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Vox is incredibly stubborn.
It’s a fact perhaps not expected of the sinner, at first glance, what with his wide eyes, bright smile, easy laugh, and generally eager disposition. But anyone caught on the other end of a conversation with him learns quickly of Vox’s talent in sinking his teeth into what he wants and sooner dying than letting go.
Case in point.
Tonight.
“I told you, I can handle it.”
And Alastor can only sit there and watch, horrified down to his core, as Vox pulls out a pairing knife to trim the chicken thighs.
“I mean, it’s just cooking,” Vox flippantly goes on as he proceeds to saw through the meat, grinding and tearing and struggling against the striations of the sinew beneath his grip.
Alastor jolts up to his feet when Vox tosses the hunks of fatty, misshapen chunks directly onto an un-prepped baking tray without it seeing so much as a single grain of salt.
He feels like he might start crying.
“Sit, sit down already,” Vox laughs as he waves Alastor away with the knife he still holds in a slack grip. “Relax, for once. Have a drink!”
Alastor doesn’t so much as glance at the wine bottle resting by his elbow, unable to trust Vox enough to take his eyes off him for an instant. His shadow goes about pouring him a glass, but Alastor sees his diligence is for naught when Vox goes right on to chop unpeeled onions with that same pairing knife.
When Alastor starts tearing up, it has far less to do with the onion vapors.
The hunks of onion get tossed into a pan (oiled at the very least, thank the dubiously existent God) and they stew in silence, the pan not yet warmed by the burner beneath. Uneven hunks of carrot soon join them.
All of it unseasoned.
Alastor swiftly drains the wine glass his shadow eagerly presses into his hands, and another serving is poured and delivered as he watches Vox pull out potatoes from a side cabinet.
“Spud for my bud,” Vox chuckles under his breath as he skirts the sink entirely and plops the unwashed potatoes directly into a pot that hasn’t yet come to a boil.
He sits there and drinks and watches and drinks as Vox stirs the vegetables in the pan, the metal of his spatula screeching every so often as it scrapes the bottom of the pan. Sections of the vegetables are soggy from the oil while other areas are blackened.
It feels like his mouth shudders in fear of what it's about to endure, and Alastor does what he can to soothe its worry and numb its senses with another mouthful of wine.
He settles his cheek in his palm as he watches Vox struggle with the tomatoes. His bright tongue pokes out like a kitten as he concentrates on holding the vegetable tightly enough to still its roll, but gently enough not to squash. It's a precarious battle he finds himself losing again and again with mounting frustration.
Sans any spices to otherwise distract it, Alastor's nose is easily able to detect the scent of chicken twining around the kitchenette like the lazy curl of cigarette smoke. Or, more specifically, the smell of charred chicken skin. Vox doesn't seem to notice, busy as he is trying to slice through his fifth tomato.
"Vox," Alastor warns.
Splat.
There goes tomato five.
Vox sighs at the mess, the tomato's guts covering his fingers in a sticky, seed-ridden juice. "Shit, don't worry, I got this."
And he goes to work, brows furrowed, with tomato number six. And the stench of burnt chicken skin only intensifies.
"Vox."
He has the gall to shush Alastor, and when Alastor stands to correct him on both the chicken and his manners, Vox looks up with a glare.
"I told you to sit and relax, didn't I?"
And in his frustration, there goes tomato number six.
"Fuck!" He shouts emphatically before tossing the knife into the sink. While his back is turned, Alastor plucks the knife out of the soapy water so the wooden handle wouldn't warp. He has it delicately placed on the side of the sink, sharp edge facing away from Vox, as the "chef" returns.
Apparently, Vox has assumed the culprit of this tomato massacre to be the knife he was using and not the manner in which he cut. And his solution seems to be replacing his ill-chosen pairing knife for...a boning knife.
Alastor's shadow sympathetically pours him another glass, and he downs it in one go.
Before Vox can rip into tomato number seven, Alastor reaches across the butcher block, thinking he might be able to prevent any further culinary tragedies that night. But Vox simply reaches out and slaps Alastor's encroaching hand away with the flat of his knife, just like Alastor has done to Vox hundreds of times before.
Only to accidentally slice right through Alastor's forefinger.
It plops down onto the countertop between them.
They look down at the sluggishly bleeding appendage.
Then up at each other.
Vox's mouth is agape, the apology already clear in his wide eyes, which only widen further when he notices the hunger clear in Alastor's eyes.
"No."
Alastor glances down.
"Alastor don't."
He snatches the finger up just as Vox lunges across the counter. He pops the appendage in his mouth, the tang of iron and crunch of metacarpals an instant delight to his starving senses.
"Hey! Drop it!"
And Alastor is reluctant to do so, as he suspects it will be the only flavorful meal he's going to get that night.
Vox rounds the counter and makes a swipe at Alastor, but he slides off the barstool and evades with an easy jump back. Vox chases him around the small apartment, tripping over the stray shoes and jackets and paperwork he's tossed aside carelessly after coming home the past week. Alastor cackles when Vox nearly shatters his face on the corner of the coffee table after slipping on a glossy magazine.
"Fuckin' shit- shitty ass, too much fuckin' shit everywhere, can't even fucking," Vox rants as he climbs back to his feet. He rounds his attention to Alastor, finger pointed and mouth open to no doubt spew more obscenities, but his attention flicks over Alastor's shoulder.
"Shit! The potatoes!"
Vox sprints past him and into the kitchen, where the pot is boiling over. Before even turning the burner off, Vox grabs the handles and pulls the pot towards the sink. The heat catches up to him halfway, and he drops the pit with a yelp into the sink, boiling water and potatoes pouring all over the basin.
Alastor has his shadow surreptitiously turn off the stove while Vox runs his hands underneath the tap. He's got that look on his face he gets when he's trying very hard not to cry, and Alastor quietly perches on the barstool so he can savor each flicker of pixels and smothered whimper.
Once his hands are better, Vox gives them a careful flex and, apparently, gives up on the tomatoes as he sweeps the mess off the counter and into the garbage bin. He silently fishes the potatoes out of the sink, holding them carefully by the tips of his claws, and tossed them into a waiting metal bowl.
With a large fork, Vox gets to work pressing and mashing and stirring the spuds. He grunts and mumbles the occasional curse under his breath as he works. Judging by his struggle, the potatoes likely weren't cooked all the way through.
But Alastor is distracted by the appearance of something he had started to believe Vox didn't even own: salt! He just barely holds back the tears of joy as he watches Vox pour a generous helping into his mashed potatoes, though real tears of grief manage to escape from his eyes as he witnesses Vox peel away squares of American cheese from their plastic sleeves and slap them down over the bowl of potatoes to melt.
It's only then that Vox finally checks on his chicken, and a dark plume of smoke greets him as he opens the oven door. The smoke gushes out and rapidly envelopes the apartment, but with one of the very few virtues of Hell being the utter lack of adherence to building safety codes means they are at least spared from the irritating squeal of a working fire alarm.
While Vox frantically tries to disperse the smog with a hand towel, Alastor sends on shadow tendril to open the nearest window while the other fetches a new bottle of wine. He is certainly going to need it, judging by the state of the chicken Vox places on the counter, or, more accurately, the state of what was once a chicken.
The sad blackened hunks of meat are strewn across a backing sheet coated in a thin layer of fat that had been rapidly cooked off by the oven's heat. Unguarded by so much as a layer of parchment paper, the poor thing hardly stood a chance.
Regardless, Vox uses a fork to stab the thighs and transfer them to a plate for serving. Onto another plate go the vegetables, which slide from the pan to land with a wet, soggy plop onto the serving plate.
Vox carries the dishes to the small table he has crammed between cabinets beside the one window in his kitchenette, the one currently open to the sounds of screams and traffic six floors below. Alastor watches him set the table with plates for himself and Alastor. Alastor does his part in carrying over the wine and two glasses.
He arrives in time to watch Vox pause for a moment, utensils in hand, before hesitantly setting the fork on the left side of the plate and the spoon and knife on the right. The spoon and knife are inverted, but he decides to let it slide for now.
They sit on opposite sides of the cramped kitchen table, their knees knocking against one another and shoes (because Alastor will not remove them and expose his hooves to Vox's disgusting carpeted floors) occasionally brushing. Vox portions them out servings while Alastor pours Vox a glass of wine and refills his own.
The potatoes, as he'd suspected, are not fully cooked. Hunks of hard potatoes hide amongst the starchy mess. The American cheese coats the potatoes like a film of scum atop a still lake and, upon chancing a taste, Alastor realizes that Vox had not salted the potatoes.
He had sugared them.
Alastor can only hope, for the sake of his sanity, that such a decision was made in error, and hurries through finishing them off so he doesn't have to look at them anymore.
Across the table, he can see Vox pause in his chewing of a carrot. His brows are furrowed and the corners of his mouth pinched in. His throat is working, but the food remains in his mouth, like he can't coordinate his body well enough to swallow.
Alastor takes a moment to cleanse his palate with some wine and decides to chance the chicken while it's still hot. With the knife and fork, he slices through the first piece. The charred skin crumbles like chalk beneath his utensils and peels away to reveal rubbery and pink flesh inside.
Chicken certainly ranks among the worst of the raw meats (white meat tends to be so bland on its own, and the texture of raw chicken is, frankly, abysmal) but he forces down every bite without complaint.
The other vegetables on his plate, the oily carrots and half-burnt onions, are more or less indistinguishable from the chicken in quality, so he suffers them in silence until, bite by bite, his plate is finally clear.
He glanced back across the table to see Vox's plate is still mostly full. The lumpy pile of potatoes is gone, as are maybe half of the pan-fried vegetables, but the chicken remains, each portion cut open and abandoned.
Vox's eyes flick up and meet Alastor's, accidentally, going by the speed in which Vox snapped his gaze back down to his own plate. Alastor can see him fidget in his seat, can feel his knees rock against his own. Vox worries his lip with sharp teeth.
"It's...I..."
The words die in Vox's throat, but Alastor can imagine what he wants to say. An admission of fault, most likely. Perhaps a joke about his overestimation of ability. Maybe even an apology for this tragedy of a meal.
But Alastor looks at the food on the table, and the man across from him who had tried so very hard to make it.
Alastor usually cooks for himself, both out of the practicality in knowing what he likes and in enjoyment of the task itself. But he has been cooked for in the past.
When he was alive, his mother had cooked for him out of love for her son and to teach him their shared culture.
When he came down here, Rosie had cooked for him out of love for her friend and to share with him new recipes.
And with Vox...it's hard to say why he decided to cook for Alastor. This is the first time it ever happened.
So he takes in the hesitancy of Vox's voice and the self-conscious slouch to his shoulders and the eyes that wouldn't meet his own.
He takes in the messy living room of a man who is too busy working to clean and a kitchen that has rarely ever seen use in near shambles.
He takes in the meal before him seasoned with nothing but ill-chosen sugar and love.
"It was a fine attempt," Alastor says, a bit surprised at what comes from his mouth.
Vox is too, going by the gobsmacked expression stretched across his screen. But, even more surprisingly, Alastor doesn't find what he's saying to be wrong. Not in the least.
"I think, we should cook together next time."
A ripple of static washes over Vox's screen as he jerks upright. "Wha- really?"
Alastor can feel his eyes soften and allows the expression to happen. It has taken some time, but he has learned that it is safe to be like this around Vox. Soft. Forgiving. Gentle. It's strange, and still a bit unsettling, but not bad. Things were never bad around Vox, at least not until he decided to try cooking. But even that was fine. It was a mistake, yes, but a salvageable one.
One they could fix together.
"Would you be interested in that," he asks Vox, as though he can't already read the answer across Vox's face.
The giddy smile only grows. The eager excitement bleeds into Vox's eyes and they fash brightly for a moment. "Yeah! I- ahem, yeah, I'd really like that."
And Alastor is surprised, but not altogether displeased, to find that he is similarly excited to share this passion of his with Vox.
"Fantastic. It's a date."
He holds out his wineglass to toast in lieu of a hand to shake.
There's something in Vox's expression that Alastor can't quite discern, but he doesn't think a out it much further when Vox doesn't hesitate to pick up his own wineglass and tap it to Alastor's.
"Yeah," he agrees, his low voice soft, downright fond, "it's a date."
And they seal their deal with a drink.