Work Text:
A little blue spark of happiness tesla-coiled its way up Vox's antennae, flaring off in an excited burst of electricity that was barely visible in the intense glow of the trapped angel in front of him.
The plan had worked perfectly. The Serpent, the Flame, the motherfucking King of Hell himself had fallen for a plan that was so ridiculously simple that Vox almost hadn't bothered to try it. He hadn't needed to do more than change his voice, fake a phone call, and tape a big stupid red X on the floor. The angel had walked into the trap like an idiot. Boom. Done.
Vox was thinking in italics. That's how well the plan was going.
And to top everything off, not only was Alastor there to see Vox's triumph, but he was trapped just as thoroughly as Lucifer was. He hadn't even needed angelic steel or disguises to get Alastor in his clutches. The Radio Demon had offered himself up like a broken little lamb after Vox had happily ground him into the pavement.
(He'd overheard one of the staff commenting that it had been too easy, that surely it was some kind of reverse trap that would kill them all. Well, the man had been right about one thing - his imminent death. Shoky always loved eating mouthy sinners.)
Fuck that guy. Alastor was his now, parked in an office chair with a single puny cable wrapped around him to remind him every second of every day that he was Vox's prisoner. He was currently sulking over by the wall, ears flattened, red eyes glaring at him in the dim gloom of the warehouse. Good. Let the fucker stew in the sight of Vox doing what Alastor could only dream of.
And now here Vox stood, in his latest moment of triumph (and oh, there had been so many recently, he was building up a whole fucking photo album of Charlie and her dad getting their asses handed to them over and over again) and nothing was going to stop him now. With a little twitch of the electricity flowing through the wires below him, he started the lift. Lucifer, trapped in his egg-shaped prison, rose into the air -
And came to an abrupt, grinding halt.
“What the fuck,” Vox snapped, striding forward to examine the equipment. The weapon was Carmilla Carmine's, as was the little prison pod, but the lift to attach one to the other was all VoxTek. Alastor's constant needling about you'd be nothing without the other two and always needing someone else to help you out was definitely not the reason that he'd insisted on that particular lift being installed, though. It wasn't like he needed his name on any tangible part of this plan to prove to that red motherfucker who was in charge.
Which was good, because at the moment, the part with his name on it was the part that was fucking everything up. It had been a hell of a time to get the thing put in. The warehouse looked sleek enough on the surface, all metal floors and V-shaped barriers on the walkways, but underneath the surface the electrical work hadn't been touched for...oh...decades, probably. The janky old wiring wasn't up to the kind of load that this particular lift required. The little crew of VoxTek employees that he'd set to the task had managed to make it work somehow, though.
Maybe he should have supervised the updating of the wiring down here himself. Val kept getting bored and murdering the electricians if Vox wasn't around to oversee things personally. He kept telling him, it didn't matter how pretty arc flashes were, it meant that it was going to put them behind schedule...
Well, he had more important things to worry about than some stupid fucking wires. He'd...they'd be ruling Heaven in a few days. The warehouse and its brand-new inhabitant only had to last for long enough to get him onto his well-deserved divine throne and then he wouldn't give a rat's ass what happened down here.
Of course, that was if he could get the stupid fucking thing to work again.
When. He meant when, of course. When he got it working again.
He could feel Alastor's smirk burning into his shoulderblades as he began to lever up the floor with his sharp blue claws. They'd had to stuff most of the electrical bullshit down into the floor to keep Lucifer from seeing it. He could call one of his staff to disassemble the floor for him, but no, that would be asking for help and he was not in the mood to deal with another round of smug eviler-than-thou lecturing from Alastor, not that any of it was true, because one of the best things about being in charge was making other saps do all the grunt work -
The floor panel clattered to the side, revealing a three-by-three hole that led straight down into the warehouse's crawl space. The little hole was full of cables and ancient cloth-wrapped wiring that had been shoved aside and halfheartedly pinned back to make room for the complicated jury-rigged mass of electronics that powered the lift. Vox glared at it. Maybe he should have hired engineers to design the lift instead of making Ethan do it.
“What's the holdup down there?” Lucifer called.
“Vox's little toy broke,” Alastor called back. Vox could hear that fucker grinning under the rustling of cardboard.
Cardboard?
Vox snapped his head around without bothering to turn his body as well. One drawback of the office chair prison was the fact that his captive was a) mobile and b) easily bored. Alastor tended to drift around whatever room Vox had him imprisoned in like one of those butterflies that caused hurricanes. At the moment, he was investigating the huge shadowy heaps in the back corner of the warehouse.
Normally, the place was full of stage parts and lighting and all the other bullshit they needed for their big PR stunts, but his staff had actually managed to do something right for a change and get all of it upstairs, outside, and assembled for the big reveal tomorrow. The whole warehouse should have been empty. At the moment, though, the warehouse was also serving as temporary storage for all the random stuff they'd acquired in their decades of running Hell's most successful media empire. (Their usual storage space had been unexpectedly exposed to the elements when Lucifer had smashed every fucking window in the tower a few days ago during his big Look at me, I'm the Devil song-and-dance.)
Cardboard boxes were stacked in unsteady piles back there in the gloom, a sea of memories sealed up tight and left behind as they'd moved onward into the future. Alastor was enthusiastically pawing through one of the boxes with both feet.
“Get out of there.”
“Here.” Alastor flicked a coiled wire out of the box. It tumbled to a stop a few feet away from Vox.
He didn't touch it. Vox's eyes flicked back and forth from the wire to the trapped radio demon. What was his game this time?
“I'm bored,” Alastor announced, spinning once in his chair for emphasis. “I'd like to go back upstairs sometime this century.” He gave Vox a sly grin. “What, you'll accept help from everyone but me?”
“I...”
“Really, Vox, you mustn't be so slow,” Alastor drawled. “Don't you have a very important plan to follow? You certainly wouldn't shut up about how long it was taking for your little friends to put together their dance number the other day.”
Vox was not an idiot. He knew full well that trusting Alastor with anything was useless at best and suicidal at worst. On the other hand, he'd just opened that box - how could Alastor have sabotaged anything in the short few seconds he'd had with it? Maybe he was telling the truth for once.
“You know, you really should have someone fix up the wiring around here,” Lucifer called conversationally. “You leave it hanging from the rafters like that, you're asking for a fire.”
Alastor leaned to the side, looking past Vox to the little glowing pod that was currently housing the universe's most well-known fallen angel. His eyes narrowed over his sharp yellow grin. “Since when was the King of Hell required to know about building safety? Or was that just a little hobby you picked up while you were ignoring your responsibilities?”
“Who do you think rebuilt the hotel after you let it get destroyed?” Lucifer countered.
“I'd hardly call waving your hands around a bit building anything.”
“Big talk from someone who didn't bother showing up until all the work was done!”
Vox bent down and scooped up the wire, removing himself from the middle of the pointless bickering. Maybe Al had given him the wire to get himself away from Lucifer that much sooner. If that was the case, he definitely had a point - the angel hadn't exactly endeared himself to Vox either.
Then again, Lucifer's presence hadn't been all bad. The on-the-spot spin Vox had managed to put on Lucifer's unanticipated interruption of his rally had been fucking beautiful. Some of his best work, really, and the audience had eaten it up, hanging on his every word like he was...ooooh, like he was a god. Praise Vox, they'd chanted, and he'd spread his pixelated wings and showed Heaven just what kind of dangerously charismatic motherfucker they were dealing with. He'd humiliated Lucifer, sent the archangels packing, and had collected another page for Charlie Morningstar's Big Book of Failure. He was unstoppable. He could do anything.
Speaking of which...he had a thousand and one other things he had to do before the big reveal tomorrow, and according to the schedule, he was supposed to have been done down here two hours ago. He slid his top half down into the hole and gently tossed the wire toward where he wanted it to be. Thanks to his close, personal bond with electricity, he didn't need to worry about shutting the power off before he ordered the wire to twine itself around a contact here and one over there -
Sparks fizzed and fountained into the air in a shower that would have looked quite pretty if it wasn't aimed directly at Vox's face. He ripped the cable free, flinging it back onto the ground behind him as he rose from the hole in the metal flooring.
“I am going to fucking end you,” he snarled at Alastor. Smoke coiled up from his shoulder where an ambitious spark had decided to try and turn his jacket into a bonfire. He slapped it until it was extinguished.
Alastor grinned innocently at him, eyes wide. “Aw, I was just trying to help, old pal,” he said brightly.
Vox snatched the cooling wire up and examined it suspiciously. There, in marker that he should have read before he plugged the damn thing in, was the word CAUTION written large enough for even Val to see. He stormed over to the box and kicked it into the light. A small paper label was stuck to the top of the box. SFX - PYRO - SPARKS it read, in his own blocky handwriting.
Vox grabbed the box and flung it closer to the lift, away from any further exploration by his captive. In fact, just for good measure, he dragged Alastor back into the lighted area of the room, parking him near the edge of the circle of light surrounding the lift and pinning his chair in place with a few spare cables. “Don't move,” he growled.
“Wouldn't dream of it,” Alastor replied cheerfully.
Lucifer chuckled. “I see you learned some manners while you've been gone.”
Alastor glared up at the angel. Vox could almost see the war raging in Alastor's head between his two current personas - the Vox-centered malicious-compliance-laced I'm Just Trying To Be Helpful, Really versus the Lucifer-induced I'm An Argument With Antlers.
“You, on the other hand, have yet to learn anything, it seems,” Alastor said coldly.
“Hey, I know all kinds of stuff.”
“Oh?” Alastor's grin turned a little more sharp. “What's my name?”
Lucifer rolled his eyes. “Who cares?”
Vox abandoned the two to snipe at each other and stuck his head down into the slightly quieter recesses of the hole. Now, where was he -
His head buzzed as Val's ringtone echoed off of the metal surrounding him. Oh, what now... “Val,” he said, trying to sound like he wasn't in the middle of tech supporting his own fucking lift while his two nemeses bitched at one another in the background. “What can I do for you?”
“Baby, where are you? We need to finalize some decisions for the reveal tomorrow!”
“I'm...fuck...a little busy right now,” Vox muttered, easing an arm past a particularly badly placed knot of wiring. If he could just get his claws a little closer to that circuit panel -
“Yep,” he said, when Val stopped saying whatever he was saying.
There, he could just reach it. Now, if he'd wired the stupid thing, this wire would have gone over to this terminal...yes, there it was. Wonder of wonders, Ethan hadn't fucked that part up.
“Sure thing,” he agreed absently.
Now, were those connections stable? He prodded them with a little spark of electricity. They seemed like they were still firmly connected. So if that wasn't the issue...which one of the dozens of hastily slapped-together wires might be the culprit?
“Right.”
That one down there looked a little loose. He snaked his other arm down, gently tugging at a bend in the wire. Nope. That wasn't it.
“Whatever you want, babe.”
Oh, wait. That probably wasn't a good auto-response, at least not today.
One of the benefits of being made out of electronics was the ability to record everything and rewind reality in case you missed something. Vox, dangling upside-down in the nest of wiring, took a second and fast-forwarded through the conversation he'd just agreed to. Val and Vel were going to wear matching hats? Great. He didn't care. Angel Dust's dress was finished? Who gave a shit about that? Val wanted to add a dance number to the presentation - no, no, he'd have to make sure that didn't happen. The whole point was to show off the Might of Lilith, not a pack of sinners in sparkly leotards. And after the reveal, Val was going to -
Vox felt the faint ringing in his audio processors that usually heralded a chorus of You Fucked Up Big This Time. Valentino had spent the last ten minutes explaining in detail how exactly the two of them were going to celebrate when the reveal was over. (His business partner was very detail-oriented when it came to...celebrating, something that Vox was usually just fine with.) And on any other day, he wouldn't mind listening to Val rabbit on about whipped cream and handcuffs and car batteries.
But not on speakerphone!
He muted Val mid-leer and pulled himself out of the machinery. “Did you hear any of that?” he demanded, glaring suspiciously at his captive.
“Did I hear the conversation that you were having on your phone, a device which uses radio waves to function?” Alastor's smile twisted mischievously at the corners. “Of course! Not that I needed the radio waves,” he added.
“My advice, lose the dance number,” Lucifer called from his custom-built prison five feet above them. “Don't want to gild the lily, am I right? Besides, you're a terrible dancer.”
Vox internally snarled. Oh, he'd show him. He'd gild every fucking lily in Hell. Wait...how the fuck did you gild lilies?
Gnah. His processors were starting to overheat, he could feel it. He usually had enough processing power to deal with crises (by fixing them) and unruly underlings (by killing them) with enough power left over to run AlastorRevengePlans.Exe full-time in the background. He was running close to burnout by simultaneously attempting the most audacious hostile takeover ever seen, fixing the stupid wiring on the stupid fucking lift, and dragging Alastor everywhere with him like a kid with a teddy bear -
No. NO. No, no, no, fuck that. He was NOT a kid with a teddy bear. Alastor was his prisoner, who he had dragged down to the warehouse for...reasons. Reasons that he'd be able to think of in a minute, right after he was done...
What the fuck had he been doing?
Oh, shit, Val was still muted.
He quickly unmuted him, taking care this time to have a properly private conversation in his own head (not that it mattered, since Alastor was obviously and pointedly using the radio waves to eavesdrop on his call). “-ter not have me on mute again, you asshole,” Val's voice echoed inside his head.
“Val, babe, you're doing a great job,” Vox said in his Business Voice, the slippery smooth one that let him insinuate himself and his wishes into wherever he damn well pleased in meetings.
“Don't use that fucking voice on me,” Val snapped. “You had me on mute, didn't you?”
“Of course not!”
“Then what was I saying?”
Vox was faced with a choice. Either he could mollify Val and repeat the last few minutes of the conversation, or he could roll the dice on causing another tantrum/shooting spree upstairs and weasel his way out of this as quickly as possible. Either way, it wasn't going to be fun.
Alastor was watching him with that bright, happy smile on his face, in spite of the bags under his eyes from not sleeping and maybe a little burn mark or two on the temples from the last time Vox had shocked him. He looked like a kid in a candy store.
Yeah, he definitely wasn't repeating what Val had said, especially the part about the dentist chair and the flat of Easter eggs. “Val, I'm in the middle of something. We can talk later.”
Frustrated Spanish spewed from the phone.
“Great. Bye,” Vox said, hanging up before he could understand anything Val was saying. Plausible deniability, that was the thing.
Not like it mattered. Val would calm down once they were up in Heaven.
A wire landed at his feet. “Try this one,” Alastor suggested.
Vox snorted. “I'm not falling for that again. Fuck you.” He raised a foot and shoved Alastor away from him. The office chair and its ever-smiling inhabitant disappeared back into the dark shadows of the warehouse.
Now, where was he...right. Vox fed himself back down into the hole, using the glow of his screen to illuminate the dark hanging wires. Testing the circuits was easy enough. Short little sparks from his claws zipped obediently wherever he told them to go, sailing cleanly through the wiring of the lift without encountering a single short or flaw. There wasn't any obvious -
A godawful crash reverberated across the metal floor. Vox, startled, fell forward, saving himself from falling completely into the floor with one hand clutched frantically around a floor support. A spiderweb of wires lashed around him, tangling impossibly around his neck and shoulders until he was no longer plummeting forward. They fell away reluctantly as he squirmed upward toward freedom. Carefully, trying not to dislodge any wires from their ancient connections, he began to unthread his head from the hole.
What the fuck was that? It hadn't been Val. There wasn't enough time for anyone to get all the way down here that quickly. The elevator only moved so fast, no matter how pissed off Val was, which usually didn't help the situation. No, it sounded like something big and heavy had hit the floor, something about the same weight as...
Vox redoubled his efforts to untangle himself from the wires. If that noise had been Lucifer escaping -
Well, if it was Lucifer escaping, he was safe enough, wasn't he? The angel wasn't allowed to harm sinners.
On the other hand, the angel was allowed to harm buildings, and if, just as a random example, and totally unlike something the angel had already done, if Lucifer took it upon himself to start smashing Vee Tower a little more thoroughly this time until chunks of it fell through the ground into the warehouse and completely incidentally crushed Vox like a little television-headed bug, then sitting around with his head inside the guts of a glorified scissor lift was probably not the best plan for his immediate survival.
Vox pried himself free of the wires and flung himself to his feet, cables fanned out behind him at the ready like a six-tailed scorpion. Instead of a furious archangel or a petulant well-armed moth, Vox was merely faced with Alastor, adrift in a sea of vintage pornography.
The previously neatly stacked tower of boxes that contained Val's best work had probably been persuaded to take a trip to the floor courtesy of a well-placed shove from a red hooved foot. Had Alastor known what was in the boxes? Probably not, judging from the scrunch-eyed cringe of distaste hovering around the edges of his permanent grin. DVDs, magazines, and promo materials from decades of work had avalanched out of the boxes, pinning the wheeled chair in a completely impassable six-inch wall of professional-grade smut.
“Having fun?” Vox demanded, leaning against the lift, arms crossed.
“How much longer will this take?” Alastor drawled, boredom dripping from his words.
“Yeah, can we hurry this up? There's a show on tonight that I want to watch,” Lucifer called from above them.
Alastor scowled up at the stalled lift, a facial expression that had always fascinated Vox. It was amazing how the demon was able to compress all of his emotion into a mere squint of his eyes or a raise of his brows while the rest of his face was immovably parked in a smile. “You do realize that you're imprisoned?” he asked politely, as if he himself was not tied to a chair.
“You do realize that he can't hold me forever?” Lucifer strained against his restraints, his arms bending ever so slightly as he attempted to tug his hands free. The thick slabs of metal refused to move.
“Don't worry. If you escape, I'm sure there's more red tape to mark obvious traps for you to fall into,” Alastor sneered.
Lucifer clearly wanted to bestow a rude gesture upon him. Since his hands were encased in four-inch-thick cuffs of angelic steel, he settled for sticking out his tongue.
“Oh, very mature,” Alastor chuckled. “How old are you?”
“I am an infinite being, immortal and vast, beyond your comprehension,” Lucifer said loftily.
“And yet you've been captured by a picture box on legs.” Alastor leaned back in his chair, casually resting one ankle atop the opposite knee, grinning insolently upward at the King of Hell.
Vox couldn't help but feel a sense of satisfaction at Al defending him - well, if you could call picture box on legs anything but an indirect insult. Still, he'd take what he could get. And tomorrow, he was going to take it all.
First, however, he had to get Lucifer ten more feet up into the air and locked into the base of the weapon. “Back to the plan,” he muttered to himself, returning to the hole in the floor.
“No one asked about your stupid plan,” Lucifer snapped.
“But I'm sure you'll tell us all about it anyway,” Alastor added.
Either it was mockery, which he should ignore, or bait, which he should really ignore. “If you wanted to know the plan, you shouldn't have interrupted me earlier,” Vox said, burrowing back into the dusty gloom below the floor.
He didn't understand it. He'd checked every goddamn bit of wiring and the circuit boards that powered the stupid lift. There was no interference by any of the other electronic equipment festooned through this dark little space.
Wait - had he checked that wire down by the floor? It looked like it might have been chewed on. If they had rats again Velvette was going to be pissed. Last time they'd made nests out of her entire stock of imported merino wool yarn from Earth and he'd had to hear about it for fucking weeks -
He eased himself down further into the dark little hole. The cables coming from his back reached up to grip the edges of the hole, allowing him to maneuver himself gently around the old wiring as he lowered himself headfirst deeper into the darkness. Other cables snaked down to the floor, tracing the wire and checking the connections. Now that he was closer, and his screen was lighting the little space up blue, he could tell that the bite marks were old.
No, this wire was functional, too. He growled in frustration and pushed himself up -
Pushed himself up -
The outer frame of his head squeaked in protest as it jammed between a floor support and something that looked like a repurposed server rack covered in dead LEDs.
Oh no.
His cables pulled frantically behind him, trying to help him rise. His blue claws gouged at the metal trapping him, leaving spiderweb scratches as he strained upward.
Okay. Up was clearly not an option anymore. He drummed his claws on the floor support, the frantic rattattat almost covering up the sound of Alastor happily kicking everything in reach out of his way. Paper was tearing. DVDs were rattling loose in their boxes. Val was going to be livid.
If up was impossible, the only option left was down. He coiled his cables below him into a set of springs and shoved as hard as he could with his hands and feet. His head slid free with a shrill squeak, the plastic case grinding on the metal support, and suddenly he was falling headfirst down into his nest of cables.
He caught himself just before his screen hit the ground. From down here, two inches from the floor, he could definitely tell that they didn't have rats. Nope. They did, however, have monster-sized roaches, roaches that he could swear were glaring at him over his unexpected intrusion into whatever the fuck they were doing.
Oh, so that's where that electrician had gone.
Vox left the roaches to their meal and tucked his knees together, slowly easing himself up through the hole with his cables, head tilted at a ridiculous angle to keep it from getting stuck on anything again. He rose into the world and flipped himself over, turning to face Alastor just as the deer got his hoof under a heavy plastic standee of Angel Dust from some award show.
Angel Dust was suddenly airborne, spinning at Vox's face like a lingerie-clad cruise missile. Vox rolled out of the way, only remembering that he was on top of a hole in the floor when he fell directly into it. “Will you knock it off,” he snarled, prying himself out of the hole for the second time in as many minutes.
“Just trying to tidy the place up a bit,” Alastor commented, as if the definition of tidying had ever involved the absolute swathe of destruction that he'd carved into Val's memorabilia.
Vox marched behind Alastor, grabbed the chair with his own two hands, and wheeled him over to the opposite wall. “Stay put,” he ordered, turning back to the machine. A wire rolled under his foot. He kicked it out of his way - or at least, he intended to. The other end wouldn't budge, since it was dangling out of the side of the lift.
...
The other end was dangling out of the side of the lift?
Vox clawed at the ground, snatching up the errant piece of wiring. The cord sizzled through his fingers, only stopping when the multi-pronged plug caught on his claws. The outlet that it should have been plugged into, the custom-installed one in the wall, the one that he'd personally checked on this morning, was empty.
“YOU FUCKING UNPLUGGED IT?” Vox screeched. Bright blue sparks crawled over his skin and shot wildly into the air as he whirled to face Alastor, sitting unrepentant and cheerful in the chair right where Vox had left him.
“I did say to try that wire next!” Alastor chirped merrily. Vox let out an unintelligible growl peppered with mechanical beeps, clutching his head as he felt his face glitching into a rainbow of fury.
“Wait, wait. You spent all that time in the floor and you didn't even check to see if it was plugged in?” Lucifer chuckled.
Vox slammed the cord back into the wall, blue sparks crackling furiously around his fingers. Slowly, majestically, Lucifer began to rise, disappearing through the ceiling into the little control room/display case made especially for him.
“This is a weird place you've got here. Hey, what's this do - “
Lucifer's comments were immediately silenced as the huge flat base of the lift sealed off the power room underneath the weapon.
Televisions are not typically wired to get migraines. And yet, the throb of a truly spectacular headache was somehow manifesting itself out of sheer annoyance and drumming away inside his hardware. Without another word, Vox grabbed the back of the chair with his cables and stalked toward the elevator, dragging Alastor backward behind him.
When he was God, he was going to have a long, serious chat with Alastor, preferably the kind of chat that made headlines for all the most wonderfully brutal and blood-soaked reasons. For now, though, he'd settle for getting out of this stupid fucking warehouse.
He raised a hand to press the elevator button and paused as he heard a faint rumbling echoing through the doors. The elevator was already in motion. If Vox listened hard, he could hear the barest thread of sound - a voice, an all-too-familiar voice spitting out all-too-familiar epithets in Spanish as it drew closer to him.
Vox hurried further down the hall, hustling to get out of sight before those doors opened. God or not, no one would want to be there when Valentino came out of the elevator to be greeted with the absolute wreckage in the warehouse. He skidded around the corner, stumbling as Alastor's chair swung wide on the cables behind him, and scrambled into the freight elevator, hammering on the button as he heard the regular elevator ding gently.
“...donde esta ese hijo de puta...Vox? VOX? WHAT THE FUCK?!”
The freight elevator slid closed with a ping. Vox allowed himself one brief, slow exhale, eyes closed, feeling the floor of the freight elevator shake gently beneath his feet as they rose back up to ground level. He opened his eyes to see Alastor, neck cracked impossibly backward, peering up at him over the back of his chair with unholy glee in his eyes.
“Oh, shut up,” Vox snapped.