Vox countered automatically. It wasn’t in his nature to let Alastor have the final say in anything without a fight.

“Patience, my dear fellow,” Alastor said, motioning Vox closer. “You gave me a tour of the Savoy, allow me to give you a tour of the airwaves.”

Vox rolled his eyes but nevertheless acquiesced. “I guess a history lesson is what I get for hanging out with a fossil.”

Alastor grinned with all of his teeth, and then they were in it again.

Chapter Text

The morning after Charlie’s failed investigation of Vox, an unknown number calls her phone, and the voice on the other end belongs to none other than the overlord himself.

“You want to see me so badly you’re harassing my favorite employees. I’m flattered, princess. Why don’t we have a lunch date.” He hangs up as soon as he finished speaking, and a moment later the same number texts her an address.

“That’s suspicious as fuck,” Vaggie says next to her. “You’re not going alone.”

Charlie bites her lip. If Vaggie comes along, it will leave Alastor the only manager present in the hotel. Which would be fine, if Alastor was able to keep up his I’m-Perfectly-Healthy-Charlie-What-Makes-You-Think-Otherwise facade for longer than ninety minutes before becoming either dangerously irritable or alarmingly unfocused. Whatever he has been doing to pull himself together while he lurks in his tower clearly doesn’t work for more than a few hours at a time. Not to mention—“If you and I both go out after I’ve made such a big deal of not leaving him alone, Alastor might get suspicious,” Charlie says.

Vaggie makes Adorable-Grumpy-Face-No.4, meaning that Charlie is correct but Vaggie doesn’t like it. (Vaggie makes Adorable-Grumpy-Face-No.9 whenever Charlie mentions her catalogue of Vaggie’s adorable grumpy faces.)

“Fine,” Vaggie says. “Take Angel. He’ll know how to keep an eye out for any sneaky Vee bullshit.”

XXX

When Bunny stalked into Vox’s workshop wearing a dress so strategically sheer it could get a rise out of a dead man, grabbed the back of Vox’s swivel chair, dragged him away from his desk, and perched atop it with her legs very much not crossed, Vox knew he was in trouble. Perhaps introducing her to Edna had been a mistake.

“What can I do for you today, Bunny?” he said in as professional a tone as he could manage given the sight lines currently available to him. (Bunny’s favorite past-time seemed to be teasing people she knew would never actually make a pass at her.)

“I want a job,” Bunny said.

Vox blinked. As far as he was aware, Bunny had been a housewife in life (until she killed her husband) and in death (until her new husband had been murdered). “Um, I don’t have a lot of use for a housekeeper. And you said you didn’t want to be on any of my programs…”

He scooted his chair backward a little as Bunny leaned toward him like a cat measuring up a mouse. Introducing her to Edna had definitely been a mistake.

“No, I want to do your taxes.”

“What…?” For a moment Vox was baffled. Then he remembered that her husband had been his soul-bound accountant and connected the dots. “Oh! Did Bruno teach you about finance?”

Bunny laughed. Her laugh was a terrible squeaky giggle, but Vox was nevertheless pleased to hear it more and more often as she got over Bruno’s loss. “Vox, hun, Bruno didn’t know how to use a calculator when I met him. I taught him everything he knew about accounting. But he wanted to be the provider, you know.”

Well, that would explain a lot. Vox had noticed Bruno tended to 'sleep on' any difficult financial issues Vox brought him. “Wait, does that mean all those comments in the margins of his reports were yours?” he asked. (The overwhelming majority of those comments had been insulting critiques of his spending habits, and had ironically increased his respect for Bruno.)

In a refreshing reverse of their usual roles, Bunny was the one to blush this time. “I had no idea he would show those to you!” she said.

Vox rolled his eyes. “Bunny, that man worshiped the ground you walked on. If you had asked him to murder me I’m sure he would have tried without sparing a single thought to the fact his contract would kill him before he could lay a finger on me.”

The assertion caused Bunny’s eyes to become alarmingly misty. Fuck. Vox was not the comforting type. He needed to change topic, fast.

Fortunately for him, Bunny took one look at his expression and snorted. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she said, “You are way too allergic to emotional shit for someone as sweet as you are.”

Vox scoffed. “Sweet? I’m an overlord. Speaking of which—”

He stood and offered Bunny a handshake. The fine lichtenburg lines etched permanently into his skin glowed electric blue, a neon beacon of the power Vox seldom demonstrated. “Same deal as your husband. But for fuck’s sake don’t choose somewhere indecent for the brand.”

With a smile that was half-smirk, half-sad, Bunny took Vox’s hand. “Well if you’re sure you don’t wanna cop a feel, then put it where Bruno’s was.”

The lightning that sealed the deal struck soft and cool.

XXX

Sneaky Vee bullshit turns out to be a decrepit diner about halfway between VoxTek and the hotel. Not the kind of place Charlie imagined an overlord hanging out, but the bartender waves her and Angel into a private back room when she asks about Vox.

Angel, taking body-guard duty very seriously, enters ahead of Charlie, but before she can even cross the threshold after him, he bursts into laughter. Two of his arms reach back and sweep Charlie into the room.

“Charlie, doll, when you said Vox’s secretary was dumber than a box of rocks I thought you’d met a temp or something,” Angel wheezes, still laughing. One hand lands on his hip, and another gestures to a familiar figure lounging on a ratty couch: Bunny.

Charlie’s cheeks flush and her shoulders scrunch up until they meet her ears. “Angel! I didn’t say it like that!”

Squeezing her closer, Angel says, “Seriously, you didn’t really think Bunny’s just eye candy, right? No one puts that much effort into advertising unless the whole point is that the goods aren’t for sale. Especially not when the tits already speak for themselves.”

Bunny pops her gum loudly. “Don’t be too hard on her, Angel. The bimbo look fools everyone. That’s the idea.”

Charlie struggles for an appropriate response while embarrassment and confusion war for control of her face. She eventually manages to get a complete sentence out, wincing the whole time: “I’m sorry, I just—you, you acted so—I mean—why would you want people to think you’re stupid?”

Bunny shrugs. “Vox’s brand paints him like he controls everything personally. As far as the public is concerned, the only kind of assistant he needs is one that works under the desk. He’s lucky I can look the part and run his shit at the same time.”

Charlie’s shoulders fall as realization dawns on her: “Vox sent you instead of coming himself, didn’t he?”

“Nah. He doesn’t even know we’re meeting.”

“What do you mean he doesn’t know?” Charlie says. “He was the one who called me.”

“Actually, that was me,” interjects a new voice.

XXX

Bunny loved Bruno, loved him with her whole heart, but there was no getting around the fact that he was a little bit dumb. Ironic, since of the two of them Bunny was the one whose eternal punishment was to look and sound like an empty-headed sex doll. Part of the reason she loved Bruno was that despite his old-fashioned views on gender, he never minded when she informed him he was being a dumbass. (In life, she had bit her tongue and bit back her ambition out of devotion to her no-good cheating husband, but now that Bunny was dead she was done with that shit.)

“Bunny, my love, my best girl, listen. I get that Vox isn’t very powerful yet, but he’s going places. I just know it.”

“So you sold him your soul!?!”

“I’m telling you, this is gonna be good for us. I can feel it in my pinky toe.”

There was no arguing with the pinky toe. It drove Bunny crazy, but the instincts of Bruno’s pinky toe were always right.

As years passed with no egregious mistreatment, their fortunes rising along with Vox’s increasing influence, Bunny had to admit that Bruno’s pinky toe had been correct yet again, and gradually let go of her reservations. Then one evening an assassin with a Carmine pistol broke down their apartment door and shot Bruno before Bunny had a chance to do so much as scream. The gunsmoke glowed golden: an angelic bullet. She was so shocked, so utterly unable to comprehend the sight of Bruno’s body on the ground that she barely registered the assassin turning the gun on her.

That was when the television exploded. Bunny remembered thinking lightning had struck inside the apartment. A brilliant blue flash blinded her. The iron tang of ozone and blood filled her nose and throat. A scream and the crack-crack-crack of three gunshots left her ears ringing. And when her vision cleared—

Vox, the wannabe overlord that sinners snickered at and mocked even as they surrounded themselves with his technology, stood in Bunny’s living room with the assassin’s gun smoking in his hand. Electricity surged across his skin in glowing fractal patterns, silvery blood dripped from one arm onto the floor, his vicious snarl was split into a thousand slivers by his shattered screen. He looked more terrifying than any exorcist. This, Bunny knew with sudden certainty, was what Bruno had seen in Vox years ago. This was the TV Demon.

She never forgot it.

XXX

Charlie swings her head around looking for the owner of the new voice, sees no one, and then turns back to the couch and sees a lizard-like sinner lounging on the end opposite Bunny, startling her so badly Angel’s grip is the only thing that keeps her from tripping over her own feet.

“Fuck!" Angels swears. "Warn a bitch before ya pop outta nowhere!”

The sinner grins, his scales flickering to imitate the couch’s faded upholstery. (A chameleon, Charlie realizes.) “Where would the fun be in that?”

He bounces to his feet and gives Charlie a sassy bow. “Name’s Borl. Former burger flipper, permanent theater kid, and currently a professional impressionist.”

Bunny snorts. “He’s Vox’s spare voice.”

“Spare voice?” Charlie echoes.

Borl clears his throat dramatically and flashes his scales blue. “Attention sinners, this is your overlord speaking,” he says in an uncanny mimicry of Vox. “Voxtek would like to remind you that the penalty for logging into work accounts on personal devices is being assigned to walk the terrifying landshark I insist on treating like a harmless puppy.”

“You sound just like him!” Charlie squeals, delighted.

“Sure do,” Borl says. “I’ve always been good with voices, but ever since I signed on with Vox his power lets me impersonate just about anybody. Valentino, Carmilla Carmine, Katie Killjoy… Invite me out for coffee and by the end of the date I’ll be able to do you too.”—he gives Charlie a wink—“In more ways than one.”

With a groan and an expertly aimed kick, Bunny sends her shoe flying into the back of Borl’s head. “Down, dog!”

“Ow!”

Bunny leans forward, snags the back of Borl’s shirt and hauls him back onto the couch. “Flirt on your own time. We have a meeting at five and I wanna get this one over with.” Her expression shifts to one of suspicion as she returns her attention to Charlie. “So why are you stalking Vox?”

“I'm not stalking! I just wanted a meeting with him,” Charlie protests.

Bunny pops her gum and says nothing. Charlie squirms.

“Alright, I was maybe stalking a little. But I just wanted to find out what kind of person he is, outside the whole Voxtek-Overlord-Vee stuff.”

“Why?”

“I need to ask him a really big favor.”

Bunny groans and throws herself backward into the couch cushions. The motion flings her floppy ears over the back of the couch and sets a different part of her anatomy jiggling. “This is about the fucking Radio Demon, isn’t it?” she says in a disgusted tone.

Charlie blinks, speechless.

Sensing her shock, Angel asks the obvious question for her. “How’d ya know?”

Borl sighs. “Because it always is.”

Chapter Text

After a while Vox stopped feeling like he was going to pass out every time Alastor’s body brushed against his, but he still felt electrified in a way that had nothing to do with his inorganic components. He was alive, he was drowning, he had been blessedly excised from the rest of the world—no scrambling to keep up with politics, no constantly monitoring his empire for opportunity and catastrophe alike, no worries beyond the fact that Alastor was probably going to win this whole ‘who wears out first’ competition.

Every so often he tried to steal the lead, just to keep Alastor on his toes. The music spanned decades; their steps spanned every genre of dance. The Ink Spots, Nina Simone, Swing, Samba, Cher, Hustle, Muse, the Jackson Five, Bolero, Tango, Madonna, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry… Vox lost track of the number of times the bright interior of the Savoy looped the screens of their little amphitheater. He was drowning, happily.

He was too buzzed to feel disappointed when he finally misstepped out of exhaustion. Alastor had to catch him before he fell over—hands on his waist, electric—“Well, Vox, I must admit you are a competent dancer. Barely.”

Vox laughed. He had seen enough of Alastor’s various smiles to be fairly confident that his current one was genuine. “Told you. Triple-threat.”

“Is that a sample of the newest atrocious jargon?”

The phrase was rather old slang, in point of fact. Slang from Vox’s lifetime—How many years, decades, had gone by since then? This night was stirring up all sorts of nostalgia. By now, Vox had lived in Hell longer than he’d lived on Earth. He had known Alastor for longer than he’d been alive.

Deciding to turn Alastor’s own words back on him, Vox said: “Just because I live in the future doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the past. I’m only a generation younger than you, remember.”

“Sometimes I wish you would remember that,” Alastor remarked, then stiffened. He abruptly let go of Vox, took a step backward, and placed his hands on his hips. “So! Mr. Triple-Threat. You can dance. What are these two other supposed talents of yours?”

Vox knew better than to pursue a statement when Alastor was so loudly glossing over it. So he let it go. “I’ve got all three skills you need to make it in Hollywood: dancing, singing, acting,” he explained.

“You? An actor?” Alastor said.

Vox crossed his arms. “I fooled the entire Pride Ring into thinking I was a loser for decades.”

Alastor cocked his head to the side, considering, then nodded. “I’m still not convinced you did that intentionally, but I’ll grant you the point.”—Vox rolled his eyes—“Now, what of the third? Serenade me, Vox.”

“Are you serious?” Vox said. Singing was his weakest skill, and singing for a radio fanatic was asking to be laughed at.

Alastor’s grin was full of challenge. “As serious as the grave.”

Vox’s pride had been the death of him, and it would probably be responsible for his second death as well. Spreading his arms wide, Vox said, “Fine. What’s your request? I’m an upper baritone.”

Alastor hummed. “Sinatra, then. What songs of his haven’t I played yet…?” After a moment, he snapped his fingers. His microphone flew to his hand, while the shadow orchestra shifted its roster to include more stringed instruments. A light foxtrot began to play.

Holding out his microphone to Vox, Alastor said, “Do you know My Funny Valentine?”

XXX

Alastor refused to turn around when her patronizing tones spoke from behind him.

Alastor, what a lovely surprise.

He refused to turn around because she wasn’t actually present. She loved to show up at random intervals, often at precisely the moments when he was most content—or most exhausted—but she would never do something as respectful as come when Alastor called for her. She wasn’t here.

It’s been so long, I was worried that something terrible happened to you.

No you weren’t. “No need to worry about me, madam. I am fully able to take care of myself.” Alastor said with all the cheer his nerves allowed. He could feel the strings holding his smile in place pull tight.

Yes, that is what you said last time we talked. And yet here you are, looking even more pathetic than you usually do.

Hyper-aware of the sorry condition of his suit and the blood coating his front, Alastor nevertheless stood tall. “Not all of us can look as beautiful as you do.”

She laughed. The noise grated at Alastor’s ears like thorns. Flattery? You must be in quite the bind, my pet.

Not your fucking pet. “Not at all. I’m simply indulging in a whim. I’ve taken an interest in angelic weapons lately. I thought it prudent to have some insurance while I’m experimenting.” He was lying, and they both knew it. But she loved playing with him; if Alastor made himself entertaining enough it was possible she’d indulge him the secret.

And so you want a favor.

He took a deep breath. The scent of blood flooded his nose, and for once he didn’t find the smell appetizing. Right now it was only a reminder that he didn’t have much time. “Yes.”

Interesting.

Ghostly fingertips brushed against Alastor’s ears, and he barely stopped himself from flinching.

Do you recall what I said to you last time we met? When you claimed you were done with me?

“Yes.”

Remind me, then.

At the rate Alastor’s teeth were grinding against each other, by the time this gauntlet ended they would be as flat as they had been when he was living.

Why so reticent, Alastor? I thought you loved the sound of your own voice.

Alastor suppressed his urge to snarl at her. To her, provoking him into a rage would be just as entertaining as humiliating him, but Alastor had to make sure she chose the latter prize if he was going to secure the deal he needed. He had to keep his temper. “You said I will always come back.”

And?

Keep your temper. “That I will never pay off my debt because I will keep asking you for more power.”

And do you understand why that is, pet? Do you understand why I will always own you?

Keep your temper. “Yes.”

She laughed at him again. You say you do, and yet we keep having this conversation. You stayed away so long this time I was almost impressed. But I know you, Alastor. You crave control even more than you crave flesh. You could possess the power of a god and you would still ask me for more, because eternity is filled with things you can’t control and it terrifies you. Isn’t that right?

The blood on his clothes was drying. Alastor was running out of time. He was running out of time.

Swallow your pride. “Yes. That’s right.”

Alastor can feel her satisfied grin on his skin like paint. Disgusting.

Well then, pet, tell me about this insurance you want.

XXX

Vox hesitated. Alastor almost never let someone else hold his microphone. And the song… Fuck, couldn’t he have chosen something a little less romantic? If this turned out to be a joke at his expense, Vox was going to push Alastor off the damn roof.

The orchestra paused, waiting for him. Fully prepared to be played for a fool, Vox took the microphone. When he wasn’t immediately swallowed up by a black hole or some other bullshit, he relaxed a little. Alastor was watching him expectantly.

Okay, so he was really doing this.

Vox took a breath, running through lyrics in his head and trying to wake up parts of his voice he hadn’t used in a literal lifetime. “My funny Valentine, sweet comic Valentine…”

The first phrases came out clear and on-key, thank fuck, but with none of the croon and vibrato that made the song so lovely. Any moment now Alastor would interject, ask Vox if that was the best that he could do…

“You make me smile with my heart.”

Shockingly, no derision came from Alastor’s direction, and when Vox dared to glance at him, was still wearing one of his warmer smiles. Reassured, Vox loosened his overly stiff grip on both Alastor’s microphone and the notes he was singing into it. He was a showman. This was his element.

“Your looks are laughable”—Vox gave Alastor a pointed smirk—“unphotographable”—and Alastor returned it with a bow—“Yet you’re my favorite work of art.”

Vox was no Sinatra, but he was less rusty than he’d feared. The notes began to come easily: smooth, crooning, clear. Vox found himself swaying with the orchestra, and noticed Alastor doing the same.

“Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak,
when you open it to speak?
Are you smart?”

A glimmer of mischief blossomed in Alastor’s eyes. Before Vox could react, he was swept up, microphone and all, into Alastor’s arms, and they were dancing again, albeit at a far slower tempo. Vox’s breath hitched and the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He stumbled, but Alastor pulled him close to compensate for the loss of balance.

“Don’t stop now, my dear,” he prompted.

They were close enough for Vox to feel each word breathe across his screen. Close enough he couldn’t look away from Alastor’s face without bashing him with his own stupid bulky head. The only thing between them was the microphone still clutched in Vox’s claws while Alastor’s arms encircled his shoulders.

The sensation of having Alastor’s full undivided attention was more overwhelming than any amount of touch. Breathless, Vox softly sang the next line.

“But don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for—”

All at once, and for no fucking reason, reality crashed down on Vox like a bucket of ice water. This was Alastor. Alastor didn’t do affection, or intimacy. He didn’t give away sincere smiles for free like this. He didn’t trace the tip of a claw over the plates of Vox’s TV frame so delicately that it made Vox’s whole body shiver.

“What are you doing?” Vox said, planting his feet and giving Alastor a searching look. “You’re not so dense you don’t know what this looks like.”

Alastor stopped his caresses but didn’t let go of Vox. With an over-dramatic sigh, he said, “You’re always so concerned about image, Vox. Putting everything into neat boxes. I spent my whole life worrying about what things looked like—if I was light enough, dark enough, harmless enough.”

His words were chipper, but significant. Alastor rarely referenced anything negative from his time on Earth. It was a tidbit of vulnerability, to be sure, but to Vox it felt performative. Especially paired with his increasingly saccharine smile.

“Put the image aside for one night, my dear,” Alastor continued, “and indulge me a bit of whimsy.”

Leaning away, Vox shook his head. “No. Don’t play with me, Alastor.” Rather than sounding firm, his voice had an infuriating tremble. Fucking great. As if the words themselves weren’t already an embarrassing admission.

“Don’t be silly,” Alastor said. “I only play with my food.”

The flippancy sparked Vox’s irritation. “Fantastic. I’ve finally been promoted from potential meal to—what? Dance partner?” he snapped.

Alastor’s grin dimmed, lost the saccharine quality. He tilted his head to one side and waited until Vox met his eyes to speak. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for a long time now?” he said softly. “Dancing?”

Vox sighed. “Alastor…”

“I can’t promise you the things you want, my dear.”

With an exasperated groan, Vox said, “This may come as a surprise to you, oh great and powerful Radio Demon, but you don’t know everything. What I want is for you to promise me anything at all. Even just one thing, as long as it’s real.”

For a long moment Alastor was silent, gazing at Vox with an unreadable expression. Uncertainty gripped Vox, and he braced himself in case this was the moment Alastor finally admitted he had grown tired of Vox and sent him away. Or worse, the one where Vox would try to walk away and lose all self-respect when he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Stay, little valentine, stay.

Alastor brushed a claw-tip along the side of Vox’s frame again. “I promise, Vox, that you are my very dear friend.”

XXX

[So when can I expect you for the Extermination?] Alastor prompts.

Vox’s response is incredulous. [Are you fucking serious?]

[As serious as the grave.] Alastor hopes he can convince Vox to show up the evening before. No doubt the princess will try to hold some sort of pre-battle festivity, and if she decides to give an inspiring speech Alastor is going to need a fellow cynic to commiserate with. [The time-line may be off and the locale unorthodox, but that’s no reason to break tradition.]

[Trad—motherfu—zhH#$*&^@#Zzz] Vox’s transmission devolves into static.

Odd. Alastor doesn’t recall Vox glitching so obviously in the past unless he was fairly injured. Come to think of it, while driving Vox into a blackout rage several months ago had been entertaining, in hindsight it was rather out of character for Vox to lose his grip on the power grid like that.

[Are you alright my dear?] Alastor cuts in over the static.

[Don#t@&*—c@!#ll—me that!] Vox’s voice settles back to clarity in jerks, as if he has to bite back the interference one mouthful at a time. [I can’t—zhh#*%—believe—fucking—show up pretending nothing ever—!%#&—No.]

The last word is crystal clear, and spoken with jarring calm. Alastor’s ears twitch; he knows that tone. It typically emerges when Vox is preparing to remind someone why he is an overlord. He’s never used it on Alastor before.

Intrigued but unwilling to let the implied threat go unrecognized, Alastor lets the barest hint of the void color his own voice. [No?]

[I know you’re not used to hearing that word, Alastor, so I’ll break it down for you. No, you will not see me on Extermination Day. No, I will not let you drag me into whatever game you’re playing with Lucifer’s spawn. No, I am not going to act as if nothing happened, as if you didn’t cripple me and leave me for dead in a dumpster during an Extermination before fucking off for seven years.]

Initially Alastor is struck with irritation at the reminder of the infuriating circumstances that led to that incident, but it evaporates as soon as the import of Vox’s accusation registers. As angry as Alastor had been at the time, he had nevertheless been careful not to hurt Vox more than was necessary to incapacitate him. Certainly no maiming had occurred.

Alastor only realizes he’s let his consternation echo over the transmission when Vox brutally repels it.

[Lose the crocodile tears, Alastor. I’m only a common hack, remember? A talentless social climber dependent on spectacle to maintain relevancy. A fool you only ever tolerated because it was amusing to witness how pathetic I am. Isn’t that right?]

For the first time in decades, Alastor is speechless. He said those things, yes, and they were regrettable, but he had never expected Vox to hold onto them for this long. Word for word, good lord. Surely Vox knows his own worth better than to believe—?

An unfamiliar feeling worms its way through Alastor’s chest like spreading rot. He had meant to offend Vox, but he hadn’t had a choice in the matter. Of all Alastor’s acquaintances, Vox was the one most likely to come looking for him when he disappeared, and Alastor couldn’t risk that. But he hadn’t intended for Vox to do more than sulk for a few years, at which point the trail would be too cold to follow.

Absurdly, the princess’s endless platitudes about redemption choose this moment to intrude on Alastor’s thoughts. Were she here, Charlie would spout some nonsense about communication and apology. While Alastor cannot fathom doing anything so puerile as apologizing to anyone, let alone Vox who would most likely just laugh at him, he could try to at least explain. But that would necessitate admitting several things he is desperate to keep to himself.

Vox has cut the transmission, Alastor realizes belatedly. Enough needling would bring him back, but… perhaps it is better to let things lie as they are. Alastor has more important things to worry about. Extermination Day is nearly upon them.

From up on the shelf, Charlie’s poppet seems to project disapproval. Alastor ignores it.

Chapter Text

Not much changed, after. They still fought over Pentagram City airwaves, still scrapped in the streets, still teased and antagonized and critiqued each other. Alastor remained patronizing and inflexible; Vox remained petty and obnoxious. They never again approached the sincerity they had shared that night.

Vox found he didn’t mind. Too much sincerity was dangerous in Hell. He and Alastor were sinners, overlords—two powerful proud men whose lives revolved around spectacle and performance. It wasn’t in either of their natures to wear their hearts (shriveled and stunted though they may be) on their sleeves. The only proof it hadn’t all been a dream was that their rare soft moments were now no longer fraught with tension.

Well, that and the box that showed up on Vox’s doorstep a few weeks later. It had holes punched in the top, CAUTION stickers slapped on every side, and growled when Vox approached to retrieve the note attached to the lid.

I’m heartbroken you let the ten-year anniversary of our little excursions pass by without a word to mark the occasion. How you manage to exist in polite society I’ll never understand. ~Alastor

P.S. Do try to name the creature something more original than Vox Jr.

Vox immediately reached across the airwaves. [you self-satisfied motherfucker…]

Alastor didn’t bother to respond privately. Instead his unrepentant cackle echoed live on his normal broadcasting channel and probably gave half of Pentagram City a heart attack.

Vox named the baby landshark Vark specifically to piss Alastor off.

XXX

The hotel is barely rebuilt when another portal to heaven appears. It’s a small, ground-level one, just like the one Charlie and Vaggie used to travel to heaven for their meeting with the seraphim, but under the circumstances it’s no less terrifying than the large ones that spill out exorcists. Charlie knew that they were going to face retaliation from heaven as a result of the battle, but she’d hoped it wouldn’t be so soon.

The portal opens up directly in front of her. A little golden envelope flies out and falls to the ground. The portal remains open. Everybody is silent, anxious.

Charlie bites her lip, heart pounding, and bends to pick up the envelope—but her father beats her to it, sweeping her away from the portal into Vaggie’s arms with a wing as he snatches it up. “Dad—!”

“Don’t worry, Char-Char, I got this,” he says. The words are bright, but he’s not looking at her. His eyes are locked on the envelope. His hands are trembling.

The moment stretches uncomfortably. Just as Charlie is about to insist she be the one to open it, Lucifer flicks it open and retrieves the letter inside. Charlie can tell by the way his eyes move that it’s not a long message, but that he reads it several times. Each time, his expression shifts—from concern to alarm to anger to fear, and finally to resolve.

“What’s in the letter, Dad?” she asks.

“Oh, not much. They’re just, you know, kinda… concerned about the whole, um, everything,” he says. He finally looks up from the letter to give Charlie a reassuring smile, but it looks about as fragile as glass. “But don’t worry, kiddo. I’m just gonna… go up there and uh… have a chat with them. Clear everything right up.”

The nervous silence of the hotel lobby splinters in various noises of shock and disbelief—“You gotta be joking!”—“You’re just gonna walk up to the gates of Heaven? You?”—“Didn’t ya already get kicked out once?”—

“Hush!” Lucifer says, flapping his wings once to underline the command. “It’s fine. They just want to hear our side of the story.”

“Like Hell they do,” Vaggie grumbles.

“I’ve got this,” Lucifer insists, a little bit of brimstone inching into his tone. “You guys just stay here and keep up the good work. I’ll take care of this.”

“Wait, Dad!” Charlie shrugs off Vaggie’s protective grip and approaches her father. “Are you sure you wanna go up there?” she asks softly. She knows how terrified he is of facing the people who’d thrown him away like he was trash, and he’s already done it once for her. This—going to Heaven in person, going home—would be even worse for him. “The letter is addressed to me, isn’t it?”

Lucifer crunches the letter in his fist, where it bursts into flame. “Nope, definitely not. Nuh-uh. It was totally addressed to me.”

“Dad…”

Flicking the ash off his hand, Lucifer squeezes her shoulder. “I’ll be fine, little duck. Trust me.”

Charlie throws her arms around him. “More than anything, Dad.”

XXX

The dilemma in which Alastor finds himself would be hilarious if it were happening to any other demon.

He alone amongst sinners possesses the ability to neutralize the toxicity of an angelic wound, but he requires his microphone to do so. He also possesses the ability to repair his microphone, but he requires a large amount of power to do so. As a result of his humiliating near-death experience, his reserves of power are exhausted and they cannot recover until he heals his wound—which he can’t do until he has enough power to repair his microphone.

He is, in a word, fucked.

The only reason he is able to show his face at the hotel reasonably soon after the battle is that the princess’s poppet survived the toppling of his radio tower. Its stored power is laughably inadequate for the situation he’s in, but it’s enough to make him presentable. The porcelain shatters as he harvests it; the slivers dissolve into green ash and blow away out the window.

The effects of blood loss taper off, and he’s able to summon some eldritch string to stitch himself back together. It doesn’t work nearly as well securing his chest as it does securing his smile.

He makes another poppet as soon as he is able to snag a few strands of the princess’s hair. It’s a stopgap solution at best, but the princess holds him high enough esteem that a week buys him enough dregs of power to keep up appearances while he racks the deepest recesses of his occult knowledge for a more permanent solution.

He could, of course, go to his benefactor. But after last time… Alastor can’t decide whether he might actually prefer to perish over submitting to her tender mercies again.

Another week, another poppet. And another. And another.

Chapter Text

“It’s a pleasure to meet you Mr.—”

“Please, sweetheart, call me V,” he says. “Everyone else in the business does, and I make it a policy never to hold a beautiful girl at arm’s length.”

Whether the girl giggled or blushed or rolled her eyes in response to the line didn’t matter. She was a nobody, just another fresh-faced, starry-eyed social climber. He recognized the look—he’d had those stars in his own eyes once. Right now, he was far more interested in the girl’s escort: Gilbert Johnson, a mediocre stooge the folks at MGM sent over to whine on their behalf whenever Vox Populi announced a particularly thrilling guest.

“V, meet Donna,” Johnson said as he lit himself a cigar. “She’s my wife’s niece. I thought you could give her a tour of the studio after our meeting.”

He restrained himself from rolling his eyes—Johnson’s idea of a bribe was a pair of barely legal tits—and made appropriately charming small talk with her until Johnson suggested she go check out the famous autographs that adorned the walls of Vox Populi’s green rooms ‘while the menfolk talk’. The two of them headed to the producer’s office.

Finally, Johnson got to the point. “I heard you’re putting that Loving fellow on Vox.”

By now everyone in the country knew that Richard and Mildred Loving were going to be on Vox, he had leaked the news to Rolling Stone himself. “Him and his wife, yes.”

“She’s not his wife,” Johnson snapped. “That blasphemous marriage was never valid in the first place.”

With a shrug, he said, “You know I don’t care about the politics of the thing.” He gestured to Johnson’s cigar. “Is that the new Monterrey? Mind if I have a drag?”

Passing the cigar over, Johnson rolled his eyes. “God forbid anyone forget you don’t give a damn about politics, V. But just this once, you’re going to have to compromise. You have to cancel the interview.”

“See, Gil, I don’t. Unlike you and the lovely boys at MGM”—and Time Warner, and all the other cowards—“I do not shit my pants when HUAC comes knocking. You fellows gave me a leg up when I was starting out, so I’m happy to make some concessions for you with the studio’s other programs. But Vox Populi is mine alone, and I will put whoever I damn well please in that interview seat.”

Johnson throws his hands in the air. “Fine! If you can’t resist the scandal, you stubborn bastard, put them on your show. But for God’s sake make sure you spin it correctly.”

He hands the cigar back to Johnson and makes sure to pitch his voice at a tone deliberately chosen to remind god-fearing old windbags like Johnson that despite having been ‘caught’ in a closet with his on-again-off-again paramour Chelsea Weller at the last Academy ceremony, he was still a suspected queer. “Spin? Gil, are you suggesting that I go on my show, a source of reputable journalism, and tell lies?”

A meaningful glance at Johnson’s lips served to remind the man where his cigar had just been—and there was that blotchy disgusted flush he so loved putting on the man’s face. Oh, it was sweet to be untouchable.

Smashing the cigar out on the sideboard, Johnson huffed and blustered on. “I’m not making a damn suggestion. I’m telling you, if you let that race-traitor and his whore wife walk out of your studio as anything but a laughingstock, you are going to be in a world of hurt.”

He smirked. “I thought she wasn’t his wife?”

XXX

[So then he gets really pissed—Ow!] A screech of stereo feedback from Vox sent Alastor’s ears flattening against his skull. [Ow! The fuck are you doing in there!?]

Removing his claws from the gap he’d wedged open between two plates of Vox’s TV frame head, Alastor made a face at the mess of mechanical pieces that seemed to govern Vox’s ability to speak aloud. He sat back and crossed his arms. “I will never again question your intelligence, Vox. Given the utter lack of logic in this monstrous contraption of a skull, it’s hardly your fault you’re a half wit.”

[Har-Har.] Vox shivered. [This sucks. Can’t you just snap your fingers and voodoo this shit fixed?]

Alastor hummed. If Vox would rather put himself at the mercy of Alastor’s void magic, then the sensation of having someone’s fingers inside his head must be truly unsettling. “Not without an understanding of what I’m doing in the first place. Have patience. I’m sure I will figure it out eventually.”

Vox squirmed as Alastor returned to the task. [If you fuck something up in there, I swear…]

“I will if you don’t get on with your half of the deal. And skip to a good part. This Johnson fellow is a bore.”

XXX

“Mr. Loving, what a pleasure to meet you at last. Welcome to my humble studio,” he said shaking Loving’s hand before turning to his wife. “And you as well Miss—”

“It’s Mrs. Loving,” she corrected.

“My apologies. The paperwork has your maiden name,” he says. Calling it her maiden name was half a conciliatory gesture, and half a reminder that outside of the District of Columbia she had no power to enforce her preference for her married one.

“Does your script?” she asked coolly.

XXX

“I like her.”

[Why?]

“Because she took one look at you and knew you for a snake-oil salesman.”

XXX

He gestured backwards to the lobby. “If you don’t want to be on my show, you two are welcome to leave.”

Richard Loving took his wife’s hand and shifted to shield her behind one shoulder. “We’re very grateful you agreed to host us. We’re just a little… worried about your motivations.”

“Oh, is that all?” With a laugh, he motioned to two of them towards his green room. “My motivation is, as always, to put on a good show. This little pre-interview will help me determine what kind of show it will be. Please, make yourselves comfortable.”

Mr. Loving took a seat on the offered sofa. His wife did not sit. “We didn’t come here to be made a spectacle,” she said.

“You signed up to be a spectacle the moment you said I do, Mrs. Loving.” He debated offering them a drink, and decided to wait until there was a lower risk of Mrs. Loving splashing it in his face. “The reason you’ve come to Vox Populi, to me, is that I am the miracle worker of public opinion, and thus your only chance at controlling what kind of spectacle you make.”

Tugging his wife’s hand gently until she sat down next to him, Mr. Loving gave her a tender look that persuaded her to swallow whatever retort she had been about to make.

“First question: Do you actually love each other, or are you just freedom fighters?”

XXX

[Turns out the two of them really were crazy about each other. So adorable it was sickening, but it meant I didn’t have to coach them much—Fuck, would it kill you to be careful? That’s delicate shit you’re messing with.]

“It would be easier to be careful if you would stop squirming so much.”

[You’d squirm too if some asshole had his hands—Ow!]

“Quit complaining and tell the story.”

XXX

“—could sing my wife’s praises for a thousand years, but I thought… I mean, aren’t you going to ask us about the lawsuit? The jail time? The people helping us?”

With a snort, he said, “Richard, the last thing I’m going to do is let you go out there and talk politics. A black woman and a lunatic who bought the cow instead of taking the milk for free? No one wants to hear your opinions.”

“I thought your motto was that everyone deserves a voice,” Mrs. Loving remarked dryly.

XXX

“That is the corniest motto I have ever had the misfortune of hearing.”

[Hey, don’t knock the power of a cheesy slogan. The whole free-speech-free-press jazz saved my ass more than once back in the day.]

XXX

“Listen, you two. If you want your case to make it to the Supreme Court, you need public support, and you’re not gonna win that debating miscegenation. Trust me, what matters for this interview is that every married couple who tunes in to Vox Populi tomorrow looks at you and sees themselves.”

Mrs. Loving raised an eyebrow. “No white couple is going to look at me and see themselves.”

He shrugged. “Probably not. But if they do, it will be because I treated the interview as a lifestyle piece instead of a political one.”

XXX

Alastor squinted at a collection of tiny interlocked gears that appeared to turn just fine despite the fact that their alignment defied the laws of engineering. “I never imagined you a civil rights activist, Vox.”

[Oh, please. I was in it for the ratings. Told them as much too, when they asked. Are you almost done yet?]

Alastor suppressed a growl. He had designed and built his own damn broadcasting equipment, and he refused to be defeated by what amounted to a possessed television set. There had to be some rhyme or reason to this nonsense.

“Depends. Are you almost to the part where someone finally kills you for being annoying?”

[Of course that’s the part you’re looking forward to.]

Chapter Text

“Look, I know Alastor and Vox are, like, super big rivals, but—”

Borl interrupts Charlie with a snort. “Rivals? Have you been living under a rock?”

XXX

Cluing Charlie into the purpose of his smile had, in hindsight, been a mistake. Alastor hadn’t anticipated her taking the lesson to heart so quickly. (Foolish of him to underestimate her, especially given all the bragging he’s done about her to Rosie.) Of course, Alastor hadn’t anticipated being injured to the point that he struggled to hide it.

The situation is intolerable. He refuses to give in to his vulnerability, even as his condition grows more and more dire. He’s exhausted all of the time, and his temper frays more every hour he’s forced to interact with people. Maintaining his responsibilities to the hotel has become such a monumental chore that he’s resorted to letting his shadow puppet him through everything that doesn’t require his full attention. Everyone in the hotel has noticed his condition by now, and Charlie’s smothering concern is driving him insane.

He’s doing the rounds, seething at the way Vagatha discretely watches him—oh, how he craves the halcyon days when Vagatha regarded him with suspicion rather than concern—when a knock at the front doors breaks through his misery. His shadows allow him to beat Vagatha to the door, though the effort costs him. Giving her a pointed look, Alastor takes deep breath to clear his head, straighten his spine, and touch up his smile before opening the door.

“Welcome to the—Edna?” Alastor blinks at the diminutive woman on the stoop, bemused. “Whatever brings you here, darling?”

“Yes, yes, good afternoon,” Edna replies. She gestures behind her to a delivery truck idling on the flagstones behind her. “I have a schedule to keep. I don’t do deliveries for just anyone, you know.”

The driver hops out of the truck, opens the back, and starts hauling boxes past Alastor into the lobby without so much as a by-your-leave. Normally Alastor would take offense, but Edna approaches life with a brutal efficiency that Alastor respects. (Besides, when Vox recommended this tailor to him decades ago he’d promised not to kill her.)

“Did you change your mind about making me a new coat?” Alastor asks. When the martyred Sir Pentious damaged his coat months ago, Alastor had gone directly to Edna’s shop, but for some inexplicable reason she had refused him her business, forcing him to resort to an inferior tailor. Glancing over his shoulder at the growing mountain of boxes in the lobby, he says, “I only needed the one…”

“Darling, this is not for you,” Edna said, striding past him into the lobby, casting a critical eye over the hotel and its occupants. “I’m filling an order for the princess—oh, Saint Lauren help me! What is this!?”

She spins around to face Alastor, plants her hands on her hips, and gives him a look of scandalized disbelief. “You don’t even have UNIFORMS!?!”

XXX

“Hold on, wait, are you seriously—are you saying that they—” Charlie loses control of her excitement as Borl’s explanation of Vox’s history with Alastor fills her with hope, and her voice swoops up in pitch: “Are you telling me that Vox and Alastor are friends? This is great!”

“No, not great,” Bunny growls, still glaring at the ceiling. Angel, who plopped down on the couch between Borl and Bunny a couple minutes ago, is currently rubbing one of her fluffy ears over his cheek. (Charlie kinda wants to do the same. They look very soft.)

“Your Radio Demon is a shit friend and always has been,” Bunny continues, ignoring Angel’s antics. “I wish I could say the best thing he ever did for Vox was leave him, but he couldn’t even do that without fucking Vox over one last time.”

Charlie tears her eyes (and imagination) away from Bunny’s ears. “What? Alastor is a good friend,” she protests, even as an unhelpful part of her brain reminds her that Alastor has never once actually referred to her as one. “There must have been some misunderstanding.”

“Of course he’s a great friend to the princess of hell,” Bunny says.

With a warning look at Bunny, Borl cuts in. “We’re not suggesting Alastor is using you,” he says. “But from where we’re standing… Well, let’s just say if I had friend half as loyal as Vox, it would take a pretty big misunderstanding to make me—#^xhxz*$&z%xxz…”

Borl’s voice is blotted out by a garble of static. With a groan he sinks backwards into the couch and covers his eyes with both hands. “Fuuuck…”

Charlie’s eyebrows shoot up in concern. “What’s wrong? What happened? Are you okay?”

Bunny reaches an arm behind Angel and pats Borl’s shoulder. “He’ll be fine. Bumping into taboos like that just slaps him with vertigo for a few minutes.”

Charlie frowns. She hasn’t ever dealt much in deals and contracts, but her mother made sure she was familiar with the more common clauses and terms. A taboo clause punishes a sinner, often viciously, for trying to communicate anything to do with the secret listed in their contract.

“Vox has him under a taboo? Multiple taboos? Does he do that with all his contracts?” she asks. Even if Borl’s vertigo is pretty merciful in terms of punishment, making a sinner live under multiple taboos suggests a version of Vox that’s far more in line with his public reputation for ruthlessness than the softer version Charlie has been mentally building based on the protectiveness of his veteran soul contracts.

“Nah. We’ve all got confidentiality clauses, but Borl is special security risk,” Bunny says. “His job is impersonating Vox; he could do a fuck ton of damage saying the wrong thing in Vox’s voice, even accidentally.”

Charlie bites her lip and looks to Borl. He’s still got his eyes covered, but he seems to detect her gaze. “Chameleons are close enough to frogs that I’m sure a kiss from a princess would make me feel right as rain,” he drawls.

Charlie decides he’s probably fine.

Turning to Bunny, she says, “So, do you know what Borl was talking about?”

“I do, but I’m sure as fuck not going to tell you two about it so you can turn around and use it as leverage against Vox.”

Angel stops playing with Bunny’s ears and crosses one set of arms. “Careful, Hunny Bunny. Your Stockholm Syndrome is showing.”

Bunny gives Angel a sympathetic look. “He’s not like Valentino.”

The mention of Angel’s employer chills the room.

“Look, babe, it’s cool getting to see behind the sex doll act,” Angel responds acidly, “but if you really believe Vox is a decent guy then you’re in fucking denial. Vox produces all of Val’s porn. No one who green-lights the shit that goes on in that studio is anything but an asshole who doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but themself.”

Abandoning the couch, Angel heads for the door. Charlie snags him by one arm. “Wait, Angel!”

With an apologetic glance at Charlie, Angel says: “Sorry, toots, but I did warn you this wasn’t going to work.”

XXX

“How in the world did the princess come to place an order with you?” Alastor asks when he can finally get a word in over Edna’s professional outrage.

Edna waves her tape measure dismissively. “Oh, she came in looking for Vox, and I took pity on her.”

Alastor freezes. “What.”

XXX

“Stop! I’ll prove it!” Bunny calls out.

Charlie and Angel turn back to her. Keeping Alastor’s lesson about masks in mind, Charlie searches Bunny’s expression. Behind the belligerence, there are small signs of the stress and exhaustion Charlie would expect of someone who helps run a company as massive as VoxTek. But there’s also deeper distress. This means a lot to her. Vox means a lot to her. The unshakable core of faith that led Charlie to start her hotel in the first place tells her that there has to be something in the overlord that deserves Bunny’s loyalty.

Angel makes a go on then motion with one set of arms.

Bunny sighs. “Look, I know Vox is… not at his best right now. The last nine years have been shit for him.”

“For us,” Borl adds.

“For us,” Bunny amends. “As much as I hate to admit it, things were better before Alastor left. So whatever favor you’re asking on the bastard’s behalf, if you promise to use it to fix things between them, I’ll get you the meeting you wanted.”

Heart soaring, Charlie squeals her assent. “Of course I will! Helping two old friends make up? Especially when one of them is my friend? You don’t even have to ask! Oh, and I’m sure me and Vox will be great friends too once we get to know—”

Hopeful visions for a future where Alastor is well and the hotel has a new family member trigger Charlie’s rambling tendency, and she forgets to breathe until Angel places one hand gently over her mouth to shut her up.

“Chill with the sunshine and rainbows before you send these two cynics into shock,” he tells her, gesturing at Bunny and Borl’s dazed expressions.

Charlie blushes. “Sorry…”

Bunny gives her head a little shake, as if to clear it. “Alright,” she says. “Are you two ready to meet the TV Demon?”

Charlie blinks. “Wait, now? Right now?”

Bunny shrugs. “Vox has been sulking for weeks now. This is as good an excuse as any to drag his ass out of that depressing control center.”

For some reason, Bunny’s words have Borl bolting upright. “Oh hell no,” he says to her. “You said last time was the last time.”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Bunny says, sliding one hand down into her bra and pulling out a knife.

Angel wolf whistles. Charlie’s eyebrows rise right up to her hairline. How the fuck—Where the fuck did that fit?!?

“No way!” Borl says, leaning away from Bunny. “Why do I always have to be the one who gets stabbed?”

“Come on,” Bunny wheedles. “I’ll let you cop a feel, okay?”

Borl’s expression turns considering. “North or south?” he asks.

“North, you perv.”

Borl huffs. “Fine! But this is the last time.”

“Uh-huh,” Bunny says, and stabs Borl in the thigh before Charlie has even fully processed their bargain. Borl squeaks in pain, but appears otherwise unbothered.

“Oh no,” he says, deadpan. “I’ve been stabbed. I might be dying. If only there was someone around to rescue me.”

The TV logo on Borl’s throat pulses electric blue. Bunny pretends to check an imaginary watch on her wrist and counts down the seconds: “Five. Four. Three—”

The flatscreen mounted on the wall opposite the couch snaps on. Whatever channel it was set to is immediately obscured by a swelling mass of blue pixels.

“Two.”

The air becomes heavy with static. For a moment, Charlie thinks Alastor has somehow followed her and Angel here, but then the distortion skews into the visual realm as well, and she realizes that this static must belong to Vox.

“One.”

The room flashes blue.

Chapter Text

Vox is the one to suggest to Val and Velvette that the three of them watch the Exterminators obliterate the princess’s hotel like it’s some sort of fucked up sports game. He knows the only way he’s going to be able to resist rushing over to the hotel like a moron to drag Alastor’s stupid smug smiling ass out of trouble is if he’s with company.

What he wants to to do is lock himself in his control room and drown himself a project—reorganizing the Voxtek permissions library, or something else suitably futile and engrossing—but there is nothing in Heaven or Hell capable of distracting Vox from the infuriating bastard who has planted himself directly in the center of a fucking bullseye for the sake of whatever damn con he’s pulling on the princess.

So here he is, safe in the luxurious Vee Extermination bunker, watching the clock count down. He’s been generating scripted reactions of increasingly dubious quality since noon. He’ll shove them all into an auto-pilot algorithm and hit play as soon as the Exterminators show up so he can keep face with the others while internally freaking out.

Velvette will know it’s bullshit. She’s sharp, and has a near magical knack for spotting illusions of all kinds. Vox suspects it has something to do with her overlord domain: on social media, there are a million lies and yet no secrets. (The only reason Vox hasn’t coached her in it is because he doesn’t want her getting good enough to see behind his masks rather than just recognize them.) Velvette will know, but she won’t comment.

Val, of course, will think he’s a lunatic and pathetic to boot, but that’s just a regular Tuesday night for them. And it’s not as if the pathetic part isn’t true.

XXX

Charlie’s pre-battle speech is as sickeningly heartwarming as Alastor expected, but he can’t quite bring himself to be disgusted. He even finds himself enjoying the subsequent we’re-all-going-to-die celebration, albeit from afar. He sips bourbon and watches from above as the people he’s spent the last six months toying with give themselves permission to live. There’s a feeling in the air, something pure and uncomplicated…

He needs to watch himself. This sentimental streak will get him in trouble.

Despite his self-recrimination, Alastor finds himself lingering in the lobby once the party has wound down and the inhabitants dispersed. Without really thinking about it, he strums the proper frequency to awaken the lobby’s speakers and sets them playing songs more pleasing to his tastes than the party music. Something is nagging him.

A favored tune plays and he absently commands it to loop.

“Oh, Alastor, it’s you.” Charlie says from top of the lobby’s sweeping stairway. She’s in her pajamas. “I wondered who turned the music back on.” She laughs sweetly. “I should’ve known, huh?”

For some reason, Alastor can’t find the will to put on his showman’s mask. He settles for an air of unconcern. “Sorry to disturb you, dear princess. I was just ruminating on our battle strategy.”

Charlie’s smile twists briefly grim. “It’s fine. You’re not loud enough to wake anyone. I just can’t sleep.”

Alastor nods. She doesn’t need to elaborate. A comfortable silence descends on them, Charlie watching him from the stairway and Alastor looking up at her from the lobby.

“Is this your favorite song?” she asks. “The singer sounds kinda familiar…”

Alastor blinks, and turns his attention to the song he’s been looping for several minutes. To his consternation, it’s My Funny Valentine—a very specific version of My Funny Valentine, recorded on Alastor’s microphone decades ago without the singer’s knowledge.

With a panicked snap Alastor silences the music. Its absence leaves the lobby feeling empty. His heart pounds with such force it’s a wonder Charlie doesn’t hear it.

“You should get some rest, my dear,” he says.

XXX

[So it turns out that darling Donna wasn’t anybody’s niece at all. She was someone’s attack dog.]

“Who could’ve guessed,” Alastor said dryly. The woman had been suspicious from the start. How people let themselves be distracted by a pretty face, he would never understand.

Vox waved a hand dismissively. [Yeah, yeah, I know. The flesh is weak, and all that. Anyway, in hindsight I’m kinda flattered: they say the highest honor in journalism is to be assassinated by the CIA.]

Alastor rolled his eyes. Only Vox could take his own death and twist it into a building block for his ego. And he spoke of it so unflinchingly… Alastor avoided reminders of his own death like a rabid animal avoided water. Taking a short huff to clear his head of the memory, Alastor said the first thing that came to mind—“If she killed you in bed I’ll opt out of the rest of the story.”

This sent Vox into a fit of static that Alastor initially found alarming but then realized was just laughter.

[I didn’t take you for a prude, Alastor.]

Alastor’s microphone released a bit of static as his hackles rose. He already regretted saying anything. This type of conversation always turned sour for him.

“Not a prude, just not interested,” he said, tone a little stiff.

“In porn? Or in sex?”

“Either. Both.” An abstract note of curiosity from Vox echoed along the radio channel. Against his better judgment, Alastor added, “To tell the truth I can’t fathom why anyone would be interested.”

Vox’s expression turned considering. [Weird. Is that a thing for people, Or is it just you?]

Alastor didn’t know the answer. He’d never been asked such a question before. He'd never had anyone take his ...issue... at face value. But he wasn’t going to admit a gap in his knowledge to Vox. “I’ve never cared to investigate,” he said airily.

[Ah, well. The good ones are always unavailable.]

XXX

One of the games they often played on Extermination Days was to see which of them could get closer to an exorcist before it noticed them. Both Vox and Alastor were uniquely mobile compared to other sinners, able to zip into a power-line or whisk away into a shadow in an instant, so avoiding retaliation from the startled exorcists was simple.

Most times they were able to get pretty damn close, and the angels’ reactions to seeing the two of them pop out of seemingly nowhere were fucking hilarious.

This year, Alastor suggested upping the ante.

[Now remember, a whole unbroken feather, or no points.]

[Yeah, yeah. Sneak up, get a feather, don’t die. Rinse and repeat. Meet back here in an hour. You’re insane, by the way.]

[Why thank you, my dear. Are you ready to be thoroughly beaten?]

[In your dreams.]

And that’s how the end began.

Chapter Text

A rift opens (captured in glorious crisp HD courtesy of Vox’s drones) in the sky above Princess Morningstar’s shitty hotel. For a moment, Vox is mesmerized by the chilling sight of the horde of exorcists streaming from the portal. He hasn’t witnessed an Extermination since his days of angel-baiting with the Radio Demon. (These days he uses his overlord privilege to stay safely locked away, pretending his eye doesn’t ache.)

And there, in camera drone 14a, is the bastard himself, strutting on the hotel roof with the eagerness of a child waiting in line for an amusement park ride. Part of Vox wishes he was there with Alastor, that he’d gone along with his old friend’s desire to pretend nothing ever happened, that they were back in the good old days—but a larger part of him feels a grim premonition that this newest round of angel-baiting is going to go as badly as the one that sent their fifty-year relationship up in smoke.

Vox drums his fists on his thighs in what he hopes comes off as anticipation rather than dread for the coming bloodbath. Gotta keep up appearances.

XXX

The day of the Loving interview arrived.

Despite the image he projected of saying whatever the fuck he wanted without regard to consequence, he did have a legal team go over the scripts for his more controversial pieces. The one on his prompter now was, he knew, edited for perfect neutrality. According to his PR folks, it represented the absolute limit of positive spin he could give the Lovings before the studio suffered consequences.

It was also boring.

This could go really badly for him, even if he stuck to the script. He didn’t give a fuck about Johnson’s warning, but he did have to keep an eye on the financial angle. While he produced Vox Populi himself, his studio’s other programs involved outside producers who might think twice about renewing contracts after a stunt like this.

His gaze drifted offstage to the wings, where the Lovings were being prepped by one of the stage managers. One of the stipulations of the edited script was that he needed to avoid giving Mildred her husband’s last name, which was missing the point of having her on at all. He wanted shock-value, he wanted scandal, he needed the thrill of knowing people would change their minds about their most precious beliefs because he told them to.

…and stupid as it was, he couldn’t stop thinking about what Mildred Loving had asked him at the end of their pre-interview: Have you really never done something just because it was the right thing to do?

Maybe once or twice by accident, he’d told her, wearing his charming camera-ready smirk.

The studio lights were on. The cameras were rolling. The prompter flashed. Live in three… two…

He greeted his worshippers beyond the cameras like the benevolent idol he’d manufactured himself to be: “Welcome back to Vox Populi everyone! I can’t tell you how lovely it is to have your eyes on me once again. For tonight’s show we’re getting right to the main event, so please join me in welcoming our very special guests—”

He glanced off-stage at the Lovings, waiting nervously for their entrance, and locked eyes with Mildred.

“—the nation’s most controversial couple: Mr. and Mrs. Loving.”

XXX

When Alastor realized he hadn’t paid a lick of attention to the puzzle that was Vox’s malfunctioning voice box for almost ten minutes, he decided he was a little too invested in Vox’s death-story. Rather than entertain the idea that Vox might have some actual story-telling talent underneath all that blustering ambition, he blamed his exasperation with the impossible repair job he’d unwittingly agreed to, and grasped for the first opportunity to break Vox’s rhythm.

“If you’re telling me you suddenly developed a conscience and died a martyr for equal rights,” Alastor drawled, “may I just point out that your presence here indicates it was far too little too late.”

[I already said I didn’t care. I just wanted the scandal.]

Alastor scoffed. “Putting a black woman on a national broadcast, even to ridicule her, would have been scandal enough and you know it. You knew it then.”

Vox let out a particularly frustrated blat of static. Alastor smirked and continued, pitching his voice upwards into the boisterous register he used on his radio show. “What do you know, folks? It turns out that up-and-coming sinner Vox is—wait for it—a good guy! What an embarrassing skeleton for a wannabe overlord to have in his closet. Why, if it were me, I think I’d just—”

[DoNT*&@^yOu$%#*DarrrE#$&!] Vox’s static ramped up into unconstrained screeching that had Alastor shaking with laughter, and he nearly missed the sequence of sparks that danced over several cables near the base of Vox’s cracked-open head.

[I swear to fuck Alastor if you go around telling people—]

“Hush! I think I found something,” Alastor interrupted. Something about the layout of those cables was sparking an old rusty memory of a manual he’d read at some point. Not a television manual, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “You might be fixable after all.”

XXX

At the forty-minute mark of their feather-stealing challenge, Alastor had collected seven beautiful flight feathers from seven exorcists and was feeling very pleased with himself. (He had in fact collected eight feathers, but the rules of the game stated that only one feather per angel counted for points.) As he cast his eyes about for his next victim, he hailed Vox on their private channel.

[How goes the hunt, my dear? Are you ready to throw in the towel?]

Vox’s transmission was slightly garbled, a sign that he was distracted. [Hold on, I’m—fuck!—Shitshitshit—HA! Fuck yeah, number 14!]

Alastor’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

Vox’s voice sounded clear and exuberant over their channel: [So how many are you at, old man?]

Alastor’s shadow pantomimed a belly-deep laugh at his expense and Alastor snapped his fingers to banish it temporarily. Sidestepping the question with a bit of praise he knew would distract Vox from his deflection, Alastor said, [Not a bad showing, Vox. What’s your strategy?]

[Come over to my district and take a look.]

Every time Alastor visited Vox’s territory there were more cameras. With so many escape routes, he was untouchable there. [Giving yourself the home court advantage, I see.]

The impression of a scoff echoed over the airwaves. [As if you aren’t in the Hidden District taking advantage of the gas lamps.]

Alastor absolutely was but he didn’t feel the need to admit it, instead shadow-stepping his way toward the source of Vox’s signal. He arrived on a rooftop overlooking a deserted plaza composed of a dingy pawnshop and two competing electronic repair shops (both probably franchised by Vox, who was becoming quite the ruthless businessman lately), just in time to catch Vox slinking up on another exorcist. Upon receiving a ping of acknowledgment from Vox, he sat down with his legs hanging over the edge of the roof to watch the show.

The angel was clearly aware that it was being stalked, whirling around and jumping at every noise, trying vainly to preserve its intimidating countenance in spite of its confusion. Vox was dancing circles around the poor thing, zip-zapping in and out of its peripherals with audible snickers. The angel slashed out with its spear again and again to no avail, and its staggering feet started to betray growing dizziness.

Alastor was already having a hard time controlling his own snickering, but then Vox managed to shock it, and the classic fluffy exorcist gag set him cackling. He had to use a shadow tendril to stop himself falling off the roof as he doubled over in mirth, and almost missed the way Vox darted toward the angel quick as lightning and plucked feather while it was still bewildered.

Then Vox was at his side, rolling his eyes at the display. “Laugh any louder and its whole squad will be after us, you ass,” he said without any heat. “Come on, let’s scram.”

Vox gripped Alastor’s arm without permission and hauled him to his feet, but Alastor was in a good enough mood to let him get away with it. (While Alastor had no qualms about manhandling others himself, he rarely allowed other people to initiate touch with him. In the past few years, Vox had—as was his wont—made himself the exception.) Slightly breathless, he gave Vox a rare look of approval. “The static loosens the feathers, doesn’t it?”

Vox smirked. “Like a fucking charm. Now come on before you get us stabbed.”

XXX

“I’m telling you Al,” Mim said, “he’s the one.”

Alastor was too much of a gentleman to roll his eyes, so instead he flagged down a waiter for another Ramos Gin Fizz. (He was ignored, and Mim had to use her manicured white hand to summon service.)

Every time he went out dancing with Mim, she had found a new “the one, Al, I swear”. Mim was an unrepentant man-eater. Not quite as literally as Alastor was, of course, though her paramours did have a mysterious tendency to disappear from the face of the Earth once she was bored of them. Perhaps that was why they understood each other so well, even if neither of them openly mentioned the other’s habits. (Alastor occasionally wondered if the two of them combined might qualify as one of the top five causes of death in the French Quarter.)

“If he lasts more than two months, maybe I could be convinced to meet him,” Alastor responded.

Mim pouted and fluttered her eyelashes at him. She was a handsome woman, enough to make any other man weak in the knees, but Alastor was (for better or worse) immune to feminine wiles. Unlike other women, Mim found this amusing rather than irritating. Another reason they got on so well.

When Alastor remained stone-faced before her pouted lips, her expression melted into a honeyed smirk. “When he lasts two months, I expect you to cook up one of your marvelous dinners for us while you dine on crow.”

“Deal,” Alastor said.

Chapter Text

Exorcists swarm the hotel like safari ants on a crusade. Vox is aware of himself spouting some fucking nonsense that has Velvette quirking a knowing eyebrow at him, his heart is stuttering too much for him to care. The Princess and her people are fucked, including—

A dome of swirling, black-green energy snaps into place around the hotel, killing everything it intersects with (including several of Vox’s drones). The swarm loses a significant chunk of its advancing force as sheer momentum propels exorcists into the barrier. Vox lets out a breath of relief. Alastor has a plan. Of course Alastor has a plan.

XXX

“V darling, why don’t we stay in tonight?” Donna coaxed.

Never above taking bribes, especially if he didn’t intend to fulfill his side of the bargain, he had of course pursued a fling with Donna. Lately, however, his interest in her had been waning. Her company was not as vivid as Chelsea’s, and he was swamped with work right now doing damage control at the studio. (The Loving interview had been explosive, and while he didn’t regret the decision, the fallout had been eating up his free time.)

“I’m busy tonight,” he told her without looking up from the correspondence he was sorting through. “Too much going on at work.”

Donna draped her arms around his shoulders and batted her eyelashes. “That’s exactly why you should take a break. You’ll pass out at your desk at this rate.” At his noncommittal noise, she pressed on: “What if I just keep you company while you work at home?”

One of her hands started kneading at the pressure point in his neck, provoking a happy sigh. Fuck, he was tired. “Alright, doll. See you at six? Go ahead and let yourself in if my meeting runs late.”

XXX

“The One” did in fact last longer than his predecessors, and Alastor started to entertain an idle fantasy of being able to converse with Mim for longer than twenty minutes without the tiresome subject of true love coming up. Unfortunately, Mim kept canceling their dance outings in favor of spending time with her man. Alastor saw less and less of her as the streak grew longer and longer. (He was not jealous, because jealousy would suggest he cared enough about Mim to miss her, and he didn’t.)

Then one day she showed up unannounced at his workplace and invited him for dinner without so much as an apology for her last-minute rainchecks.

“It’s not two months until next week,” he told her, “but I’d love to see you at the dance hall tonight, my dear.”

Her expression was distracted as she agreed to meet him. In hindsight, Alastor would realize her smile was strained, her cheerful manner forced.

XXX

Of course, just because Vox had given Alastor a good show didn’t mean Alastor was going to allow him to win their game by twice Alastor’s own score. An adjustment to the rules was in order.

Vox was justifiably suspicious when Alastor proposed they have one more round of hunting each, going one at a time, winner-takes-all. “I assure you, my dear, no hidden clauses here. Whoever claims their feather fastest wins, simple as that.”

“Simple as that,” Vox echoed, arms crossed. “This idea wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the way you keep avoiding telling me how many feathers you’ve got, would it?”

Alastor’s smile took on a sharp, feral quality he hadn’t used on Vox in ages. “Nonsense, my dear fellow. Now, to make this a challenge, we won’t be targeting just any angels. We’re going after the cream of the crop.”

Vox’s expression turned incredulous. “Officers? Isn’t that a little risky, even for us?”

Alastor slung an arm around Vox’s shoulders. “Since when has the great and terrible TV Demon been afraid of taking risks?” As Vox’s screen pulsed purple in his version of a blush, Alastor had a thought that he might be laying it on a little thick this evening—but it was a small, quiet thought, easily ignored. Vox knew where they each stood in terms of intimacy. If he still let himself be manipulated this way it was his fault.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” Vox groused.

“Absolutely,” Alastor agreed.

XXX

Unfortunately for the hotel defenders—and Vox’s blood pressure—one punch from Adam is enough to crack Alastor’s creepy voodoo shield like an egg. Vox squints at Alastor through the video feed, looking for signs that the blowback of magical energy has staggered him, but he appears unfazed. Wherever Alastor fucked off to for seven years, he must have managed to snag a significant power boost somewhere along the way.

The sixty-four thousand dollar question, Vox thinks to himself as Adam alights on the hotel roof, is whether all that mysterious new power will be enough to keep Alastor from being squashed like a bug by the First Man.

XXX

Maybe he was selling Donna short, he thought as she set down a Tom Collins at his elbow. (“Not too strong, so you can keep working.”) Sure, she wasn’t as vibrant or interesting as Chelsea, but she was a thoughtful girl, attentive.

Before she could step away, he caught her by the upper arm and tugged until she bent low enough for him to give her a quick kiss. “Thanks, doll,” he said against her lips.

She seemed eager to deepen the kiss, but he had work to do. Letting her go with a sigh, he turned his attention back to the contracts on his desk. Workaholic that he was, he nevertheless hated bringing work back to his condo. Home was supposed to be for the ‘play hard’ part of his ‘work hard, play hard’ philosophy.

But showbiz didn’t sleep, and neither, apparently, did fucking HUAC. The bastards had clearly done the rounds on his colleagues since the Loving interview—no less that three of his producers had contacted him wanting to pull out of their contracts early, and take their programs with them. Cowards. He drummed his fingers on the paperwork and took a drink to cool his anger.

“You keep frowning that hard and your face will stick that way,” Donna said from behind the copy of Vanity Fair she was perusing. Getting up from the plush loveseat against the office wall, she came over to stand behind his chair. “Don’t ruin that handsome face on me. Take a break to breathe, V.”

Her hands landed on his shoulders and began to rub at his tense muscles. Her thumbs dug into just the right spot and he groaned. “Okay, okay.”

It wasn’t like he was getting anything done anyway. His focus had fucked off to who knew where, chased away by a migraine that had been threatening him since noon. So he gave it up and leaned back into Donna’s wonderful, magical hands. Slipping open a desk drawer, he felt around for the new Zenith remote he’d gotten for his office television set. Ingenious little gadget, one of the new wireless kind—he hummed in satisfaction as the TV turned on like magic and flipped to NBC.

Unfortunately, he was greeted by the exact same issue he was trying to avoid: coverage of the thrice-damned Loving Interview and whether Vox Populi would retract the ‘inflammatory' and 'seditious’ broadcast.

Like hell, he thought venomously.

“This is what I get for being the best at what I do,” he grumbled to Donna, who hummed noncommittally.

Truthfully speaking, it was what he got for letting Mildred Loving get under his skin. Each time they’d spoken, she’d been able to see right through the magnanimous TV host persona, and no doubt thought that meant she knew him. She’d made it clear she expected him to double-cross her and her husband at the last moment, flip the script once they were live and humiliate the two of them. And yeah, he wasn’t above doing that kind of thing, but… fuck her for calling him out the one time he was playing it straight.

Just because he enjoyed flipping the bird to the establishment didn’t mean he wasn’t doing the Lovings a huge favor. He’d stuck his neck out for them, put his studio at risk, and fired perfectly good stage crew for refusing to work the interview (which had the union folks utterly pissed with him). Hell, he’d had to pin his own lapel microphone on Mildred at the last minute and speak through his desk mic because the remainder of the production crew had only prepped a mic for Richard. The whole thing had been a huge hassle. Fuck her.

—and fuck him too, for finding her delightful regardless. Mildred was exactly the kind of magnetic personality he’d been drawn to all his life. A tempest, a wildfire, a hurricane under a veneer of refinement that merely deigned to tone itself down for the sake of the weaker souls around it. He’d never been able to resist people like that, despite the trouble they invariably brought down on his head.

(I see you, said Mildred’s tempest eyes, and so he’d given her the kind of interview cynics like the two of them could barely imagine, and turned the very same look back on her at the end of the night. You’re welcome, bitch.)

Donna reached around him and shut the TV off. “Don’t listen to that trash. Everybody just wants something to squawk about.” Then she looked down at him and frowned.

“You don’t look so hot, hun,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

To tell the truth, he felt like shit. Despite Donna’s attempts to help him de-stress, his migraine was so sharp it felt like a belt was cinching tight around his brain. His thoughts were growing increasingly hazy. His muscles were sagging in exhaustion, and his coordination—he nearly smacked himself in the face when he brought a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose in an attempt to relieve the pressure.

“Migraine,” he murmured to Donna.

“Oh honey, you should have said earlier. Lay your head down and I’ll go get some anacin.”

Clumsily crossing his arms on the desk, he allowed Donna to guide his head down on top of them and closed his eyes. She gave the back of his neck one more soothing squeeze and then he heard the retreating click-clack of the Mary Janes he’d bought her the other day. He’d offered her more expensive styles, but she’d laughed and said she needed practical shoes to chase him down with next time he tried to dodge her attempts to get him to eat and sleep enough.

Donna was a good sort, he thought to himself, somewhat blearily.

It felt like she was gone forever, but it probably wasn’t too long before he heard the click-clack of her Mary Janes once more, followed by the sound of something solid being set down on the desk in front of him. Solid and heavy, which was odd, but he was too hazy to be curious. However, when the next noise he heard was not the crackle of an anacin tablet popping out of its packet but a snap rather like a briefcase opening, the part of his brain that was whining for relief and therefore somewhat alert convinced him to look up and find out what was going on.

Lifting up his head took more effort than he thought was reasonable. On the desk in front of him was a smallish leather case with silver fastenings. He vaguely recalled Donna leaving it in the bathroom last time she stayed over; he’d assumed it was her makeup and never given it another thought. (Donna left things at his place all the time, and she had a key if she needed to grab something when he wasn’t home.) But the case, open and facing toward him, did not hold any lipsticks or powders.

It held a pistol.

Chapter Text

“I don’t know about this one, Alastor. She looks like she’s ticked off already.”

Alastor rolled his eyes at Vox’s pussyfooting. The exorcist officer in question was pacing a few rooftops over from their hiding place, perhaps waiting for subordinate to arrive with a report, and did indeed look to be in a temper. Not that Alastor was worried.

“Possibly because we’ve spent the better part of the night harassing her peons?” he said dryly.

Next to him, Vox frowned. “I still think we should be doing this in my neighborhood. I don’t have any cameras around here.”

“Which is precisely why we’re here,” Alastor repeated. “A well-lit boulevard with no cameras means neither of us has the advantage.”

“Yeah, and neither of us can watch the other’s back.”

Alastor leaned over and poked Vox in the chest. “If you’re so worried, you can always forfeit.” When this received the expected derisive snort from his partner in crime, Alastor straightened up and stretched his spine in anticipation. “Well then start the timer, my friend, and watch a master work.”

With a huff, Vox held up a stopwatch they had burgled from a cornerstore when it became clear that Vox would not trust one Alastor conjured any more than Alastor would trust Vox’s internal clock mechanism. Alastor was off across the rooftop before he even heard the click.

XXX

Donna made a small noise of disapproval from beside him and he turned to look at her. Even that small motion felt like he was trying to swim in molasses. “Still awake?” she said, frowning. “Your file didn’t mention any tolerances.”

She seemed to be talking to herself more than to him, which was good because he couldn’t seem to focus on more than one thing at a time. Right now, it was the fact that the pain of his migraine was starting to remind him of alarm bells. While he was thinking, Donna took each of his hands in turn and pressed them against the sides of the case and the latch. Had she been wearing gloves earlier? He didn’t think so.

Somewhere in the hazy mire of his mind, an insistent thought that he shouldn’t be allowing Donna to maneuver him like a doll buzzed aggressively, but he was too sluggish to do anything about it. Instead, he looked back at the case. A second examination did nothing to resolve his confusion over its contents.

Finally, he managed to speak: “Why’r’you carryina pisstolin your powderrrbox?” His voice sounded far away.

She patted his cheek. “Sorry, V. You’ve been a peach, but it’s time we called it quits.”

Something important was slowly crystallizing in his mind. Too slowly. The snail-like pace of his thoughts was beginning to frustrate him. He felt like a television tuned to a dead channel—nothing behind the screen but snow.

Donna was still talking, about national security and how he had his ego to blame for ignoring so many warnings. His limbs were so heavy it was impossible to resist when she took his right hand and wrapped his fingers around the gun.

XXX

After spending two hours lurking around their usual dance hall with no sign of Mim whatsoever, Alastor felt ever so slightly pissed. He was not a man who tolerated being snubbed, and Mim had promised to meet him tonight.

He’d been waiting the return of their companionable entertaining outings for some weeks now, and his impatience had reached its limit. If Mim wouldn’t come to him, then Alastor would have to go fetch her. He’d need to be a little cautious traversing her side of town so late in the evening, in the interest of not causing a ruckus, but he had escorted Mim home once or twice before when she had been too drunk to entrust to a taxi cab, and made his way home with minimal unpleasant interaction. Really, the hassle he went through for this woman, only to be left out in the cold the moment she felt the siren call of ‘true love’.

If Mim did not have a truly excellent excuse for him when he got to her house, he was going to… do something to teach her a lesson, though he wasn’t sure what. Something unpleasant enough to express his displeasure, but not uncouth or violent. Alastor would never raise a hand to a woman, of course, and even if Mim had been a male acquaintance, Alastor never never killed someone in anger. (Except, of course, the first time. But that time had been the closest he would ever come to enacting vengeance on his father, so it didn’t count.)

Alastor killed for entertainment, for the thrill, for bloodlust and blood-hunger, even for justice once or twice. He killed to fulfill the obligations of his contract. But he always killed in cold-blood. His victims were meticulously researched strangers, scrutinized for suitability and vulnerability, slowly corralled and isolated until Alastor was in a position to snatch them away without leaving even a smudge of evidence that might link back to the humble, mild-mannered radio host he wore like a coat in the daylight. Passion made a person sloppy, and it had no place in his moonlighting.

By the time Alastor strolled up to Mim’s door, he had not received any inspiration on the subject of Mim’s punishment, which meant she was likely going to get away with a light scolding. He knocked twice, let himself in, and noted the man’s hat and coat hanging in the little foyer. Ah, her lover must be around. May the Lord help Mim if she made him walk in on any of the outrageous activities she delighted in alluding to whenever she wanted to make him blush…

The house was quiet and dim. One gas lamp burning in the parlor, Mim’s radio buzzing softly on a table. Next to the radio was an empty bottle of liquor, and next to the table itself was a half-dressed man asleep in Mim’s favorite arm chair. The odor on the man left no doubt where the liquor went. Alastor curled his lip. Mim could do better.

But where was she?

“Mim!” he called out, unconcerned that the drunken fool he left behind in the parlor might wake. These days nobody heard Alastor unless he wanted them to.

No answer, and a strange uneasy feeling began to compete for room in Alastor’s chest next to his irritation. Mim’s apartments weren’t large; only the bedroom remained to search, the weak light of another lamp peeking out from under the closed door. Propriety stymied Alastor at the door for a moment, but the uneasy feeling pushed him forward—“Miriam, I am coming in. For God’s sake be decent!”—into Mim’s lair.

Miriam was there. Splayed out across the bed as she was, she could’ve been sleeping peacefully after a vigorous tryst with her useless lover. Even the bruises on her bare body were not necessarily out of the realm of Mim’s hinted interests, except for their placement on her forearms and throat. Alastor had covered up too many murders by now not to recognize defensive wounds, the signs of a struggle in the room, evidence of a lover’s spat escalated to disaster. There was a staticky, buzzing feeling in the air.

Alastor had killed too many people by now not to recognize a corpse without even having to approach the bed.

He approached anyway, zombie-like and light-headed, to inspect it for the cause of death. The gas lamp on the bedside table guttered as the shadows in the room grew thick. There was blood on her skull that matched a stain on the corner of her vanity table, which seemed to be the epicenter of the room’s disarray. The oaf must have moved her to the bed, maybe even tried to revive her. Perhaps it had been an accident. But an accident a long time coming, given the age of some of the bruises.

The static was louder now, pressing against Alastor’s skull. Mim was a dangerous woman, a killer of men, and yet… He’s the one, Al, I know it. Bonds of affection made one vulnerable to errors in judgment. Alastor had pointed it out to Mim more than once as something that people with their …inclinations… could ill afford. She always brushed him off with a laugh.

Then it is a good thing, she would say, with her usual honeyed smirk, that I have you to look out for me, isn’t it?

The shadows surged—

XXX

“You lack discipline! Control! And worse, you’re sloppy!”

As Alastor practically dances across the hotel rooftop while his creepy ass void magic harries Adam at every turn, Vox wonders if Alastor can actually do this. Vox knows Alastor will be utterly insufferable if he wins this battle. Nothing can top killing the First Man in terms of bragging rights, and as sweet as those bragging rights might be, Vox knows that Alastor is never satisfied for long. He’ll immediately start angling for an even greater accomplishment, and make it everyone else’s problem when he can’t find one.

For a moment, Vox gets so caught up imagining a world where he has to deal with an Alastor who has reached impossible new heights of superiority that he forgets the far more likely scenario at risk: a world without Alastor in it.

“I’m gonna wipe that shit-eating grin off your face, cuz radio is fucking dead!”

XXX

Getting closer to the exorcist was not difficult initially, even with the relative sparsity of deep shadow for Alastor to work with. Once he was within her immediate environs, however, her grumpy but unfortunately rather alert pacing slowed his progress—and Alastor could not afford to be slow about this. With Vox’s ability to use static electricity to loosen the exorcists’ feathers beforehand, he required far less of an opening than Alastor did to successfully nab a feather. Thus, Alastor could not waste time in his own attempt.

Aware of the seconds ticking by, Alastor cast his gaze about for spots dark enough he could shadow-step to them, frowning when the closest one to the exorcist he identified left rather more distance than he would like between feather and getaway. While he could sink into the void from wherever he liked regardless of light level and reappear almost as easily—true teleportation—it required more power and took several seconds longer than shadow-stepping—a parlor trick, comparatively, of bouncing between nearby dark places—and thus was not usually his choice of tactic for angel-baiting. With the relative lack of shadows to take of advantage of in this instance, however, Alastor was considering—

[Hold up, Al. There’s an angel heading this way. From your five o’clock, it looks like?]

Alastor turned and peered into the red sky in the direction indicated. A lone exorcist was headed towards the officer Alastor was stalking. [I see it.]

[You wanna start over, find a different one?]

[Not at all. I was just thinking a distraction would come in handy.]

Vox’s consternation was noticeable over the channel even before he vocalized it. [Are you sure—?]

[Hush.] Alastor ordered. [I need to concentrate.]

Chapter Text

His body put it all together before he did: his heart roared in his chest like a sports car revving up from zero, adrenaline kicking in and clearing away most of the haze over his mind. Donna had drugged him. Donna had drugged him and his hand was wrapped around a fucking gun, Donna’s hand firmly trapping it there, and he needed to get away or she was going to kill him. He needed to move.

Unfortunately, just because his blood was rushing and panic was keeping him lucid didn’t mean that he was now miraculously un-drugged. All his limbs—every muscle felt so heavy that he could barely move. His legs had decided to opt out of the struggle entirely and his arms weren’t much more responsive. The most he could manage was a pathetic wriggle that only made Donna tighten her grip on his right hand and use her spare hand to grab the back of his neck.

“Hey now, calm down,” she scolded. “It’ll be over in a moment.”

He had to move. He had to get away. He managed a weak swipe at Donna with his free hand, but the attack barely inconvenienced her. He couldn’t get away. He was fucked, he was fucked, he was—

Never releasing the hand trapping his own on the gun, Donna maneuvered herself so she could pin him against the back of the chair by pressing her free arm firmly against his throat. Now he couldn’t even twist his head away as she brought her hand—their hands—up and pressed the barrel of the gun to his temple.

No, no, no no nonono—no it couldn’t be like this, fuck, this wasn’t how he was—it was too soon he needed hedidn’tdeservehedidntwanttodie—

His unwilling finger pulled back on the trigger.

XXX

When Alastor came back to himself with blood soaked into his best dancing suit he was horrified. Not because Mim’s drunken oaf of a lover didn’t deserve to have his skin peeled from his body in inch-wide strips, but because he had found himself standing in a public street in broad daylight without quite remembering the sequence of events that brought him to be there. Or rather, he did remember, but the duration of time passed was far too short. It was same day, practically, in which he had found Mim’s body, which couldn’t be right. Because even if Alastor somehow ended up doing something as ridiculous as killing a man for personal reasons, he would never do so without a plan to get away with it.

He had to be missing time, somehow. There had to be a reason he was lurching like a drunk along the curb in a respectable neighborhood with a dead man’s blood all over him. There had to be an explanation, some crafty plan that would let him walk away from this. He wouldn’t’ve—

XXX

Later, Alastor would tell himself that it wasn’t his fault.

If Vox had just shut up and allowed him to concentrate instead of murmuring his anxieties over the radio waves, Alastor would have noticed something off about the two exorcists’ behavior. He would have paid more attention to his own perimeter, would have noticed the third set of wings gliding at low altitude along the rooftops towards the scene, would have realized that the exorcist he’d thought a distraction for its superior officer was, in fact, a distraction for him.

(It seemed that after years of abuse the angels had finally had enough of his and Vox’s game, and devised one of their own.)

Failing all that, if Vox hadn’t been so irritating, then Alastor wouldn’t have muted their private channel, and he would have heard Vox’s initial warning about the third exorcist. Instead, he darted out of the safety of the shadows to make his play for the feather, absorbed in his manipulation of the tendril of void magic slithering forward to trip the pair of supposedly unaware exorcists, and was caught utterly in the open when Vox’s shout rang out across the street: “BEHIND YOU, IDIOT!”

Alastor managed to dodge the third exorcist’s swinging pike, but only just. He was too far out from the nearest shadow for an instantaneous shadow-step, and during the seconds it took to grasp enough of the void for an unrestricted teleport he was rather too preoccupied with the three exorcists closing in on him to keep track of what Vox was doing.

Then the officer’s giant axe was arcing toward him—but Alastor didn’t bother to dodge. He was half in the void already, and out of danger. He had barely been in any danger in the first place, and only because Vox had been distracting him.

Unfortunately, Vox did not seem to realize this.

Later, Alastor would convince himself that his foremost thought as Vox threw himself in front of the descending axe was that Vox was a fool to think Alastor couldn’t take care of himself. But truth was, as the angelic weapon buried itself in Vox’s screen with a horrifying crunch Alastor would remember for the rest of his unlife, Alastor couldn’t think at all.

XXX

“What just happened?”

There’s something different about Alastor’s voice, though Vox can’t place it with the interference from the camera drone, and it nags at him even though it’s a stupid thing to be thinking about when Adam is clearly gearing up for another shot and Alastor is just standing there—

XXX

There were sirens in the air now to match the sirens in Alastor’s skull, but worse yet there were hounds baying. Freed from his stupor, Alastor runs.

He runs runs runs to the bayou, where in the waist deep morass he has the best chance of fleeing the manhunt. He knows this countryside from boyhood, knows it better than he knows his father’s face, but the twisting roots and grasping willow branches betray him now for reasons he can’t fathom and he falls.

He falls, and there in the mud the dogs are upon him. Time loses all meaning in the jaws of rending teeth: it could have been seconds or years before the executioner’s wading boots sloshed to a stop beside his head, but regardless Alastor could have wept with relief when he felt the barrel of a shotgun press against his skull—

XXX

The gunshot discharging inches from his ear was the loudest noise he’s ever heard and he was somewhat dumbfounded to have heard it at all. The brief flash of white-hot heat across his forehead as the bullet flew just shy of his skin was just as unexpected until he realized that the last desperate wrench of his arm against Donna had, incredibly, worked. Maybe she had gotten complacent with his weakened struggles, or maybe some other fucking miracle had happened, but he was alive. Fuck, he was alive. When he got out of this he was gonna dump ten grand into the first church he saw. And then he was gonna crucify every motherfucker involved in this.

But first he had to survive.

Evidently sheer terror sufficed to burn through some of the grogginess paralyzing him, because his limbs began responding to his mind’s frantic commands once more, albeit clumsily, as if they were trying to respond to the whole backlogged queue at once rather than just the most recent one: to get the fucking gun away from Donna. The resultant flailing did manage to shuck off Donna’s grip, but in the process he lost his own hold on the gun. It went flying across the room, crashed into the TV screen, and landed with a thunk on the plush carpet.

For a moment, neither of them moved, waiting with bated breath for some unknown signal like a pair of kids playing red-light-green-light, and the office was so still he could hear the tiny whine emitting from the cracked TV. Donna seemed to be rather taken aback at his resistance, like she wasn’t quite sure what to do with someone who refused to roll over and die. And while her lack of initiative improved his chances of survival, the idea that the bastards hadn’t even bothered to hire a good assassin to kill him sparked his outrage further. Had they dug this bitch out of a bargain bin?

Then moment ended, and they both went for the gun.

After that, everything became a blur. A painful, desperate blur as he clumsily launched himself out of his chair and over his desk in a frantic attempt to get a lead on Donna. He crashed into the floor nearly face first, plush carpet doing jack shit to soften the blow, and barely avoided getting kicked in the face by Donna’s solid Mary Janes as he scrambled across the floor. In the second miracle of the hour, he reached the pistol before Donna did, managing to get a barely-responding finger hooked on the trigger first try, and rolled over on his back to point up at her—

Bang. Bang. Bang.

She blinked down at him, blouse blossoming deep red, swaying slightly and looking even more shocked than before. The office was still again just long enough for the realization to dawn that holy fuck he just killed someone before she lurched forward, barely catching herself against the TV set looming above him. Except the motion was not quite as involuntary as it looked, because then she started pulling, expression twisted with effort as she used her whole body weight to tip the television set forward off its stand.

And then gravity took over and the last thing he ever saw was his own frightened face reflected in a cracked TV screen.

Chapter Text

Vox answers the distress signal. He always answers. Good workers are hard to find these days, and he’s not about to lose his veteran souls for anything short of an Extermination.

One of the first projects he’d taken up after becoming a proper overlord had been to safeguard his most valuable souls from a repeat of the so-called hazing process the reigning overlords had put him through. The tracking spell woven into Vox’s soul-brands had been expensive to craft, requiring occult magic that was outside Vox’s wheelhouse as a tech demon, but supremely worth the trouble (and he has long since paid the favor Alastor charged for reviewing the design). Each one is powered by the electrical grid and triggered by contract magic, costing Vox nothing to maintain and allowing him to locate any of his soul-branded sinners any time he wants.

So, before Vox has even properly unplugged himself from the sludge of depressed doom-scrolling he’s been engaged in for the last… days? weeks? Fuck, he’s lost track of time again. No doubt after being submerged in Pentagram City’s data-sphere for so long he looks like shit, but Vox doesn’t have the energy to care. If he ends up looking like a wreck in public he’ll just hypnotize the witnesses. He’d rather reserve his meager alertness for whoever he has to kill when he arrives on scene.

The point is, before he’s even lucid, Vox is grasping at the power grid to search for the nearest Voxtek device to the distress signal. It’s Borl, which means—

Vox crackles back to his physical form with all the subtlety of a lightning bolt, and finds himself in a familiar diner, one of the grungy establishments he keeps around for his more discreet business deals. He spots Borl relaxed on a sofa with a knife in his thigh and next to him, just as expected, is Bunny looking as innocent as it is possible for a living pin-up caricature to be. Vox groans. What a waste of adrenaline.

“Hey boss!” Bunny greets him brightly. “You look like shit.”

“Damnit Bunny, how many times do I have to tell you the tracking clause is for emergencies,” Vox hisses.

“It is an emergency. You left me on read,” she responds.

Vox has already lost this battle a hundred times, so he rolls his eyes and turns to a more easily cowed target: Borl. “And you! You have to stop enabling her.”

Borl leans away from Vox’s accusing finger. “Hey man, I got stabbed! Can’t I get a little sympathy here?”

Before Vox can roll into a futile lecture on contract abuse, a giggle sounds behind him. He’s been aware of a bystander in the room since a few seconds after his arrival, but he hadn’t bothered to look in their direction because he’d sensed his partial ownership of them. A Vee soul meant he could easily dispose of them, or at least bully them into silence. But that musical, innocent laughter was very recognizable—

Vox spins around to face the beaming face of Charlotte Morningstar, Princess of Hell. Next to her is Valentino’s favorite whore, one of the few Vee souls he can’t easily dispose of. Fucking lovely. Bunny and Borl are in deep shit when this is over.

Vox is painfully aware that in his bare wrinkled shirt-sleeves, sans bow-tie and vest, without his hat or heels, he is under-dressed and disheveled. Being this exposed to strangers makes his skin crawl. (Technically-speaking, he is more dressed than most people in Hell, but Vox’s image is his armor, and besides that he’s never quite managed to shake off the stubborn antique sensibilities of his youth on Earth when it comes to his own modesty.)

He catches both Angel Dust and the princess not-so-subtly tracking his left eye and realizes he hasn’t covered up his scar. Fuck his life. No choice but to let the damned thing show. If he covers it now he’ll look even more weak, to Lucifer’s daughter of all people.

“Your Highness!” Vox says, barely managing not to grit his teeth. “To what do I owe this charming surprise?”

XXX

Charlie’s always had a sort of knack for souls. It’s like music, kinda, that no one else but her can hear. Inside of every demon is a rainbow of notes that form a unique and precious melody, and each melodious soul wants to intertwine with all the others to form a beautiful cosmic symphony …and that’s usually where she loses the people she’s trying to explain it to. No one understands, not even her dad, whose own ‘soul-sense’ apparently functions differently. Tired of trying to explain only to be laughed at or patronized, Charlie mostly keeps the ability to herself these days—but sometimes it does come in handy when meeting new people.

As the after-image of the TV Demon’s dramatic entrance fades from Charlie’s vision, she is taken aback by the volume of the music that fluxes around his soul. It’s nothing compared to her father’s (nothing compared to hers, whispers the part of her mind that’s starting to sound too much like Alastor for her comfort) but it definitely indicates more latent power than she expected from an overlord rumored to use his technology as a crutch.

Charlie doesn’t like to snoop around people’s souls (it feels rude), but Vox is blaring his to the point of shouting. She doesn’t need to listen very close to notice the strains of his soul that shift readily to harmonize with Bunny and Borl’s melodies. Another strain, melancholic and oddly familiar, seems to reach out into the distance… but before Charlie can place it, Vox reels in his power. All the melodies and harmonies disappear, replaced by a quieter, half-hearted rendition that reaches out to no one.

The switch is disheartening, but Charlie still feels vindication surge through her. Even without the music, the venom-less exasperation in Vox’s voice as he scolds his insubordinate souls is pretty damning (…or whatever the opposite of that is). Whatever the number and nature of Vox’s flaws, he is a sinner who still cares about others. It’s all the opening Charlie needs to dig the hooks of redemption in him. That’s for later, though. Right now, she’s got a very specific mission in mind, and despite Vox’s greeting, she suspects that he’s not exactly happy to see her. Or perhaps just not happy to be blind-sided. Either way, better start off on the right foot.

She holds out her hand. “Please just call me Charlie. It’s wonderful to finally meet you. I’ve heard such good things!”

Vox shoots Bunny a look as he shakes Charlie’s hand. “Have you?” he asks, tone suggesting the statement is not the compliment Charlie intended it to be.

“Nothing she wouldn’t have found out eventually,” Bunny responds. “You know, given her professional circle.”

The words trigger something in Vox, and his smile turns sharp-toothed. “Oh, I see.” Returning his attention to Charlie, he says, “No offense meant to your business partner, Princess, but whatever the Radio Demon has told you about me is …outdated information at best. And I’m not interested in anything he has to say to me either.”

“Oh no, Alastor didn’t send m—” Charlie begins, only to be cut off by Bunny:

“I promised you’d hear her out. It’s not like you’re doing anything else.”

A streak of TV snow glitches across Vox’s screen, and the air crackles briefly. Bunny doesn’t react, but both Borl and Angel Dust flinch a little. Charlie flounders for a way to defuse the tension. “If you just give me a moment to explain—”

“Would you mind if I spoke to my employee privately for a moment, Princess?” Vox interrupts.

The door to the hallway slams open by itself, and Angel Dust once again places a hand over Charlie’s mouth, practically carrying her out the door. Only after shutting it does he release her, putting a finger over his lips to halt the half-formed protest that immediately spills from hers.

“Calm your tits and I’ll introduce ya to the most time-honored tradition in show biz,” Angel says.

“What’s that?” Charlie asks.

With a wink, Angel points at door the handle. “Listening at keyholes.”

XXX

It’s one thing for Bunny to back-talk him in private. Even when Vox’s temper is at its worst he recognizes that Bunny’s attitude serves to keep him grounded, although he wishes she’d reserve her snark for his finances rather than his personal choices. And in years past, before Vox’s patience for the foibles of his contracted souls was reallocated bit by bit to other irritants he has to put up for the sake of his business, he even found it privately endearing. But Vox has an image to maintain. His power has always lived and died on his brand, and that brand advertises total control. Being insulted and bossed around by souls he owns in front of the least subtle woman in all of Hell is precisely the opposite.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he hisses at Bunny.

“Something’s gotta give, boss. You can’t keep going like this,” Bunny says. Her voice is absent of sarcasm, a bad sign that she’s convinced herself she’s right about something he’s not going to agree with. “We can’t keep going like this.”

Vox does not miss the look she gives Borl, nor the way Borl’s apprehension has him all but blending into the couch. Borl, who has always been anxious around authority but only in recent years fearful, nods in hesitant but nevertheless troubling solidarity.

The problem with owning a lot of souls is that after a certain amount it is neither possible nor desirable to treat them all as individual people. These days Vox largely doesn’t treat his contracts as people at all. It’s more efficient to see columns of numbers, especially when the complexities of his Vee partnership factor in. But Vox’s older contracts, the ones like Bunny who made deals with him before it became a privilege to do so rather than to be handed a standard Vee contract—well, it used to be in his interest to let them think themselves his equals, minus the overlord status. As a result, Vox’s new management style has them chafing, despite the generous allowances he makes for them. Until now, he’s thought it a problem for the back-burner.

“There are other ways to get my attention than publicly embarrassing me, if you have a problem with the way I run my business,” he says icily. “Not that it’s any concern of yours in the first place.”

“Not my concern!” Bunny shoots up off the couch, disturbed from her habitually unconcerned lounging. “Even when you’re not fucked off being depressed or putting out fires for the Vees, I still run half of VoxTek. Your business is every bit my concern. And you are fucking up in that department, believe me, but that’s not even what I’m worried about right now.”

Vox towers above Bunny, but despite the height difference the force of her frustration has him stepping back. He crosses his arms to disguise the submissive motion. “Then what are you worried about that’s worth all this ruckus?”

“You, dumbass!” Bunny says, stamping her foot. “You’ve been spiraling for years now. I thought with that asshole gone—I thought that you’d get better after you got over him but now he’s back and you’re…”

Vox cannot believe what he is hearing. Almost from the moment Vox introduced Bunny to the Radio Demon—who for the record had been far nicer to her than he ever was to Vox himself—Bunny had disapproved of their friendship. At the time, Vox had waved off her concerns. She just didn’t understand their dynamic, that was all. For her to flip positions now of all times, when Vox has finally come to terms with the fact that she was fucking right all along, is the height of hypocrisy.

“I am over Alastor, and that sure as hell is none of your business,” he interrupts. He doesn’t want to be having this conversation right now. He doesn’t want to be having it ever, but it’s going to take more energy than he currently has (more energy than he’s had in years, to be honest) to get Bunny to drop the subject permanently. The best he can do right now is remind her that they are in fucking public.

“You and I go back a long time, Bunny, but do not forget that I own your soul,” Vox warns, already knowing she’ll take it badly but too frazzled and irritated to care, “I will not tolerate another indiscretion like this, do you understand?”

For all that Bunny is surprisingly sentimental for a denizen of Hell, she is also a sharp, competent businesswoman. As her expression shifts from earnest concern to calculation, Vox feels a stab of hope that he managed to get through to that rational side of her—but then he recalls that the business version of Bunny thinks he’s an even bigger idiot than the friend version does.

“Is that really the card you wanna play, boss?” Bunny says, perfectly painted neon lips curling in disdain. “Cuz I’m not gonna roll over for it like Sig did.”

Of course she would bring up the only topic more verboten than his relationship with Alastor. Sig wasn’t just the oldest of Vox’s veteran contracts, his was the first soul Vox ever owned. (Vox had needed a power boost for some scheme, and a couch to crash on, while Sig had been intrigued at the opportunity to psychoanalyze an egomaniac.) Vox’s relative inexperience at the time of their deal meant that it was embarrassingly equitable—or at least it had been, up until Vox convinced him to renegotiate several years ago.

Frowning so hard his mouth becomes a pixel-thin line on his screen, Vox says, “Sig and I made a deal—”

Bunny cuts him off immediately. “Oh fuck right off. If Sig had made that deal willingly you wouldn’t have stopped going to your appointments.”

Vox squashes the spark of guilt before it can catch flame. Sig hadn’t been using his knack for hypnosis for anything important, and Vox had desperately needed more power after Alastor’s betrayal left his reserves inexplicably stunted. Besides, claiming Sig’s ability as his own is Vox’s right as an overlord. The fact that Vox had since avoided speaking with Sig despite it technically being a breach of contract to miss so many sessions is irrelevant.

Just because Vox does not feel guilty does not mean he is not immensely pissed at Bunny for bringing it up, though. For a moment, he comes very close to calling her bluff—if he reaches out for Bunny’s soul and yanks on that chain, will she still be so ready to talk shit?—but there’s a dead man’s contract hanging around Vox’s neck like an albatross, one single vaguely-worded clause still active after all this time. Vox isn’t sure he could hurt Bunny even if he wanted to.

(Promising to “look after” Bruno’s widow in the case that Vox caused the man’s death was such a mortifying rookie mistake that Vox has never told anyone about it. Not Alastor, not Sig, and certainly not Bunny.)

Reigning in his temper with great effort, Vox tells her: “Take a vacation, Bunny.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, take a vacation,” he says in clipped tones. “Put it on the expense account, I don’t care, just get out of my sight for awhile. Starting now.”

Bunny puts her hands on her hips. “And the company?”

“I ran Voxtek just fine before you came along. Something you might think about while you’re gone,” Vox says pointedly.

For a moment, it looks like she’s going to argue. Then, worryingly, she smiles.

“You know what? Fine. I could use a break. And I know just the place to go.”