Chapter Text
Alastor can admit, in the silence of his own head as he walks away from the first official overlord meeting since the Extermination Day that Wasn’t, that Charlie MIGHT have been right. He probably should have stayed home.
Not that he’d tell the girl that under pain of torture - that kind of hand-wringing and fretting wasn’t the sort of thing that should be encouraged in anyone, least of all the Princess of Hell.
“Al, I just have such a bad feeling -”
“Of course you do, darling - it’s a meeting of the overlords of Hell. By definition, no good can come of it”
“What if they” - she made an inarticulate gesture that reminded him painfully of her father - who was, by the way, sitting across the parlor from them, pretending to sketch, pretending NOT to listen, even though Alastor saw him roll his eyes far too often for a man who was simply sketching rubber ducks. “What if it’s some kind of -”
“Charlie, dear, the overlords of Hell are like starving wild dogs.” He gave her a pat on the head in sharp contrast to his words and then permitted it when she angrily swatted his hand away. “It’s always at least BORDERING on a trap. I intend to go anyway.”
“You don’t HAVE to!”
“Oh, but I do. One, if I don’t go, they’ll assume weakness, and we can’t afford that. Two, these lovely little social gatherings are a veritable FOUNTAIN of useful information. Remember, we’d never have learned to kill angels otherwise.”
There was information, all right. Here is what he’s learned: the other overlords know about Pentious.
Alastor is not sure HOW they know – who told them – but he has his suspicions. Either way, the ruling powers of Hell now KNOW about that silly snake-man getting into heaven, and it all just feels a little too convenient to him.
His steps sound too loud and too fast in his ears. He takes a breath, forces them to slow. He forces himself to walk like a man who isn’t watching his own back, like someone who isn’t running.
It feels like one of those cheesy horror reels that had started playing toward the end of his human life. The streets are dark, but not empty – never empty at night in Pentagram City. Things are always crawling in the dark here, like the squirmy mass of creatures you find under rocks, many-legged and writhing and wretchedly alive.
Alastor doesn’t know if he finds it more delightful or disgusting – like much of Hell, it somehow manages to exist squarely between those two extremes and is reluctant to tip in either direction.
He hears it before he feels it – it travels down his ears, the hairs at the nape of his neck, his fingertips, a sensation of STATIC that resolves itself very suddenly, very close behind him, pressed up against his back in hard, familiar lines that he can feel through that tacky, Reagan-era suit that hack insists on wearing. A hand clamps on the outside of either of his biceps, holding them tight against his body, and the hairs by his right ear stand up from being too close to a screen. Vox’s voice is all soft stereo and honey when he says, “Hey there, Al. Long time no see.”
He does not let himself shudder, does not let himself try to wrench away, does not let himself do anything to indicate SURPRISE to suddenly have Vox pressed up against him. His smile is sharp as a knife. “Odd, it hasn’t seemed that long to me.”
Vox laughs, low and dangerous, and Alastor doesn’t react to that either, forcing his body to obey, to project nonchalance. I am in control. Like it’s HIS idea that they’re standing here, like this – say, my good man, is that a mic in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? – like it’s beneath his notice.
“Come on, don’t play stupid. You knew this was coming.”
Alastor sighs theatrically. “I figured it was about time I was subjected to another blatantly mediocre sales pitch.”
Vox’s fingers dig into his arms, almost hard enough to puncture fabric. “You have some nerve, pal. Mister Radio Demon, always gotta talk big – but you want to hear a secret?”
The prickly, static feeling at his ear is almost unbearable. “I kinda think talking is ALL you can do right now.”
“Hm,” Alastor says, and he hopes what Vox hears is bored. “ That’s an interesting theory. Tell me more.”
On the exhale of that statement, he sends black tentacles shooting out of his back, but Vox is GONE – as Alastor knew he would be. He dematerializes only to reappear in front of Alastor, a few strides away, crackly and electric and smug. “Getting slow, old timer,” he says, and the backstreet pulses as if with surround sound.
Swing and a miss! Says Alastor’s patently unhelpful hindbrain. Bottom of the ninth, and the score is Vox 1, Alastor ZERO! Looking bad for the home team, folks!
“Just making sure you remember how to stay on your toes, Voxie,” Alastor sing-songs, folding both hands on the mic in front of him. “You tend to get complacent in that silly tower of yours.”
Vox laughs again. “You know, you’re so pathetic lately, you don’t really deserve this offer – but what the Hell, I’m in a good mood today.”
“As ever, I wait with bated breath.”
“Now is that any way to talk to a guy who just went to bat for you?” That grin, the made-for-tv one that oozes trust me, “I mean, the other overlords, we put it to a vote, and surprise surprise, the collective was VERY okay with a problem like you just turning into a missing ad on a milk carton – I mean. In light of everything.”
Vox’s grin is shark-wide now.
“Well, then isn’t it lucky that I have an old pal like you to look out for me,” Alastor drawls.
Vox hums, and Alastor feels that hum around him, feels it coming through his shoes – the man always did have the most insufferable predilection toward SPEAKERS. “Oh, don’t look so sour, Al. It’s a Hell of a deal.”
Vox walks, slowly pacing the back street, the suspiciously empty back street. “You can keep right on staying at your tacky little hotel with your drippy little princess and your brand new sugar daddy. You can pal around with the other losers – but you report to me. You tell me everything. ”
You belong to me – he can taste the echo of it in the air.
“I see,” Alastor says. “And in return?”
It’s rage that crackles through Vox’s screen, through his speakers, through the bedrock of Pentagram City via the crisscrossing wires that have, over the decades, imbedded like veins through this whole wretched, breathing environment. “In return, I don’t cut you up into little pieces, stuff you in a garbage bag, and drop you off on the hotel porch like a little lapdog that got hit by a truck. See? I told you it was generous.”
“Hmm….let me think…..no.” Alastor’s smile is all charm and teeth.
“Your loss, bitch.”
Alastor feels more than he sees the wires come out of the ground, the walls, reaching for him. His own dark shadows and tentacles spring up, but not as many, not enough, fuck, his powers never HAVE been the same since that stupid chain and Vox has home field advantage –
The back street seems to explode in light – Alastor hisses instinctively, shielding his eyes with an arm, it burns.
“HA! Didn’t see that coming, did you, you slick motherfucker? Been a lot of changes since you’ve been gone, lot of UPGRADES…”
Flood lights, Alastor thinks, feeling a faint, grudging surge of something like admiration. It’s not as if he CAN’T use his powers in bright light, but he’s strongest in twilight, in darkness, and Vox knows. He knows because they talked about it, back in the distant past where Vox used to have a beer and he used to have a rye, back when they used to sit a little too close at the bar so that their thighs almost touched beneath the polished wood.
The lights burn down from so many directions that neither of them casts a shadow. There’s nowhere to run.
The bases are loaded, but it’s still anybody’s game! his stupid hindbrain supplies.
He barely jumps left in time to avoid having a stray coil wind around his right leg. His teeth are too big for his face, but he fights the impulse to become larger – size is not his friend here. Size will make him slow, make it easier for Vox to wrap him up, pull him down.
“Looking pretty nimble there, fossil!” It’s like the walls are jeering at him, pulsing with Vox’s energy.
“And YOU still move like you have lead feet – or maybe that’s just in the toys you sell the children!”
Fuck you. You do NOT get to be what ends me. I won’t have it.
A wire wraps around his wrist and yanks. His back hits a wall with dizzying force. His face feels too hot. It’s probably bleeding.
You aren’t worthy of killing ME, you talentless, mediocre piece of shit.
He realizes the danger a millisecond too late, wires and cables surging out of the wall, wrapping around his limbs, his waist, his throat, and he claws at them -.
A static pulse, and then a hand grips his jaw like a vice and shoves. The back of his head hits the bricks, and the world swims – he can hear the buzzing in the lights, he thinks, or the buzzing’s in him, or the buzzing is the AIR –
Vox’s body, up against his, slotting in, familiar and much too warm through that glaringly ugly striped vest. “Aw, baby, don’t be mad,” he all but purrs. “You did pretty good for a pet. That’s what’s going on, right? That’s why you’re fighting like a pussy? You finally let somebody put a collar around that scrawny neck of yours. Who was it?”
Vox grinds against him, and he can feel bile behind his teeth, is torn between choking it down and doing the world of footwear a favor and splashing it all over Vox’s shoes.
“Let me guess – his royal shortness? Seriously, it’s not a good look, Al.”
Vox slams his head against the wall again, presses against him harder, he feels his stupid ribs creak. “You should’ve come to me first.”
Alastor feels something sharp against his ribs, sharp and cold even through the many layers of fabric, like Vox has been keeping the steel in a freezer, and he knows what it is.
“You recognize angelic steel when you feel it, right? I don’t have to explain to you what’s happening right now?”
No, but you will anyway. You can’t help narrating, can you, chum?
“Because I could just, y’know, rip you to pieces – but this little baby can make it so you stay gone.”
He has to get out of this damned alleyway – out from under these lights. He has to –
The knife digs in just under his arm, barely a pinprick, but it feels like being burned with a lighter. “Focus, asshole – I’m talking to you.”
Ah, Vox – center stage, a captive audience, and you STILL aren’t the center of attention. How sad for you.
Alastor lets his body go slack against the wires that hold him, lets his head loll forward.
“Oh no, princess, you don’t get to pass out yet. Seriously, it’s like that silly hotel made you forget how to have fun.”
Alastor lets his face – just his face – elongate into something crocodilian and buries his teeth into Vox’s shoulder down to the bone. He can hear the crunch.
And Vox shrieks, equal parts rage and surprise, because of course he does. Whatever Vox’s past was, it did not include back alley knife fights. But Alastor’s did.
The cables on his wrists go slack for just long enough. He yanks a hand free, settles it on Vox’s wrist, and twists them in a way that’s so far buried into muscle memory that it’s soul-deep.
He has the knife in his hand now. The first cut slashes down Vox’s forearm, long way, and when he instinctively steps back, the second slash is aimed at his throat – too shallow to kill, damnit, but the blood spatters hot across his face and he feels ALIVE again.
The next slash severs the cables that hold him to the wall, and he rolls clear, panting, one knee in the dirt.
“What the – fucking OW, did you just BITE me you LUNATIC?!” Vox gestures at his shoulder. “Who DOES that?!”
And there it is, dizzying – that mix of indignation and shock and a million years ago, it seems like, he was pulling Vox by those blue-tipped fingers, the both of them too drunk by a mile, out onto the club floor – “ No, no – hey, I can’t DANCE, you lunatic! –“
Alastor laughs. He tells himself that he sounds crazier than usual by design, it’s a strategy. He meets Vox’s eyes and runs his tongue down the length of the blade. “Oooh, tasty. You always did give the best presents, Voxie.”
Vox lunges at him. The next cut is a deep one as Vox twist away and Alastor mirrors his steps, two forward, one back -
“Here now, follow along, it’s not HARD.”
There are wires EVERYWHERE, but Alastor is manic, twirling the knife Vox was stupid enough to pull out like a tiny shard of light, and whenever he cuts one, it and Vox both hiss –
The multicolored lights are spinning too fast – shit, they really ARE drunk, but the arm around his waist is steady, strong, and Vox is trying not to look at him, and his smile has something fragile in it that Alastor wants to dissect, wants to take apart and put on his WALL…
Vox, half-laughing, “What the fuck, Al, you can’t just say shit like that out loud!”
“Hush, you like it.”
His hand is too low on his back, but for once, Alastor doesn’t care – the room doesn’t spin so fast when he lets his forehead rest against Vox’s shoulder, and he’s…for once, for a moment, maybe…
The crack of the gunshot itself hurts. The sudden eruption of fire and ruin in the place where his left knee used to be is secondary. Alastor stumbles, half expecting to hit the club floor, a little surprised to feel the sand and cracked cobbles of that filthy side street instead.
Vox blows indulgently on the barrel of the gun. “Ya know, in retrospect, I probably should have led with this – but what can I say? You’re cute when you think you stand a chance.”
Alastor doesn’t speak. He snarls, all fury like a wounded animal. The second shot imbeds in his hip. He is distantly aware that it hurts just as much as he remembers, being shot. It’s been a long time, but that’s the sort of thing that the soul never forgets.
“Val will be so disappointed,” Vox says. His smile takes up the whole of his screen. “I think he was really kinda hoping I’d bring you home for a visit. You’d really hate what we’ve done with the place since you’ve been gone.”
Alastor switches his grip on the knife as if to throw it. He makes sure Vox sees it, slow and deliberate. Please be as stupid as I think you are.
Vox laughs again. “Seriously?” he asks. “That’s SERIOUSLY what you’re falling back on?” He crackles with raw power – cables surge around him, some whole, some cut and frayed, but each one ready to intercept a silly little flung knife, even one made of angelic steel. “I mean, I admire a go-getter, but this is just SAD. I tell you what.” He holds his hands out wide. “Take your best shot, you piece of shit. Let’s see what you can do.”
“Gladly,” Alastor says. And he throws the knife, not at Vox, but at a transformer box that has been crackling ominously on one of the nearby power poles for a while now.
It’s a bit of an experiment. How will a demonic powergrid and pure angelic steel react to one another? And the answer, as it turns out, is rather like a menthol dropped into a coca cola bottle.
Vox screams, his screen glitches, and then everyone ELSE screams as every electronic device for three blocks all but explode in the feedback loop, and half a dozen street lamps burst in a shower of decidedly rainbow-sunshine-colored sparks and glitter.
Then the pride ring goes dark with an audible garage-door sound, and Alastor falls backward into the shadows –
“Are you SERIOUSLY running away again, you fucking PUSSY” – Vox’s voice is so heavy with distortion that Alastor almost can’t make out the words, but then, he doesn’t need to. Vox is patently unoriginal in his response to prey escaping his incompetent, grasping fingers.
It happens kind of a lot – you’d think the poor bastard would have caught a clue by now, but Alastor is just as glad that he hasn’t.
He tries to tell his powers to take him somewhere safe – outside pentagram city, somewhere far from electricity, far from wires and fiberoptics and drones. But when he blinks his eyes back into being, he finds that he’s on a surprisingly shiny white floor, in a gauchely-decorated little circus room with a suspicious number of rubber ducks strewn about – that he can probably only see because a handful of them are glowing in the dark, as if any person in this or any other plane of existence would want a little bo peep duck that glowed a faint neon pink.
He gives his shadow a look that he hopes conveys the entire length, breadth, and implication of What the Hell is THIS?!
His shadow shrugs, unrepentant. It’s all right, Alastor already understands the problem. It’s his own fault. His first thought was safe, and this was the last place he felt… that… since…
“You got no one to blame but yourself if I step on your feet.”
He thinks his face is still bleeding.
He thinks he might be crying.
He tells his powers to take him anywhere else, but they just….sputter, and he is still here – surrounded by oddly judgmental bath toys, with light fixtures that are full of Vox and fireplaces that are full of Lilith, and hallways that are full of people who claim to be his friends .
Alastor does not want friends. Friends are dangerous. They crawl inside you, burrow in like maggots and leave holes in you, make you trust them, make you complacent and soft and then they – not like enemies. Good, reliable enemies that you know how to handle, know to keep at arm’s length, know not to give your back to or to trust past what serves their own self-interest. When your enemy tries to hurt you, tries to kill you, it’s never a SURPRISE – it’s expected, almost courteous. How kind, when people do exactly what you expect them to.
An enemy might kill you, but a friend can ruin you.
This doesn’t get to ruin me. Do you hear me? It doesn’t. You don’t. None of you. Not Lilith, not Vox, not whatever fuckwits Heaven sends down here, NONE of you.
He can hear someone in the hallway, muffled and clumsy. “Jesus fuck, what IS it with this place, it’s always something – Hang on, Char, I’m getting the lanterns, NO, honey, I love you, you should NOT be around candles, light NOTHING –“
Shit.
Alastor closes his eyes, gathers every ounce of his strength, and WILLS his powers to pull him anywhere, literally anywhere, that isn’t this stupid room.
The door opens, and Lucifer Morningstar, King of Hell, Formerly First Among the Stars in Heaven, trips over him and goes sprawling into an inconveniently-stacked pile of very squeaky rubber ducks.
“Ow,” his noble majesty huffs, his voice muffled in the pile of his own poor coping mechanisms.
Alastor keeps his eyes closed and this time, wills the ground to swallow him up. Wills himself to spontaneously combust in a puff of absolute mortification. I should have let Vox shoot me again, he thinks
“Aw, shit, why is the floor wet – if those stupid pipes have sprung a leak again, I’m going to – oh, hey, what –“
The silence that settles around them is almost physically painful.
“Dad?” That was Charlie’s voice from a flight or two down the stairs. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, Char!” Lucifer’s voice, Alastor notes, does the same thing as Charlie’s when she’s trying to convince the people around her that Everything IS Fine when anyone with an iota of sense could spot from HEAVEN that it wasn’t. “I’m fine! Just a minute.”
Then his voice drops to nearly inaudible. “You fucker, if you’re dead in my room, I will….I will…”
Alastor rollshis eyes when he feels Lucifer check for a pulse. “Or you could just ask if I’m consc-“
“SHIT you’re awake!” Lucifer holds up his fingers between them and snapped them, and his fingers lit with a soft glow that illuminates – well, Alastor isn’t sure what, exactly, but probably the kind of bloody mess that more resembles road kill than a respectable hotelier.
“Your powers of observation –“ Alastor feels the too warm, too fuzzy, skin tickling sensation that warns of a near blackout and digs the claws of one hand violently into the forearm of the other. What had he been saying?
“What the Hell happened to you?”
“Hell happened to me,” Alastor says flatly. “Now if you don’t mind -” If you don’t mind, what? Kindly go away and let me finish whatever I’m doing here? Alastor isn't sure where he had been going with that one.
“Fuck,” Lucifer mutters, clearly paying him no mind. He is not wearing his coat or hat - he rarely does around the hotel these days - but he is rapidly struggling out of his vest, even as Alastor feels something flickering over his skin like static
Every hair on Alastor’s body stands up in reaction as he tries to shove away from -
“Stop MOVING, dumbass, stop it, I’m trying to - ”
“Don’t DO that!” Alastor fairly snarls in his face.
“I’m trying to HEAL you, you absolute - shit, but it’s not working. WHY is it not working?”
“What’s not -” the world spins crazily and Alastor finds himself on his back as the erstwhile ruler of Hell yanks his coat back, visibly blanches, and then shoves the wad of balled-up vest into the absolute wreckage of his left hip and torso and leans his full weight onto the wound.
Alastor is fairly sure he’s never made a sound like that in his life as he tries, mostly successfully, to swallow the scream.
“Dad?” That was Charlie’s voice again, a little closer.
“Charlie, honey, I’m gonna need you to bring me a belt and a light!” Lucifer’s voice is so close to sing-songy it is genuinely macabre. Blood is spotting its way onto his shirtsleeves.
“A belt and a….dad, did a fuse blow up here? Something smells burnt.”
Alastor reaches blindly until he catches hold of one of Lucifer’s wrists, squeezes it hard. “She does NOT need to see this,” he hisses.
“Buddy, you have no idea how much I agree with you right now, but you are bleeding WAY too much, and if I move my hands -”
“Who DIED and put YOU in charge of -”
“Hey, YOU are in MY room, bleeding on MY rug, asshole, so YEAH, at least until the HEMORRHAGING ends, I get to be the boss of you!”
“Who are you talking to?” Charlie asks in her ‘I am slightly concerned that my father might be insane’ voice - and Alastor closes his eyes in resignation.
“You are so useless,” Alastor says to Lucifer, his eyes still closed, “that it’s almost impressive.”
Through the awful, cottony brownness that is swallowing him whole, he can distantly hear Charlie’s scream.