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You lie awake at night thinking about that moment every day.
Should you have taken his hand? How could you know it wasn’t a ploy, a trick? The same Vox that’s always putting himself on a pedestal, unable to allow even his own business partners a lick of the spotlight for the briefest moment. Tricks and lies and cheats are his specialty. There are no exceptions to that rule. Not even you.
So why are you guilty, and why do you regret it?
You lived your life on Earth with a target on your back. A bullseye square between your eyes. Not a word said to you wasn’t laced with malice, disgust, with hate so ingrained in their skulls that, if you were a weaker man, you would’ve caved to this fabricated innate “truth” of the world. But nothing presented to you was ever truth; not a single smile nor handshake nor drink offered was done so with pure intentions.
You believe in nurture over nature, and you are the prime example. Raised by a deceptive world only ever out to get you, surrounded by liars and frauds, you became one yourself. If everyone could fake it till they make it, why couldn’t you? So you did, and so you have. Right up until your death, and even past, you have faked and faked and faked. Not even the grin you wear is natural.
So when confronted with care, with kindness you’ve never known…what do you do?
Inspiring. That was what he called you. Are you really someone that can inspire, or are you just a pawn in yet another game of chess?
You roll over, and the analog clock hung on the wall is blurry—curse your stupid vision problems, you wish they’d stayed on Earth—but it seems to read roughly 2 AM. You got in bed three hours ago. A groan escapes you, but you’re careful not to let the smile on your face falter. To let it fall is to give in. And frankly, you’re not very comfortable with what may happen if you give in to these feelings right now, and you’re worried most for your dignity.
Your thoughts, inevitably, return to Vox. Where could you have gone wrong all these years? You’re not sure, and you almost just want to stop right there. Wrong…when are you ever wrong?
“…What if I’m wrong?”
It leaves your mouth before you realise. And the aftertaste alone is almost enough to push you in the deep end. Almost.
But it’s a question you know the answer to. What if you’re wrong? Then the past 70 years of your afterlife were lived on a lie, and that you threw away the one chance you had at something unconditional. Something that wasn’t a loaded gun, hidden with their finger on the trigger. You missed it—no, you laughed in its face.
What you’d give to go back in time and accept. It’s a humiliating feeling to say it, and you can feel your insides melting at the idea of the great, infallible Radio Demon changing his mind. Oh, but what you’d give, what you’d give—you’d sell your soul all over again, and that’s saying something.
It’s…ironic, really, that your feelings blossomed only when his turned to malice. It should’ve done the exact opposite—anything you felt for the man should’ve vanished the instant he suggested that partnership—but in the years since, you’ve grown mournful of the life it might have promised you. Mournful of what his reaction may have been if you said yes. If you believed him.
Who are you fooling, though? The signs were clear. A disgusting bastard such as himself is in Hell for a reason. Funnily enough, it was visually identical to yours, but you wouldn’t trust a man with your background as a business partner, either. You admit, you deserve the inferno, too.
His, though…you may have killed for ultimately petty reasons, some murders perhaps even justifiable. Him? Pure greed. Partly bloodlust, a few of them, just for the rush it gave him. Every move he made was careful and calculated, a planned accident or a strategic kill late in the night to avoid eyewitnesses. Each got him higher and higher up the ladder until Icarus flew too close to the sun. And then he just did it all over again in record time—and finally, in the late 50’s, you were eye-to-eye with a potential Overlord.
Even until the very deal itself, he was making moves to ensure you agreed. Pumping you with alcohol, buttering you up with praise, getting you as comfortable as possible…and don’t even get started with the grip he had on your shoulders. Sorry, Vincent, your dear little pawn knew that trick all too well. Ha-fucking-ha.
As the memory comes back to you, you’re feeling better. It’s a wonder you almost convinced yourself he was being honest. You can’t bring yourself to pity those other two he managed to loop into that deal. Whatever their names were, Velvet and Vwhatever. Ever the showman, even getting his henchmen with matching names included. Are you jealous? No. Of course not, how could you be? They’ll get what’s coming to them; they willingly signed their lives away to prop up a conman. You’re just waiting to see him slit their throats just like the men he stepped on in his life. Just like he almost did to you.
The memory is vivid, and distracting. You’re spacing out well before you get to the height of the recollection. It makes your breath hitch, as if you’re seeing it for the first time in your life. He was so…upset. Crying. When his outburst started, he was hardly choking back tears, sobbing out each word.
One simple little detail is all it takes for everything to come crashing down on you.
Your hand is gripping the sheets so tightly that your claws have sliced clean through. Your other goes fishing around the bed behind you until you latch onto a pillow and drag it to your chest. Face buries into it before you give yourself the chance to make noise. Of course, the fabric soaks everything up, tears and noise both, and you weep quietly into it.
You don’t move from this position, arms and legs wrapped around your spare pillow and face pressed flush into it, for several hours. Some of that you might be asleep for, but a majority of it is allotted to straining yourself dry of emotion. It makes you feel disgusting and pathetic, utterly mortified, and worst of all, like a child—but when your tears start, they’re impossible to hold back. Instead, you find the nearest sponge-adjacent object and get it out before someone sees you.
It’s a good thing, at least, that you only overthink like this when you’re in bed. If you weren’t so quick-witted and confident on your feet, you’d be dead years ago. Sometimes, though, you do need to be humbled slightly—Icarus, of course, would agree—and you suppose a bout of tears every other night does the job of keeping your feet firm on the ground. Preventing anything too drastic is good no matter how you try to spin it.
In the moment, though, this will never occur to you. Never that it’s okay to need to cry once in a while, or that you’re safe to do so here. All you can focus on in your unstable head is Vox. You sob yourself to sleep thinking of all the things you two could’ve been if you accepted, how happy he and you would be today if you’d said something else. Nothing about lies or treachery—in your fantasy, he meant it, every last word, with a generous spoonful of sincerity and love.
Love. Did he ever love you? It’s something that tonight, you only begin to ponder long after the first tears have hit, so your answer is predictable. Yes, of course, of course he loved you. He loved you and wanted nothing but to stay by your side, and you ruined it by laughing in his face. Friend-zoned and dismissed in one fell swoop.
What you’d give to love him back. You’re never sure if you do—you don’t know what love feels like, which, in retrospect, makes everything that much worse. Your potential first real love, from someone who trusts and respects you, callously rejected on a hunch. You know he loves you back, he must, but it’s grown into a sick feeling reigned by obsession rather than care. At least, it appears so—and with Vox, dear predictable Vox, you know you’re right. Whatever was soft and sweet about that initial proposal is long gone, replaced by something grown from the corpse of failed romance.
It’s nothing you can change. You may be the most powerful sinner in Hell, but that title isn’t much. There’s no way for you to go back in time, to push down all your thoughts of self-sabotage and to accept. In your final minutes awake, the last few tears running down your face as you drift off, you picture what a perfect world might have been. His cold, metal hand in yours, his face displaying a smile brighter and more genuine than anything he’s ever put on for the cameras he now drowns himself in.
He could’ve loved you, if only for a while. Just like the other Vees, you know it would never last—he may have once been human, but he’s been a demon for longer. Envy will overcome even the purest love in due time. And because you were once human as well, there’s a part of you that would’ve endured even the downfall if only for the honeymoon phase.
Oh well. That’s all you can really say on the matter.