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. . .
Vox was hungry.
No, not the easy kind. Not the sort of hunger which could be quelled simply with food .
He had tried that.
Draining his appointments, barricading himself in his penthouse and savagely accosting his internal processors with a torrent of synthetic, fatty substances, reminding himself to cover the ingredient labels with his fingers so he could abstain from thinking about whatever repugnant sludge he was actively shoveling into his 4D mouth, gorging like his life depended on it.
His afterlife?
Second death?
Unfortunately for Vox, he wasn't very efficient at concealing his mid-morning / late night / entirely unscheduled binge-sessions. Trails of brittle crumbs and suspicious lumpy garbage bags were betrayals of an embarrassing habit.
Valentino called it ‘stress eating'.
Vox called it ‘progress’.
After he had resolved that the growing chasm in his gut was in fact not receptive to the bolster in calories – his automated systems scrupulously tracked and reported back to him the exact percentage increase in recent thermic intake, providing him with helpful information such as how many micrograms of water he could heat per Celsius per every calorie ingested – 1,000,000 – crazy, right? – Vox had instead refocused his EVF to other indulgences.
The dizzying, heady pulsation of disorienting strobe lights and cyclones of thrashing, sweaty bodies shoving and panting against the exposed slip of his neck was nothing if not rousing (and mildly disgusting), serving as a welcome distraction. And the booze felt smooth enough going down. But he could only traverse so many clubs before the acrid stinging of vomit threatening the tunnels of his esophagus became too overwhelming, and he found himself forced to cling onto the scantily clad waist of his lover, lest he get swept away in the gale, silently begging him to just drive them home already and hadn't he already told him to quit it with the touching? He wasn't in the mood.
The skull-shattering headaches that came with the morning light weren't a preferable experience, either. And the indignant jabs from Velv made him want to finally put one of Valentino's gaudy ass pistols to good use and paint his own circuits across the wall like soggy macaroni. They could deal with the mess while he took a deserved reprieve in the ether. Maybe some time spent in the frozen womb of whatever came between Hell and an Exorcist’s blade would do him well. Maybe it could fix him.
Fuck.
Fuckfuckfuckkkkfuckkkk
What was he doing?
Whenever was the last time he'd truly felt whole?
Certainly not in life, where he'd been forced to churn out banal spinoffs of stale sitcoms and force feed reruns of whatever exhausted IP featured enough tits and padded sex to keep the puny attentions of the perverted masses afloat. The shiny title of ‘Head Programming Manager’ had paid well, sure, especially in those last years, but fat checks weren't Band-Aids and no matter how large they grew he couldn't slap them onto the weeping fissures rupturing his soul and call it a job well done.
He couldn't whine, throw a tantrum and stomp his feet until somebody maybe finally took notice of the leaden violet bags underneath his eyes and the way his upper lip seemed to quiver so much more often than when he'd first started out because goddammit he didn't know how many more reruns of the 18th season of ‘The Nelsons: Suburban Shenanigans’ he could stream before bashing his head in with a television.
No. He'd had a job to do. Same as he had now, in death, but instead of the blinding sycophantic smiles he'd flash his superiors when they'd enter the studio to make sure he was still adorning his metaphorical harness, only for his features to immediately gain ten pounds the moment their gazes departed, he was now only required to display ‘wide_grin_2.png’ for long enough that the unseeing eye of the camera blinked shut and he was left standing with a glaring black hole in the middle of his gut that everybody seemed to prefer to ignore.
And he couldn't throw a tantrum about it.
Because he had a fucking empire to run.
He had an empire to run and a boyfriend to coddle and reporters to lie to and a red deer to find–
Oh.
Right.
Alastor was missing.
Vox looked down at his stomach; at the hole.
At the crimson hole.
Not black at all.
When had that happened?
He sat, facing his impressive array of monitors, each luminated with a unique image cast from somewhere in Pride.
On a roof, inside of a bookstore, perched from the decrepit branches of scorched trees, some on-the-go; buzzing overhead a crowd of oblivious Sinners, scanning, moving onto its next hoard of targets when it didn't find who it was looking for with a robotic efficiency only one of his machines was capable of perfecting.
Vox understood now.
The hunger, the food, the hole.
He had to–
A notification.
Velvette calling.
Vox quietly enabled ‘Do not Disturb’ mode.
Of course it's because of him. When isn't it?
He'd thought it'd go away, that he'd be happy if he'd just died that night on the roof, bisected straight through the middle by The First Man's blade. Thick, heavy tears of scarlet blood oozing from the furious gash visible only from the tear in his coat.
Was that the only scar he had?
Did Alastor have other scars, somewhere?
Vox wanted to see them.
He wanted to– he wanted to–
He huffed out a breath – agitated? Bored? Horny? – expelling it from his fans and tilting himself forward, guided by the weighted curse that was his head – he hoped whatever uhholy deity manufactured his blueprints had gotten at least a few good laughs – and flattening it against the desk.
He felt itchy.
When had it all become so rotten?
They were so close, the both of them. The long nights spent, when it was just them, together; two predators prowling in the dark. Across the streets. Through alleyways. The dim glow of a CRT television screen reflected from sickly yellow razorblade fangs, sometimes stained sanguine from the meaty viscera of their previous kill. Those teeth had the ability to melt flesh like butter, Vox had known. He had seen it before. He liked it when Alastor got that way– appreciated it. It was like art, the beast consuming the man, replaced with beady, shifting eyes that clicked when the dials inside them changed stations; scanning.
Scanning for what? Vox hadn't known. The question had shriveled, stillborn in his throat the moment those eyes shifted all their collective attention directly onto him.
He gulped, felt his throat bob in turn, frozen, he didn't move.
God, his eyes were pretty.
The knobs reversed, cranking backwards accompanied by the distinct snapping of bone. Alastor blinked and they were gone. Rubies in their wake.
He grinned. Licked the red goo from his lips.
So, so pretty.
Vox remembered, he had stepped forward. He’d wanted to be closer to him. Just a little bit closer.
He’d wanted– he’d wanted–
A notification. This time from his camera system.
Vox raised his screen, he looked up.
‘#4518 - Serial 7KG830A3T - Cannibal district - movement detected. Proceed?’
Vox felt his gut shift. Crimson with yellow fangs.
He was starving.
. . .