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“How about I call up and get you a Sazerac?”
Oddly enough, in the grand scheme of things, that didn’t sound too bad. Alastor’s plan was working out perfectly so far. Vox, just as he had expected, hadn’t changed a single bit. The only downside had been losing his last remaining bit of dignity. He could handle being paraded around town, but Vox’s pathetic display with the other overlord across the room? Abhorrent. It didn’t matter though, he’d be feared properly again after Vox’s inevitable downfall. Sharing one drink with him couldn’t hurt, really. It might even make his victory taste sweeter later on.
“I would not object to that, old pal.”
Vox had, in all honesty, already moved on from the offer. He was already rambling on and Alastor’s seemingly genuine reply must have caused his screen to glitch out for a minute.
“Fuck, I mean, sure, didn’t think you’d say yes to that.”
“Didn’t think you’d remember my drink order after seventy years, but then again, that’s just your brand of pathetic isn’t it?”
Vox called Ethan to fetch their drinks after that snarky comment anyway.
“One more thing, Vox. If you truly do want to have a civil conversation with me. He,” Alastor used his legs and ears to gesture vaguely at Valentino, “will have to go.”
The moth perked up at that statement: “What the hell? You’re our fucking prisoner, you don’t have shit to say. Right Voxxy~”
Alastor interjected, static lacing his voice as he turned around in his chair to face Valentino: “Do tell, who, exactly, was talking to you?”
Vox pulled the chair back towards the desk with his wires as he got up. Alastor could tell he had won already.
“Listen, Val, don’t you see how important this could be? Just how much information I, I mean we, could get from this? Besides, babe, you already got what you wanted right?”
“Contrary to popular belief, I am more than your fucking sextoy, Vox,” the moth demon squeaked.
“I didn’t say anything like that, now did I? Besides, this IS my bedroom so I feel like I have the right to choose who stays and who goes.”
Valentino shifted his eyes to Alastor’s grin, wider than it had been all day, which was saying something for that smiley freakshow. He angrily gathered his clothes anyway.
“This better be fucking worth it, Vox,” were his final words before storming out.
Ethan appeared in the doorway right on cue, drinks on a platter accompanied by the bottles of alcohol needed for refills. Vox snatched the platter out of his hands and commanded his assistant to keep an eye on Valentino as he slammed the door closed behind him.
A glass was placed in front of Alastor.
“You can check it yourself if you’d like, I swear it’s not poisoned,” Vox joked.
“Oh no, I don’t need to check for that. I doubt you’d have the guts to attempt such a thing, especially in your precious tower. I don’t think it’d be good for your image if I wrecked this place.”
“Hilarious, Al,” Vox picked up his drink, claws tapping against the glass, and held it out to the radio demon, “just like old times. Cheers.”
Alastor merely looked at his glass and back at Vox. Expression reading as something like “I cannot tell if you’re doing this to annoy me or if you’re actually this dim”.
“Right, fuck, yeah, the wires.”
Vox got up from his chair, one of his claws between the wires and chair, ready to slice them off, before halting briefly.
“No funny business, right? This isn’t one of your stupid tricks to get out of here?”
“Pal, that would go against the integrity of our deal, wouldn’t it? The wires and chair are entirely unnecessary. Besides, sharing a drink is a sacred ritual, is it not?”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it, no need to get all uppity about it, just… making sure, is all.”
“I have taken notice of the fact that you do quite a lot for your own peace of mind, yes.”
With that, Vox sliced through the wires restricting Alastor. The radio demon proceeded to stretch his limbs for the first time that day. Vox noted just how right Alastor had been. The wires did ease his mind a lot. And seeing the radio demon without them, in his home, in his room even, did nerve him out. Maybe sending Valentino out had been a mistake.
Alastor raised his glass to Vox politely before taking a sip. The drink actually mimicked his personal preferences quite well. Everything in Hell tended to taste a bit off, but this, this was surprisingly nice.
“So,” Vox started, “what did you wanna talk about?”
“Quite rude to make your guest carry the conversation, don’t you think?”
“You were the one to mention conversation in the first place. I’d assumed you’d have something specific in mind. I don’t think you would have agreed to a drink if you didn’t have anything in mind anyway. You’ve never been one to stay quiet for over a minute.”
Vox chugged his drink in one sip. He had never been a whiskey drinker, so Alastor assumed the other overlord was merely drinking along with him for the sake of faking politeness.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Is it so odd to you that I’d want to share a drink with an old friend of mine? You seem to think I never thought of you as such even though I let you get away with so much that would have ended others up on my broadcasts. I actually respected you, you know?”
“Oh for sure,” Vox poured himself a second drink, “but the idea of being partners and working together was simply too much.”
“We both know that was a loaded statement, Vox,” Alastor said as he shoved his glass towards the television demon to be refilled as well.
“No, no, I get it, you’re a selfish prick. Don’t worry,” he clinked their newly filled glasses together, “I am too.”
It got a chuckle out of Alastor.
Vox leaned back in his chair, seemingly letting his guard down a little, and continued: “So, what do you think of the tower? Tallest building in Pentagram City at this point.”
“First of all, I think Princess Morningstar’s hotel is still taller considering my radio tower is attached to it.”
“Doesn’t count, Al. That thing is on a hill.”
“Secondly, most of the interior is terribly distasteful. But your studio isn’t too bad. You still have an actual radio and physical speakers, I can respect that.”
“Well thank you, that’s quite the praise coming from you. Guess I’ll have to come check out your new place some time too.”
“Oh I would kill you before you even reach the door, dear.”
Vox laughed. A genuine laugh, and for a brief moment, Alastor recognised his friend from decades ago again. He snapped his fingers to make the radio next to Vox’s bed hum to life. Alastor had selected a few tracks from later on in his own life, just to make sure it would be familiar to Vox as well.
“Surprisingly modern by your standards,” Vox commented, which made Alastor chuckle again.
“I am amazed you remember what good music is.”
“No matter what you believe, I’m not stupid. I can see when you’re trying to do me a favour. Thank you, Al.”
They fell into a more comfortable silence, listening closely to the music. That was, until Alastor coughed up blood and poorly attempted to hide it by wiping his hands clean on his coat. It took Vox a moment to process, but once he did, he practically dropped his drink on the floor.
“Alastor what the fuck?”
“It’s nothing, merely a consequence of my more… marginalised tendencies.”
“One, you can say cannibalism. I know. I stopped caring decades ago when I first considered that I would taste like metal. Two, this has never been a side effect of that, you’re a terrible liar.”
Alastor wanted to object to both of those points, in all fairness. First of all, he was quite the good liar, if he did say so himself. Secondly, Vox did in fact have flesh left, it would hypothetically just be more annoying to get to. He simply had never tried because it seemed more trouble than it was worth. And he quite liked annoying Vox. More than he liked seeing the television demon dead. He said exactly none of those words out loud though because the freshly opened wound across his chest fucking hurt.
Vox, however, had already gotten up and had started nudging Alastor to take his coat off.
“I would quite like to keep my coat,” the radio demon protested.
“Should have used a fucking tissue then. I’ll send it to my assistant and it’ll be cleaned by morning. Promise.”
Alastor’s grumbles were laced with static but unfortunately lacked any real threat due to his continued coughs.
“Alright you dramatic piece of shit, I get it, you hate this. Now what the hell is wrong?”
Quite frankly, Alastor had had it with Vox’s caring act. He hated being doted on like this, and he hated that Vox was pretending to care about him even more. Did he mean for his next words to be quite that snarky? Maybe a little bit.
“Oh, well. I don’t know. I thought your stalking abilities were quite a bit better than this, considering you have been doing it for decades. Or are you having memory issues in that flat head of yours? Do you not recall me being hit by angelic steel a month ago? Do you not even remember slicing the stitches open this fucking morning?”
His voice was laced with venom and static. His eyes turned to dials. His smile threatened to rip his face open. Vox filtered right past all of it though. Alastor’s breathing was uneven and raggedy. His threats were empty. Vox had learned to listen past empty threats in his many years living with Valentino.
He quickly lowered his eyes to Alastor’s blood covered blouse and opened the first few buttons. The radio demon tried to kick Vox away and produced even louder static. It certainly succeeded at annoying Vox, who resorted to restraining the deer’s legs to the chair’s legs with a few of his wires. He didn’t even try to cover Alastor’s mouth up, knowing he would still be able to hear the staticky feedback in his own head anyway.
“By Lucifer, that looks terrible,” Vox started as he inspected the wound.
Alastor had mostly quit kicking and screaming, likely because of the pain: “Maybe because someone with a picture box for a head decided that he should open it up again.”
He had done that, hadn’t he? He hadn’t actually considered that a wound inflicted by angelic steel wouldn’t just close up on its own. The wound looked disgusting. It was deep and fleshy. Half of Alastor’s stitches were still in there, somewhere. And yet all Vox said was:
“It’s not like you did a good job stitching it up in the first place.”
Alastor instantly bit back: “Because it hurt to do so, you prick.”
“Oh there we go! The old man is finally learning some new insults! At this rate we might actually get you up to date soon!”
Vox was met with a slap across the back of the head from Alastor’s shadow for that one. Fair.
“Al, just fucking hold still, I can’t do shit if those nasty stitches are still in there.”
The radio demon still grumbled and protested but had stopped actively attempting to kick Vox, who then promptly withdrew the wire restraints.
“See it as part of the deal, can’t hold you prisoner if you go and die on me, can I?”
Alastor gritted his teeth and nodded in agreement.
“Do you want me to, you know,” he quickly flashed his hypnotic eye at the deer, “so you don’t feel me poking around?”
“I would rather fight Adam again.”
“Noted,” Vox murmured as he began carefully removing the old stitches with his claws.
Surprisingly, Vox was really taking his time, trying not to cause Alastor more pain than necessary. The radio demon found it odd that Vox of all people wouldn’t use the opportunity to prod at the wound just a little bit. As a bit of petty revenge. But he didn’t. Quite frankly, Alastor wasn’t sure if he had ever seen Vox be this focused in his afterlife. Eventually the television demon spoke up again.
“I know I’ve already said so, but fuck, Al, these are done terribly. Couldn’t you have asked Niffty to patch this up for you? She was a seamstress at one point wasn’t she? I reckon she could do it somewhat better than this.”
Alastor would have to press Vox on how he knew Niffty’s name later.
“My dear Niffty was, and still is, the best in the business. But I do not bother her with these kinds of minor scrapes.”
“You got cut open by a higher angel. That’s not a minor scrape. It’s fine, though, I get it. I wouldn’t want Velvette to see me if I looked like this either,” Vox gestured vaguely at the wound and the small pile of poorly connected string on the desk next to them, “I imagine it’s like that too when it comes to you and Niffty.”
“Yes, it quite is,” Alastor’s grimace eased back into his regular smile.
Vox rolled the radio demon’s chair back towards the bed, gesturing for him to sit down on the edge of the mattress. Alastor glared at him in response, angry static filling the air again.
“Alastor, I am not stitching that together while you’re in a chair with wheels on it. I know you. You’ll either think it’s funny to spin around while I’m trying my fucking hardest to fix you up and ruin it or you’ll feel a bit of a sting and kick my hands away, ripping everything out again.”
That noisy picture box did know him rather well.
Alastor merely responded: “You and that partner of yours have fornicated on this bed while I watched. I’d rather not be reminded of the unholy things I’ve seen happen in these sheets.”
“You could’ve been normal about it and said ‘hey Vox, would you mind changing the sheets real quick before I sit down?’ but no. You chose to use the word fornicate instead.”
Alastor chuckled as Vox’s wires changed the bedding in what he could only assume to be record time. Vox’s claws were still preoccupied with tending to Alastor. The television overlord had at some point during their exchange managed to find a towel and was currently attempting to stop the gaping cut across Alastor’s chest from bleeding. Once the bed was cleaned up, Vox’s wires shifted to support the radio demon’s weight as he stood up from the desk chair.
It was ridiculous, really, he was being tended to like a child that would collapse at the slightest inconvenience. His head had only been spinning a little bit ever since Vox had clawed open his stitches during their fight earlier. Besides, it had been manageable considering he had been carried around in the creaky desk chair all day. But this? Vox carefully supporting him as he took the two required steps needed to get from the chair to the bed? Fully nonsensical.
Is what he would have said if he hadn’t tripped over his own feet because of his blurry vision.
What came out instead, was:
“Thank you, Vox. Maybe you’re not truly useless after all.”
Vox’s screen glitched for a second. Like he was unsure of what he had heard. Like he knew he’d never hear those words again.
“It’s only fair, you know. See it as me thanking you for not ripping me apart and broadcasting my death yet.”
Vox continued applying light pressure as Alastor chuckled at the scenario. Now that the television demon thought about it, this really was odd, wasn’t it? He cared about Alastor. He didn’t want him to die, no matter how much he tried to make himself believe that he wanted the deer dead on his doorstep. Seventy years of being mocked. Seven years of total silence. And his first instinct was still to patch the other up. He just did what he would have done for any other demon he cared about. He had pried bullets out of wounds for Valentino before. He had supported Velvette until all of her loose joints functioned again after a particularly nasty dismemberment. It came naturally to him to extend the same grace to Alastor. How could he not? The other demon still looked and acted exactly the same as he did when they were proper friends. Alastor was unchanging. He could only hope the deer saw some traits left in Vox from when they had first met as well.
“Old pal, I do think it’ll need to be stitched up again. I would prefer not to do it myself again but I highly doubt you would do any better. Do you happen to have anything I could use?”
“What? No, you’re not doing it again. You’re the type of person to do an even shittier job this time just to piss me off. No way, Al.”
“I am not letting you do it either, Vox. No way in hell.”
Vox appeared lost in thought for a moment before turning back to Alastor.
“Would you let Velvette handle it?”
Velvette was the most tolerable of the trio that held him captive in Alastor’s opinion. She was overly modern for his taste. But she was just the right amount of snarky and she had offered him a taste of that angelic exorcist in that overlord meeting a few months back. Vox had continued rambling as Alastor considered her as an option.
“She’s very capable, I swear. Runs all sorts of surgeries on her modelling floor. Hell, I reckon this would be easy for her. And I know what you’re about to say. But if I’m really serious about it, she wouldn’t tell a soul. Really. Not when I’m genuinely asking.”
The radio demon mumbled: “Alright then, give your dolly a call, will you?”
Velvette stormed into the room seconds later. She was quite frankly under the impression that Vox had finally pissed Alastor off enough to get his ass handed to him and thus that Vox was the one who needed to be patched up. When she saw Vox with a bloodied towel in his hands and the radio demon’s chest sliced right open, it stunned her for a second.
Vox started: “Velvette, dear, I assume you see what the issue is now?”
The doll demon shoved the door closed behind her and set down the suture kit she had brought down on Vox’s nightstand.
“Vox what the actual fuck? Do I even want to know?”
“I doubt you do, dear,” Alastor’s voice chimed in before he coughed again.
Velvette groaned and grabbed a proper suturing needle before redirecting Vox’s hands to be out of her way.
“Did you use a fucking sewing needle to do this the first time or something?”
Alastor didn’t comment.
Velvette continued: “This is going to hurt like a bitch considering an angel did this well over a month ago and it still looks fresher than a new sinner. Vox could you do your weird eye thing or something? Make it a little more bearable?”
“There’s no need for that, Vel,” Vox interjected, “we both insist.”
“God, fucking, get over yourselves,” Velvette sighed, “don’t say I didn’t warn you. Both of you.”
As Velvette started getting into a rhythm with her suturing, she stopped abruptly as unbearably loud static and screeches filled the room.
“Can you tell him to stop fucking doing that? It’s messing with my work, Vox.”
“I don’t think he’s capable of controlling it right now, Velvette dear,” Vox replied.
“Could you like, try to filter it out or something? Don’t you two operate on the same frequency or some gay shit like that?”
Now that he thought about it. Alastor had on prior occasions used their shared air waves to contact Vox. He was continuously tuned in to whatever Alastor decided to broadcast, so to speak. Just that morning, he had been able to zap himself right to the radio demon because of it. He had never tried reaching out to Alastor himself. Usually teleporting through his cameras would do the trick to find the radio demon. Additionally he had always kind of assumed that this was a one way influence. A power of Alastor’s rather than a shared experience.
Filtering Alastor’s increasingly loud static out completely would likely be impossible. But trying to reach out and make it slightly less deafening? It was worth a shot considering Velvette’s hands were starting to tremble, turning the whole thing into a nasty feedback loop of more pain.
Vox wasn’t quite sure how this worked. He assumed this would come more naturally to Alastor. But he pictured it like the fight they had upon Alastor’s return from his self-proclaimed sabbatical. The brief moment before he caused a power outage across the Pentagram. That second where he could feel the radio demon’s presence again after 7 long years.
Meanwhile every instinct in Alastor’s body was telling him to run. Vox’s wires had formed restraints to keep him still, at Velvette’s command this time. It hurt and he couldn’t kick or run or anything really. When he had done this on his own, he had the grounding pressure of his own hands on his own body. Now it was all cold claws and methodical sewing. He was vaguely aware of just how loud the static and screeching sounds of deer were getting. He could feel Velvette’s hands get uncertain. But it wasn’t something he was doing on purpose to annoy the doll demon.
Worst of all, Vox’s stupid signal kept prodding in the back of his mind. He was trying to simply force it out. Not now, not when he was in danger. Not when he was vulnerable. He could barely tolerate Vox’s pestering on a good day. But his fellow overlord was persistent, more persistent than Alastor could handle right now and so he caved, just a little bit.
Lo and behold the staticky noises quieted down. Vox wasn’t entirely sure what had just happened. Or how it had just happened really. But he felt it, a light stabbing pain across his chest, like they were sharing it. Like he was a live painkiller. It was funny, really. But he was sure Alastor would kill him if he ever brought it up again.
All that mattered was that Velvette looked up at Vox and mouthed a quick thanks before finishing up her work.
It took her a while, quite a few stitches and some glue to force the wound closed. By the time Alastor properly came to his senses again, the doll demon had gathered up her supplies and Vox had gotten rid of multiple towels soaked in blood.
“He should be all good to go, Vee,” Velvette double checked her work, “as long as you don’t rip the thing open again.”
She then turned her attention to Alastor, who had returned to his neutral and closed-off smile.
“I doubt it’ll heal on its own. Then again, it just might. Nobody’s got a clue on how angelic steel really affects us. I reckon you’re the first sinner to fight an angel and live. Pretty cool, all things considered, fossil.”
“Was that a compliment or an insult, I couldn’t quite tell,” Alastor interrupted smugly.
“See, Vee, told you he would be right back to normal. You two know where to find me,” she continued while heading out, “but don’t you dare fuck up my hard work.”
Vox wished her a good rest of her night while Alastor finally rebuttoned his shirt and put on his bowtie. The radio demon then promptly got back in his designated chair and rolled himself back to Vox’s desk.
“Want another drink?” Vox prompted.
“Only if it will make us both forget about this whole ordeal,” Alastor replied.