Chapter Text
"Serpents, offspring of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of Gehen'na?"
- Matthew 23:33
Vincent was made for Hell.
He could feel it in the way the humid air misted up his screen and fogged over his insides, making his mind ache and slow to react. The way the acidic rain fell and hissed on the hard casing of his head, and threatened to seep in. The way eyes lingered from a menagerie of silhouettes filled with malice or lust or curiosity, and often a sickening balance between all three. His knees buckled under his awkward movements, and his spine cursed to get rid of the clunky brick that jutted out from his shoulders. Hell had tittered and giggled when he dropped down, a new thing to dance about over the coals. The Garden of Earthly Delights seemed more like a candid photo rather than an illustration.
That or just a children's caricature of this godless place.
He hadn't been able to settle down for a moment. He had arrived in this place in the same clothes he had died in—his suit, tattered and almost cartooned. The lapels were shorter than he had remembered, and the light embroidery of shark silhouettes on the insides of his cuffs had simplified and now more closely resembled a trio of generic fish. It was just the setup for the joke that was his new body. His skin was a deep blue that caught the reddish lights that enveloped the realm, and shimmered in places a captivating purple. It felt like a unified layer of skin, maybe tougher, but the neon blue tips of his fingers—claws— made it harder to feel the surface.
If he looks at just the right angle, though, a faint sort of patterned hatching could be seen, resembling scales. Hell had a way of being oddly beautiful with its aesthetics, but it was like the devil playing dress up with dolls. Cheap fabrics and ill-fits for objects meant to entertain rather than live. The aesthetics of his body, he quickly realized, were more real than they appeared and were truly a sadistic deformation and morph of characteristics that did little to compose a biological specimen capable of a comfortable life. Gills rippled around his chest and slit like vents were mirrored in two rows on both sides of his neck. The ones on his midsection opened wide and brushed harshly against the fabric of his undershirt.
He tried to lift it once to relieve the harsh rash, but the gills were too wide, and the rush of air that entered his lungs had choked back out of his mouth, making him flounder and lightheaded. He had decided to keep his clothes tucked in and clinging lightly against him. The ones around his neck were less sensitive but were unreasonably chilling. It was like refrigerator coolant had been piped through his body with no way to regulate. As the muggy air clung to his body and made him nauseous with the heated filth of the landscape, his vents continued to rustle a vicious blizzard of cold air through his upper body. The contrast of the two made him feel like he was in a never-ending wading fever.
"Fuck my life," he whispered aggressively.
He was walking who knows where, and for once in his life, Vincent Whittman was homeless. Sure, he had been between places before, but serfing the sofa of a dozen or so friends did little to compare to the paranoid trip he was having trying to keep himself awake and on the move. Staying still wasn't an option when every minute or so there was a man with his dick out and gun in hand just strolling by, or a woman, dressed in a disco-ball knitted outfit that reminded him of an astronaut suit, eating the face off a flamingo-like man midday with no care or fear of recompense.
So the pop cultural proverb proved true. No rest for the wicked.
Hearing the vulgar wretching of someone who looked high out their mind to the right of him, Vincent watched another short story play out in front of him. A pink latex clad lizard hacked up blood and collapsed. From across the street, an opportunist cannibal—he assumed from the recurring motif of sunken eye sockets— glanced up and began to make their way over. Walking faster and away from the scene, he didn't care to watch the end play out; the narratives here were never didactic. Any sense of right, wrong, and morals was abandoned once they had been cashed in up top, and heaven refused to be short-changed on the entry fee. The studio executive wondered if maybe he really did fuck up.
He should have gone to church. Read the bible more, or be jewish or something. Goddammit.
The TV-headed sinner continued like that for weeks. He, of course, fell asleep—collapsed— at times, but each period ended abruptly with some sort of horror above him. He was scavenged for parts, for meat, for a grope, and each time he woke, he wrestled more desperately against the exhaustion that left him more defenseless than he already was awake.
That was until he finally figured out a plus to his new form, and he'd be darned, it was very nice plus.
"What's that you got on your head?" the bear, or maybe a bulky mouse-like man asked.
Vincent's nose scrunched from the foul tartery smell coming off him before he mentally reminded himself he had no nose. He wondered passively what he looked like in the moment. His mind boggled on the thought before the towering stature of the guy really set in his cloudy mind, and his simmering nerves turned to a full boil. His skin became hot, and his reason overwhelmed the stress of barely being able to make out the full face in front of him as his eyes blinked furiously trying to bypass the siren calls of sleep that were trying to yank him under.
"You hear me, freak?" —the mammilian freak— asked. "Is that a television? That's crazy as fuck. New sinners keep getting weirder. It fall on your head or something."
First, fuck you.
Second, what's it to you jackass?
Third of all. He's going to die. He could see it in the gate of the burly body that shifted back and forth on its feet in front of him. This guy wasn't just looking to tease; he was planning on going for him. The smile and casualness of his tone meant he was strong. He recognized that the bulky-headed oddity was weak and a fresh little fishy. He tried to look around, but he was barely able to keep a decent enough pace as he walked. Running was out of the question. He was so-so-so unbelievably fucked.
His claws prickled into arms where he had them wrapped around himself. The chilled air in his chest made the warm breaths in his lungs brittle as they rushed in faster and faster.
"Let's have a look inside."
Before he could even think of a practical way to defend himself, a wide-paw like hand had already anchored itself on his arm, and he was being heaved forward. The other hand wasted no time in clasping around his face, and then a sharp, bone-piercing pain shot through his body. A claw was digging at the seam in his head, wiggling the weak spot of where the plastic connected.
"Come on, open up," the man seemed to only momentarily struggle as his claws tried to push hard enough to break through.
A sharp, vicious crack rang out across the screen of the struggling, exhausted man.
And it hurt. Hurt worse than his sensitive skin, hurt worse than when that slenderly black goey creature had gnawed off his finger a few nights ago. He had thought that was the worst of it. Your flesh being bled, brutalized, and disconnected, but this was different. The thick glass had cracked, and what he couldn't see anymore was the jagged edge that had broken completely off and into the domed surface of his face. It had angled on impact and poked into the components that were responsible for the screen display. The CRT face flickered in and out as the wiry hardware loosened and scratched under the shard of thick leaded glass.
He was going to die—he couldn't, fuck. He saw his finger regenerate. He saw how the roadkill on the street didn't rest but boiled and wrestled desperately trying to place itself back together. Who knows how his electronic head would come back together, if it even would. He can't die—literally, he knows it—that death wouldn't be an escape. It was just a worse hell, and he could barely stand the weeks he was able to parse out the world around him. But pain without context and rationale would be worse, he knows it.
He did everything he could to be at the top. To make his voice gospel, his face god. He said jump, they jumped. He said go, they lept. He didn't do it all, waded through all that shit in life to finally be the one in control, just for Hell to be real and for him to suffer in it. He hadn't shrugged past the scriptures of his youth and the hypocritical preachings of his father just for that dead son of a bitch to be right, or worse—actually in heaven.
The pain was too much. The hand on his shoulder was tight, and he couldn't wrestle away from it or even get a solid grasp on the hand on his case.
No—no. No. Shit. No. Fuck, he couldn't even budge. It hurt. The clawed hand came down from the top of his head, but there was no reprieve. There was the slight, curious, and sadistic nudge of the glass in his face.
A shrill, distorted yell tore through the street.
Light flashed.
Long dark silhouettes of everything in sight flickered in out out as the bright burst of bright white and electrically neon blue distorted in intensity. The humid air seemed to channel the shape of the lightning up to the sky a good dozen feet for a long three seconds before it let out a final crackle and disappeared.
The smell of the cooked meat was not nauseating as it had been before. It didn't even register as a smell, more so just straight heat. In his good eye that projected weakly on one side of his face, Whittman saw the burnt corpse in front of him, braced upright but now completely absent of movement.
With a couple of tugs, the battered man was able to get out of the tightly fisted grasp and look down at the still flickering sparks of his hands.
Fuck yeah. That'll work great.
The adrenaline, a biochemical hormone his new body also seemed to dabble with, was running out, and he felt his fear churn back into a tired stutter. Even this whole fiasco wasn't enough to keep him awake.
Don't stop.
Looking up at the charred body one more time, before passing by it. Vincent began his pace again.
This time, though, he did so with the addicting rush of one-upping someone so completely that their life is ruined in his wake. The thought of that body being taken and stripped for jerky or being chopped for a fire starter gave him vindictive glee. He saw it now. The path up and out of this eternal walk.
For the moment, the new fish just kept swimming submissively along the cobblestones, but there was now something charmingly predatory in its stride.
——————————————-————-
Vincent's life got better. That being said, words like "better" or even "good" seemed to be purely rhetorical rather than practical descriptors of anything down here.
But it was "good" and it was "better" because for the first time in a long time, he ate. Hunger was a phantomish pain down here. Maybe it was because he had never felt it while human, but for some reason, he still believed that it wasn't the same. Another biological degradation that Hell had to punish them, because while he drifted by for what may have been weeks, hunger had felt like the lesser of any other pain. It was wispy and burrowed deep, almost like it had tried to be forgotten.
Until it wasn't. From nowhere, his mind began to slip. It wasn’t anchored well to begin with, running on fumes and huffing them. The putrid air became swirled in violent colors, and his teeth had ground against themselves. It wasn't until he had felt the slimy ick of pus smathering across his lips did he came back to realize he was ripping through the plump guts of a rotting orca.
The black and white spots of their skin were patchy and dry in the air, and the wretching he did do the side did little to sink him out of to painful fit in his stomach. It was disgusting, it hurt, and he could barely remember doing it.
"Bit of indigestion," a weirdly distorted voice chimed up above him.
He startled, not quite yet expelling the last bit of bile now splattering his front.
A man stood in front of him. He was the most human thing Vincent had seen in his time down here. He was decked out in a deep maroon and red suit that looked well-kept but well-worn. Hair clung to his face less like strands and more like fur, jutting up in a short cut, thick in volume. The smile on his face was comically large, and his eyes crinkled curiously at him.
"What quite are you, my good fellow?" He looked back and forth from him to the corpse, "I couldn't quite stop myself from coming over and introducing myself. Especially as you were dining. Your teeth are truly remarkable! Newcomers seem to be getting bright new upgrades. A lucky bunch, I may say."
Maybe it was because he was exhausted and not in a position to string a coherent thought together. He knew rationally this man had to be a danger. Well dressed, confidently spoken, air of brevity all meant he was very much above all this. He was above the grime on the street, and the sleazy groups of men grabbing people into corners to jostle about and beat on, he was above this hunger that had left Vincent mad and broken in the street.
That wasn't taken into consideration when he wheezed out, "you dz-didn't."
The furred ears of the man flickered with the words, a trait that clashed humoursly with the poise and stillness in his posture.
"What was that, pal?"
Vincent looked at him, a little lost and startled. His own voice had come out in a buzzy and stuttered flow. It was just coming to him that this was the first time he's spoken out loud down here. He muttered a few times to himself, sure, but this was the first time he's actually raised it enough to hear it echo clearly in his ear.
He sounded like a goddamn TV.
Like him, but specifically his voice, as it could be heard on choppy recordings. Another reminder of his humiliating death and his new looks.
"Well," the projected voice inclined.
The man—deer?— in front of him stared patiently. His voice was oddly tuned as well, and for some reason, that soothed Whittman a bit. That this man in front of him had seemed so well adjusted to his altered body. His voice dazzled out of him like an entertainer and the showrunner in him couldn't help fidget and lean into the familiarity of a performance.
It took a moment to remember what he meant to say. And to remember who and where he was.
"You didn't," he rasped, "introduce yourself."
Eyes lit up in amusement.
"You're right!" The man twirled his cane with a sizable decorative topper. It didn't seem like it was for support.
"How rude of me," a hand came out in front of him, "The name's Alastor. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Quite a pleasure."