Work Text:
The nights get longer the closer it is to Extermination day.
But does it matter? The night/day activities as delineated by the convention of mortal society don’t apply in Hell. Hookers walk the street day or night, drugs are sold in vending machines, and murder and mayhem are just as likely to happen mid-day as they are at midnight.
It only grows darker for longer stretches. Darkness descends and the power grid lurches and surges to chase the night away.
This makes Vox agitated. It excites his current, makes him more volatile. And more tired.
The haunting dark…
He’s grateful the glare and symbiotic sensation of the Pentagram all lit up makes it difficult to sleep. He never found solace in sleep.
The haunting dark…
And when it wasn’t the haunting dark, it was other things.
The touch of a woman. The taste of a fine steak. The smell of a cigar. The touch… The touch of something.
In the dream he ceases to be machine. Do androids dream of electric sheep? No. They dream of ghosts. The ghost in the machine. The Life Before.
The haunting dark…
The haunting dark should have been solace. The death eternal, the forbidden fruit of peace.
But in the haunting dark, he is machine again. Eternal. Fizzling, buzzing, raw current. The electric.
And he is alone. No audience even to watch his torture.
The haunting dark…
True no man’s land. Not even he is man. Who turned out the lights? No lights, no power--powerless. He was powerless. His stomach would not contort with starvation, his throat would not shrivel with thirst.
A slow trickle. Point by percentage point. And nothing--no thing to distract him from his demise. No one to see him scream and cry. No one to see what a television looks like when in despair, to watch the static grow and grow like moss, like a parasite, like pixel-eating bacteria, across his facsimile face.
The haunting dark…
He would die alone.
Could one even call it dying?
If a television shorts out and no one is around to watch it, does it make a sound?
If the power goes out and no one is home, does it matter?
And afterlife snuffed out--not with a catastrophic powerstation failure, a blaze of glory, one last hurrah, but with a fizzle-whimper of static.
The haunting dark…
Oh, god, the haunting dark.
The static… The static grows louder and louder, a rushing wave. Is this the end? Is this it?
Oh, it’s better than the silence.
Please let this be it.
“Open your eyes.”
A static-crash breath.
“ Open your eyes, Vox. ”
His voice is grating static, too. Machine, like him.
No, no. Not like him. There was flesh and blood and hair and teeth in him. His voice was facsimile, not his face.
He hears the snap-sizzle of a hand striking his static before the sensation reaches him. Finally, he banishes the nothing left of his mind’s eye--such as that is--and registers the room around him, the demon in front of him. It looks more like a dream than the… dream.
“Ow,” he grates back in his own static growl. He feels raw. Bare. Vulnerable. His screen--his armor, his attempt at a face --is gone. Removed. What lies beneath is exposed: another mockery of form, a featureless skull of static.
“You were unresponsive.”
“You took my screen off…”
“ You were unresponsive .”
The static laced in Alastor’s words isn’t anger--it’s worry. Vox’s head is still swimming, still touched by tendrils of darkness, but he can tell that much. He tips his chin up slowly, static eye-pits gazing at Alastor’s tense face. He’s not smiling.
“Woah. Scary look,” Vox says weakly.
Alastor sighs, his scarlet lids growing heavy over crimson eyes, and his smile curls back into place. “A true masochist. I have met many in my day, but you truly take the cake, darling.”
Vox watches Alastor adjust his cuffs--but what he notices is that Alastor has no shadow. Even in the flickering firelight of the room, he casts no shadow at all. Vox’s smile is lost in the static of his screenless form.
“You don’t have to be so careful, Al. I’m fine,” Vox lies.
Alastor pauses to shoot him a disbelieving smirk, a musical, frequency-change chuckle floating from him as he turns on his heel.
Alastor’s den is dark, but it’s a comforting dark. A contained dark. Not like his shadow. His shadow could imitate the haunting dark… But unlike the terrible dark of his dreams, Alastor’s shadow obeyed its master. It could be called off, commanded to retreat--as it had been. Now it was locked so tight within the Radio demon that not even the man himself cast a shadow.
Alastor brings him a drink. Vox can feel the burn of it pass through him, but taste nothing. Alastor sits adjacent to him in a matching sitting chair.
“How was it?”
“Better.”
“Liar,” Alastor says quietly, eyes fixed on Vox, though his face remains poised forward.
A chuckle ruined by static cuts the air in response.
“Fear is a healthy emotion,” Alastor says, his tone returning to its airy lightness.
“Mm, you would say that.” Vox manages to finally feel the chair beneath him, to adjust his position without feeling so unmoored that he might just float away. “Fear is a useful emotion. For us.” A beat. “ To us.”
“And yet you are determined to eradicate yours. Funny.”
“How is that funny?” Surely a fellow Overlord-not-in-name-but-in-influence would understand that fear was to be weaponized, not experienced.
Alastor turns his chin to look directly at Vox. “Are you really so eager to eradicate the last scraps of humanity you have left, darling?”
Vox’s current spikes and his ribcage feels fit to tear itself apart.
Alastor waves a hand. “Only making a point.”
Discontent roils through Vox. If he had any sense of a digestive system, he felt he would be sick. As a fresh wave of misery washes over him, pounding on the beach of his already storm-weathered mind, he sees a flourish in the corner of his awareness, elegant, spindly fingers--an offered hand.
He hesitates only because his system is so out of concert with itself. His hand falls heavy in Alastor’s, but slender palm and brittle-looking fingers hold and support it.
“Afraid my skill lies in breaking the psyche, not healing it.”
Another wave washes over Vox, this one of relief. A physical reminder that he is not alone. His current flows weakly through his hand, and Alastor’s answers in kind.
“You’re a terrible therapist,” Vox agrees with a stuttered laugh.