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Lucifer, in all of his time to accumulate wisdom, had plenty of contingencies to consider when he'd helped rebuild his daughter's hotel. There were far more threats to worry about than just the exorcists, after all. Vox couldn't have had any way of knowing that the complex sigils printed into the spaces between interior and exterior walls would have such a profound effect on his circuitry. Lucifer was no tech genius, savvy as he was at the drafting desk. He could carve a mean rune, but he'd been going for coverage, not specificity. It could have been good fortune that Vox, little more than a spark of electricity, passed through the barrier of demonic magic relatively unscathed, thrown into the glassy confines of Alastor's perch no worse for the wear in a physical sense, though that condition was unmistakably battered at best. He went flying to the floor with a slapstick crash so surprising and sudden that even the normally composed Radio Demon couldn't help but startle out of his chair.
"What in the Nine Rings?" his unfiltered voice sputtered out, whipping around to look to the floor, where that recognizable navy blue tailcoat, along with the rest of the familiar being, lay prone on the floor. Regaining his composure, Alastor cleared his throat, stepping up near the flat-screen display that served as his surprise guest's head, poking at him with the blunt end of his staff. The demon beneath him stirred, groaning. "Took a wrong turn on the way back to your den of debauchery? I suppose that flat head would make navigating hard."
"A-Al, pl-pl-please," Vox tried to say, his vocal software glitching from the damage done to his display.
All of the joviality deflated out of the conversation like a doomed zeppelin. Vox has never begged this way. Not in a scenario like this; someone as privately pitiful as him still had pride for his public face. Alastor stooped down and rolled him over, finally seeing the massive gouge of broken glass in his display; malfunctioning diodes blinked epileptically, jumbled wires tangled together no differently from intestines, glimmering shards of glass and dull heat from innards shrouded in shadow lending a surreal art to the pathetic, fractured display. Vox didn't need to breathe, but old habits die hard; he was breathing deeply, panicked, afraid.
"Vox, who did this to you?" Alastor wondered, his tone hushed, smile as plastered to his face as ever, but wavering at the corners, tugging like it's being held up with puppet's strings.
"D-D-D-Don't remem-em-em-em-ber," Vox glitched, his shaking hand reaching out for something to hold on to. "Cir-cir-cuit m-m-ade me-e-e forget."
"Don't talk any more, save your strength," Alastor chides him, catching his hand as it flails weakly. "We need to get you fixed up." He'd barely finished the sentence before he was pulling Vox through the shadow on the floor, letting darkness overtake them for only a brief moment.
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There was a demon Vox always trusted with his electronics; someone even Alastor had reluctantly accepted help from a time or two. This would be the most urgent request yet. The shop was tucked safely down a side street only a few blocks from Cannibal Town, a prime piece of real estate long inhabited by the tech marvel, whose wizardry made him something of an understood non-combatant in the many turf wars Hell went through. Alastor led the drooping, delirious demon down the scorched turf of the street to the entrance of the shop, an antique chime twinkling to life as the door swings open.
"Well, here's a face I haven't seen in far too long," the proprietor calls out, his words jovially conveyed with an Madagascan accent. One eye swivels to look at them, the other still concentrating on a circuit board he's soldering new capacitors into, the sparks seeming to punctuate the pauses between his words. The sinner's hands have flesh, but past the forearm, glistening scales blanket like a patchwork, shimmering and blending into the reflected light, carrying up to his head, shaped much like a chameleon's. He rolls the sleeves of his collared shirt further up his arms as he stands, reptilian eyes now focused on his guests. "Sins alive, Alastor, I haven't seen the two of you on each other's arm in thirty..." He trails off as Alastor turns Vox towards him, the break in his screen immediately apparent.
"I'm aware, Kamil," Alastor replies hurriedly, "but now's not really the proper time to catch up."
Kamil, his voice entirely business now, instructs the fretting demon "help me get him in the chair," taking the one that sits at the computer desk. Alastor deposits the barely-conscious demon into it with little effort. The labored breathing has stopped, and it's all Alastor can do to tell himself that it's because Vox has gone into standby. The proprietor of the shop taps on Alastor's shoulder, passing him a cable that trails back to the computer. "Plug this into his display," he tells him, and Alastor, after some confusion over which slot is the correct one, connects Vox to the computer.
Kamil's typing commands into his keyboard in a flurry then, the two monitors displaying entirely different kinds of information, his eyes independently scanning the visual and verbal displays.
"His backup reserve is keeping him in a perpetual state of low power. There's no damage to the central processor, internal temperature is lower than optimal, probably due to the new vent in the system... language processing got damaged by the trauma..... RAM has been completely wiped, save for the encrypted files, but the hard-disk memory is entirely intact.... that's peculiar."
"I'm not going to pretend I know what any of that means, I just need you to fix him. Can you?"
"In my sleep." Kamil is already pulling gloves over his hands, rolling a handcart with his tools to his side. His prehensile tongue snatches one off of the tray, a spudger that he wedges in-between the two halves of Vox's casing. With some force, he pries a seam apart, carefully loosening the hard shell that surrounds Vox's display, lifting it away to reveal the sensitive electronics within. From where he sits, Alastor can see the back of Vox's head, freed from its protective shell, the posterior side of his casing dangling from the cable connected to the computer like clothes on a line. Funny, that Alastor has been with Vox enough times to have memorized every inch of skin, every nuance of flesh and machinery, and yet here is a part of him Alastor is seeing for the first time. The PCB that houses all that makes Vox who he is diverges from the typical, distinctive green, coated instead in electric blue. His ego, and that neurotic attention to detail, goes all the way to his internals, Alastor finds himself noting.
Kamil gingerly pulls cables from their connections, letting them dangle freely away. Seeing the cables that give Vox life, hardly different from the sinew that binds a human body together, makes Alastor swallow nervously. "Do you know what happened?" Kamil wonders, delicately prying a thick ribbon cable away from its secure placement.
"Not at all. I don't think he does, either, he was saying that teleporting inside the Hotel had made him forget, somehow."
Satisfied with his cable management, Kamil pulls a peculiar device from a lower shelf, the machine humming to life and blowing air so hot that Alastor can feel it through his coat. "Whatever did this to him can't have been fun," the reptilian tuts, pushing a suction cup against Vox's display with measured force, pulling against it to pry up a section of the screen before wedging a thin, flexible bit of plastic between the housing, sliding it to and fro, then settling it into the corner of the display. Alastor wants to keep talking, just to distract himself from the clinical demeanor of the operation, annoyed as his own squeamishness. As if he hasn't dismembered a nearly countless number of sinners, ripping still-pulsing offal and viscera from gurgling, thrashing victims.
So he has, and still...
"You can fix him, right?"
"You never repeat yourself, Alastor. I am fixing him, you know. After all those public rows, didn't think you'd care what happened to him one way or the other."
"Perhaps the years have made me... sentimental."
The pair are so invested in the work, they fail to notice the computer's monitor coming back to life, Vox's familiar LCD-face filling the display. It's a trick he's employed plenty of times, transferring his personal operating system down a wire into a different architecture, and gaining access to the built-in webcam only takes a few more seconds. There's a brief moment of horror when he takes in the sight of his body being operated on, the exposure of his inner workings akin to viewing a recording of your own brain surgery.
Instinctively, he tries to call out; he's a long way from his body, though. The computer he occupies doesn't have a sophisticated language synthesis module. And besides, on closer inspection, Vox catches a glimpse of something rarer than snow in Hell: Alastor, overcome with emotion. The smile remains as steadfast as ever, but in Alastor's eyes, there's something Vox thought him incapable of ever showing; fear, anxiety, terror. And Vox knows it's over him.
He still can't remember why he needed to get into the radio tower, but he certainly remembers the years that came before; in all of their interactions, no matter how close the shave, how high the odds, Alastor had never once cracked under the pressure. That smile had seen them both through Hell and high water, sometimes to Vox's obvious chagrin. He could hear himself yelling at Alastor "Don't you take shit seriously? What are you gonna do if one of us gets killed?"
"No need to worry about what could never happen," Alastor's voice replies in that singsong tone he uses just to push someone's buttons. Al always made him the butt of the joke, never hesitated to remind him how pathetic he was, never let it rest about who needed the other more.
And now here he was, looking like he was about to cry, watching an old friend put him back together. Vox can only watch in silence as the procedure goes on, Kamil eventually managing to pry the screen off, scraping the last of the adhesive clean from its housing and clearing away the last of the broken glass. Through the microphone, he can hear them talking.
"And replacing the glass will... help him?"
" A lot of his behavior is likely because his RAM was completely cleared. I guess you can think of it like... getting hit in the head and waking up disoriented, not remembering how you got where you are."
"Thank you for that apt comparison, Kamil."
"Just trying to be considerate," he retorts. "I'll have to find a display that matches his dimensions; thankfully I keep a few in reserve for one of my best-paying customers. Keep an eye on him while I'm away, will you?" Kamil excuses himself to the back room of the shop, Vox still mutely watching from the computer's display. For a moment, Alastor, thinking himself entirely alone, runs the back of a clawed hand across the torn-down shell of his longtime companion's head, unable to stop the tidal wave of worry that accompanies seeing him in such a state.
He really has been made sentimental. Perhaps it was having twice the time he'd lived on Earth, free to play his eternal game of cat and mouse with Vox, toy with him, lead him on, leash him like a domesticated pet and reward him like a dedicated attendant, that had softened his heart. And now, here they were, with no more games left to play. He can't help but speak, desperate to relate to Vox the words he was too proud to say in more equal circumstances.
"It shouldn't pain me to see you like this, not when I know that you were cheering for Adam to finish what he started. And yet, somehow, this is the closest to death you have ever been. To be the cause of so much death, and I've never given much thought to yours... Ironic, considering our being mortal is what led us here at all. But you *can* die again, and old friend, I worry over whether there's another chance after this one. Perhaps that is the intended fate for those like you and I. We are not good people, Vox. We are not even decent people. But..."
Alastor's voice cracks, his claws gripping into a tight fist. Vox can't see it from where he is, but for a moment, the smile wavers, somehow, before being strung back up. His voice hitching, he tries to continue.
"But... you were good for me. You were good for my soul, whatever's left in here that even counts as one. So you can't die on me yet, you understand? We have a lot left to do, you and I. I don't care about this feud any more, I'll do whatever it takes to make it right. So please, just be okay."
Vox wants to call out to Alastor, tell him that he will be okay, that his words have caused a stirring in him, perhaps even something close to what he had come to the Hotel to say in the first place. There's no way of knowing now, and it doesn't really matter, regardless. He agrees with him, and there's no way to say it in this moment.
Alastor is trying to regain his composure as Kamil returns from the back room with a shiny, black display just Vox's size, along with a small jar clasped in his dexterous tail. He returns to his chair, deftly maneuvering the jar onto the cart where the rest of his tools are.
"Would you do me a favor and hold this for a moment? I need to make sure that the display will work alright before I attach the adhesive."
Alastor nods, trying to make his face as unnoticeable as possible, hiding a portion of it behind the screen. He can feel the slight pressure of Kamil inserting various cables and wires, carefully making sure the connection is secure. Finally, he calls out to Alastor, "I'm about to power on the display."
A quiet power source hums to life, the black display dimly glowing with the VoxTech OS, booting up to the program that normally show's Vox's eyes and mouth, momentarily unoccupied.
"Is it working okay?" Kamil asks Alastor, still hidden behind the display. Alastor tries to speak, before Vox's eyes and mouth return to the display, his digital pupils wide with panic, mouth turned in a frown of confused disbelief.
"Al, what's going on, what happened?"
"Vox, you were hurt, I-I took you to get help, fixed up-"
"Obviously, I meant, what the fuck made you-"
Alastor's face is inches away from Vox's, bathed in the ethereal glow of the backlight's dim incandescence, his expression shifting. Vox has become fluent in the subtlety in Alastor's eyes, conveying what his mouth cannot. This is not for the others in attendance, they say to him, as clearly as if Alastor had spoken them aloud.
"Right... that's for later. Thanks for putting me back together, Kamil. Do what you have to do."
Kamil obliges the overlord's order, prying the cable loose as though he's flicking a light switch down, settling them back to where they'd lay only moments prior.
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Vox is still there, in some way. Standing by. More ghost than God in the machine, absent the power to affect the way the story ends. It's all in the hands of others, outside of his control.
He'd be powerless without the other Vees...
It's hardly the time for that. His brain, angered, sends the impulse to ball his fist up, and it cannot. There are no fingers, there is no hand, there are no nerves. There is the infinite mind, given parameter by the confines of binary code, fenced in a perimeter of circuits that his existence lays across, wafer thin and wafer fragile. And now, unavoidably, forevermore known to be every bit as fallible as organic flesh, without the benefit of autoregeneration.
It's meditative, if nothing else. There's nothing in the way of distractions, here; it's not quite the same as sitting still with your eyes closed, unless you were in the greatest sensory deprivation chamber good money and bad taste could buy. It isn't Vox alone with his thoughts; that would imply there was something else he was simply being deprived of. His thoughts are the only thing that exist here, and they're worse company than TV static.
He doesn't like being weak. Maybe he recognizes on some level that his entire corporate persona is founded on a bedrock of weakness; fear and paranoia at being outdone, subjugated, victimized, and vowing to be first to the punch, if it means avoiding the fist coming his direction. And it was all leading up to him getting shattered just the same.
He's trying not to think about it, but he can't help it; Alastor, that hypocritical son of a bitch. After everything, all the wasted years, all the broken promises, he had the nerve to cry for him. Of all fucking people, of all fucking times...
Isn't it what he always wanted? To hear Al say he was sorry, and fucking mean it?
But he hadn't said he was sorry. Sure, you could imply it from what he said, but that wasn't enough for Vox. If Alastor wanted to make amends, get things back to the way they had been... well, he wasn't the only one. But it was going to take more than him hoping they could forget. Vox was capable of forgiving, but he couldn't just forget. Not right away.
Something stirs to life. Vox's consciousness transcends that membrane of lucidity, the threshold of bodily cognition unblurring into clarity layered like the throes of fevered sleep, shaken off through temporary breaks in the will of the body, marred with nonsensical visions. Higher function restores itself in bits and pieces, phantom sensations becoming corporeal certainties.
Let there be light...
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Vox jerks up out of the chair with a deep gasp, claws clutching the lapel of his coat near his heart. Kamil, arm extended, tries to reassure him back into a reclining position, speaking in an even, servile tone. "Mr. Vox, you're no doubt aware that you suffered a rather serious injury to your electronics, and Alastor was so kind as to bring you to my shop for repairs. If you would just let me run some diagnostics to make sure that everything is working as intended, I can send you on your way."
"Fine, fine, I get it. Thanks for you help, Kamil, just send the bill to the company, yeah?"
"Of course, sir."
Alastor watches silently as Kamil runs diagnostics and calibrations, making Vox follow the ghostly trail of a single L.E.D. pen, having him enunciate every phoneme read from a chart, then differentiate exact colors on a swatch. It's a dull process, made tolerable by Alastor's barely-concealed delight at seeing Vox alive and well. He'd told a great many lies; some for his own amusement, some for his own protection, but he never fibbed about one thing; to be entertaining is the most important quality one can possess, and Vox was nothing if not entertaining.
Eventually the tests conclude, and Kamil discharges the Television Demon into Alastor's care. They thank him again for his help, making a hasty retreat from his shop. They're barely a block away before Vox ducks Alastor down an alleyway, trying to keep his voice down.
"You ready to tell me what the hell was up with you back there, Al?"
"Is it really so surprising I'd be concerned for you?"
"Yeah, it fucking is, you told me you didn't care what happened to me!"
"Because I knew you could take care of yourself. Because I knew that if you were ever in any real trouble, you'd find your way back to me."
"Oh fuck off. Why should I believe that now? All the bullshit Al, all the pain, all the humiliation and heartbreak."
"Where did you end up today?"
Vox already had a series of insults loaded up and ready to fire, but he's stopped dead in his tracks by the weight of Alastor's words. Even when Alastor was brought to heel by Adam, did Vox really think he was going to die? Or did he know that Alastor would find a way to weasel out of death at the last second? He was good at it; Vox trusted him to take care of himself, and he always had. More than he trusted himself to take care of himself. Defeated, he drops his hands to his sides. "I guess I'm always going to need you, Al."
"I'm sorry."
Vox's head twitches, double-taking at Alastor, and he shakes it, wondering if there's a lingering logic error in his operating system. "You're what?"
"I'm sorry. Sorry for the things I said. Sorry that I was afraid to be vulnerable, and I likely will remain afraid to be vulnerable. I thought even one person knowing my weaknesses was one person too many, but I suppose... it's foolish to assume that I will always be able to keep them a secret. Perhaps it is more important I find those that I trust not to exploit them."
"That's the best I'm gonna get from you, isn't it?"
"For now, it is."
Vox laughs, standing at the exit of the alleyway. "You know it's not gonna ever be like it was, right?"
Alastor offers his own ironic chuckle, moving to join him. "Living in the past is what I do best. You'll just have to learn how to appreciate nostalgia, old pal."
Vox knows that's not really what he means. The mouth said one thing, but above that smile, his eyes said something else entirely:
Maybe it'll be even better this time around.