Chapter Text
The first thing to know about Vox was that he was a loser.Not just any kind of loser, but a very specific, deeply pathetic kind of loser, the kind that manages to lose even when the odds were already in his favor. So when he lost to, well, the Hazbin Hotel gang, that was the word anyone would use. Even if they didn’t really feel like a gang or a group, more like a bunch of coworkers stuck together by circumstance and unresolved trauma, it still counted.
And since Vox was defeated by those losers, and Valentino took control of VoxTech, the conclusion was simple and merciless.
Vox was alone.
Defeated, stuck in that weird iPad mode without a body, flickering and glitching, jumping from screen to screen while his true form was reduced to a miserable rectangle. No hands, no weight, no presence. Just images and sound and static. Existing without existing. So of course, when a random, seemingly powerful demon offered him a deal, he said yes.
Okay, she had weird white skin and red eyes, red hair too, which made her look like a rejected member of a rock band that never made it past their first gig. But who was Vox to judge appearances at this point. He had nothing left.
The other two members of the Vees hadn’t spoken to him in three months. Not a call. Not even a sarcastic remark. Valentino had taken everything worth taking, and what remained of Vox was apparently not worth the effort.
So Vox stayed there, alone, without a body, without a place, without anyone looking for him. And when you strip someone down that far, when you leave them floating with nothing but time and regret, you shouldn’t be surprised when they say yes to the first hand that reaches out. Even if that hand clearly belonged to something that would ruin him in an entirely new way.
So the random sinner appeared and proposed him a deal.
In contract terms, it was fairly simple. Almost insulting in how simple it was.
She could make him the most powerful demon in Hell without changing his actual power.
No visible cost, no obvious loopholes written in microscopic ink at the bottom of the page. Nothing about souls, nothing about servitude, nothing about eternal suffering beyond the usual baseline Hell already provided. It sounded clean, professional, and dangerously reasonable.
Of course, Vox didn’t know.
He didn’t know who he was really dealing with. He didn’t know that the pale woman with red eyes and too-wide smiles was Roo. He didn’t know that the entire point of the deal wasn’t really about him at all, but about making Lilith’s and Rosie’s lives significantly more complicated. And in this very particular, very delicious case, Alastor’s as well.
The deer demon, of course, didn’t want to see this creep regain power after such a ridiculous defeat. It offended something deep and personal in him. Vox wasn’t supposed to rise again. Not like this. Not without suffering properly for it.
But Roo didn’t care about pride or rules or balance. Roo fed on despair and opportunity. And Vox, glitching, bodiless, abandoned by his own allies, was a prime target. He was loneliness, insecurity wrapped in neon, a man desperate enough to believe that power could be handed to him without asking anything back.
So she smiled, and he listened.
And then the deal began.
Of course, nobody would really remember it afterward. Not properly. Not the way it happened, not the weight of it, not the moment where everything quietly shifted into something worse. The memories blurred, bent, slid into the cracks of Hell like water down a drain. Everyone forgot. Everyone except, of course, Alastor and Rosie. Some beings were simply too stubborn, too old, or too powerful to let reality be rewritten without noticing the seams.
Vox, for his part, was happy.
Genuinely happy, in a way that almost scared him when he stopped to think about it. His sins to Valentino and Velvette were erased, cleanly, efficiently, like they had never existed. The debt, the humiliation, the constant pressure crushing his chest until every thought turned suicidal, all of it gone. Even his breakdowns, the ugly ones where he dissociated so hard he barely existed, were wiped away as if they had been a temporary software bug.
He felt lighter.
He didn’t question it, because Vox never questioned miracles when they finally looked his way.
Tomorrow, of course, he would wake up to a surprise. Waking up as Charlie’s new older brother was not something he would have predicted, even on his worst drug fueled paranoia spiral. It would take him a few minutes to process, maybe longer, but in the end he would smile and accept it with that familiar logic of his.
This wasn’t a curse. It was an opportunity.
A new position. A new narrative. A new way to claw his influence back without crawling through Alastor’s shadow ever again. If Heaven had slipped through his fingers once, then fine, he would take it back in force this time, with better leverage, better allies, and a cleaner image.
Vox believed this was a second chance.
He did not yet understand that Roo did not give second chances.