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The door slammed hard enough to rattle the cheap glass frame hanging crooked on the dressing room wall.
“Get the fuck out. All of you. I said alone.”
Vincent exhaled, sharp and uneven, like he’d been holding his breath for hours without noticing. His reflection stared back at him from the mirror: perfect hair, perfect suit, perfect fucking smile… You never fully dressed without one, that’s what he always fucking said… And he probably died with this fucking smile on. Why did he even listen to him? As if he was fucking trustworthy. After all, he also said he will never be caught…
His hand came up, fingers digging into his own cheek, dragging the corner of his mouth down until it hurt. The smile snapped, broke, dissolved into something rawer, uglier.
On the counter in front of him, the briefing folder lay open. He already knew what it said. He’d read it once. Then twice. Then a third time, slower, like maybe the words would rearrange themselves into something less… fucked. They hadn’t.
ALASTOR — RADIO ICON — FOUND DEAD IN WOODED AREA
APPARENT HUNTING ACCIDENT
ONGOING INVESTIGATION REVEALS LINK TO MULTIPLE HOMICIDES
Vincent’s fingers tightened on the edge of the counter. “Accident,” he muttered. “Yeah. Sure. Fucking accident.”
He flipped the page again, even though there was nothing new to see. Just more details. More neat little bullet points meant to package the horror into something digestible for the masses. The body. The shovel. Evidence suggesting multiple victims.
The golden voice of the airwaves, America’s darling storyteller, burying someone in the woods like a goddamn animal. No shit.
That part wasn’t the problem. Vincent knew. Not only did he know, but he understood it. In a way no one else could. Birds of a fucking feather. The problem wasn’t what Alastor was. The problem was… Alastor was’nt anymore. Alastor was dead. He left him. Just like that… In the worst way possible. The stupidest way possible. No warning. No grand finale. No clever sign-off over the airwaves. Just… a body in the dirt.
Vincent’s chest tightened, something cold coiling around his ribs, squeezing slow and deliberate. He dragged in a breath, but it didn’t go deep enough.
“Fuck,” he hissed, pacing now, one hand raking through his hair. “Fuck, fuck—”
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. People like Alastor didn’t just die. They didn’t get taken out by some dumbass hunting mishap like they were nobodies. They lasted. They carved themselves into the world and refused to leave. He was supposed to be untouchable.
They were supposed to be untouchable.
Someone knocked at the door, carefully. “Mr Whittman? Two minutes.”
His jaw clenched so hard it hurt.
“Yeah,” he snapped, voice already smoothing itself out, slipping back into that polished, on-air cadence like muscle memory. “I’ll be right there.”
Vincent straightened slowly, rolling his shoulders back, forcing the tension down, burying it deep where no one could see. His hands moved automatically, adjusting his tie, smoothing his jacket… Rebuilding the mask. By the time he looked up, the man in the mirror was back: composed, controlled and untouchable. He grabbed the folder, snapping it shut with finality, and turned toward the door.
The world might’ve just gone to shit, yeah… but the show? The show always went on.
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Vincent didn’t remember the drive home. The transition from blinding studio lights to the suffocating quiet of his apartment felt like a cut in reality, something abrupt and wrong. One second he’d been delivering the story, and the next he was there. He stood there for a moment, breathing unevenly, like he’d outrun something that hadn’t quite stopped chasing him. “Fuck…” The word slipped out under his breath as he yanked his tie loose, tossing it aside along with his coat. He didn’t turn on the lights. The darkness felt better.
He decided to begin with the drawers. He yanked one open, then another, rifling through them with growing agitation. Keys, paper scraps, useless junk… nothing. “Come on… come on…”
He had to get rid of everything. Anything that could tie him to Alastor, anything that could be twisted, misread, exposed. Because if anyone started digging—really digging—into Alastor’s life now that the truth was out, they wouldn’t stop at the surface. And Vincent… Vincent could not afford to be found anywhere in that mess. He shut a drawer harder than necessary and moved to the living room, already tearing through a cabinet.
“Think, you idiot…” he muttered. “Where did you put…”
He'd rather not think, that made everything worse. Every thought was about him. About them. Their relationship had never been public—couldn’t be, not in that time, not with everything stacked against it… but also because Vincent himself had never fully allowed it to exist in the open. It had been easier to hide it, to tuck it away under layers of denial and half-truths. Easier than admitting he’d been drawn, helplessly, to another man, that man, of all people. His hand pushed past a stack of records without care, his mind racing faster than his movements. They had been careful. No photos (Alastor hated them anyway), no shared appearances, no witnesses. But careful didn’t mean clean. Careful didn’t mean nothing remained.
He moved into the bedroom, flinging open the closet, shoving clothes aside with mounting frustration. “Think,” he repeated under his breath. “Think.” And then he saw it. A small box, shoved toward the back of a shelf. He froze. The sight of it hit harder than anything else so far, a slow, creeping dread tightening around his ribs. “…shit.” Of course. Of fucking course. He reached for it anyway, because not opening it would’ve been worse. The lid creaked softly as he lifted it, revealing exactly what he feared. It was nothing… But suddenly, to Vincent, it felt like everything.
His fingers brushed against a glass first, cheap and slightly chipped. He exhaled sharply through his nose. “I really kept this?” But he knew why.
That was their first night. In this bar, he’d approached Alastor with a purpose and a calculated smile, equal parts admiration and strategy. He’d seen him as a rival before anything else, another voice rising too fast, too strong. Vincent didn’t share space well. He’d wanted to measure him, to test him, maybe even to undermine him if it came to that. And Alastor had looked at him like he already knew all of that, like Vincent was something mildly entertaining. Sometimes, he wondered if he ever been something else for him.
That night, they’d talked for hours, pushing past surface-level bullshit into something else… something more dangerous. Alastor had guided the conversation with unsettling precision, nudging, probing, pressing until Vincent had felt something crack open inside him. And he told him everything. About what he did. About who he was. Silence had followed, heavy and immediate, and Vincent had known… he might’ve just destroyed himself. But Alastor just… laughed. “Oh, how refreshing…” Vincent swallowed hard, his grip tightening on the napkin. “Yeah… yeah, you liked that, didn’t you…” No judgment or disgust. Just interest. Approval, even. Like Vincent had just proven himself worth keeping around.
His hand moved again, slower now, finding something smaller. He picked it up carefully. A charm, worn smooth with time. He let out a quiet, incredulous scoff. “Your weird voodoo crap…” God, they’d argued about that enough. Alastor and his beliefs, his calm insistence that there were things Vincent couldn’t understand, forces beyond his neat, controlled world. And Vincent, dismissive, biting, tearing into it with all the arrogance he could muster. “You sound like a fucking cartoon villain,” he’d said once, rolling his eyes. And Alastor, unfazed, replying with that same infuriating composure: “And you mistake ignorance for superiority.” Vincent shook his head slightly, a ghost of something like a smile flickering and dying just as fast. “Asshole…”
The arguments hadn’t stopped there. They’d circled each other constantly, pushing, provoking. Alastor calling out the ease with which Vincent moved through the world—white, polished, acceptable, doors opening without effort. And Vincent snapping back, defensive and sharp, mocking what he didn’t understand, what he refused to take seriously. It had never been comfortable. Never been gentle. And still… none of it had driven him away. That was quite the contrary… everything, the murders, the bodies, even the fucking cannibalism... Everything that should have driven him away only pulled him closer. He’d stayed no matter what. He’d accepted everything from him, absorbed it, let it settle into him like it belonged there.
Even the limits hadn’t been enough to break whatever was happening between them. The absence of anything truly physical, the restraint, the way Alastor kept a line Vincent was never allowed to cross. And still, the brief touches, the occasional brush of lips, the quiet presence… it had been enough. More than enough. “Fuck… I was pathetic.” No declarations. No “I love you.” Not once. And Vincent had no idea if Alastor had ever felt anything remotely similar. Maybe not. Maybe he’d just been… interesting. Useful. Amusing. But Vincent…
Fuck, he loved him so much.
His gaze dropped back to the box, to the scattered remnants of something that had never been allowed to exist in the open. And now… Now Alastor was dead. Reduced to a headline Vincent himself had delivered with perfect composure… “Should’ve burned this shit…”
But he didn’t.
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How do you survive the death of the one person who mattered more than anything else in the world? You don’t. You improvise something that looks like survival.
Vincent chose denial first. It came easy, slipped into place like a well-rehearsed line. Alastor wasn’t gone, not really. Not when his voice still echoed in Vincent’s head at the most inconvenient moments, not when every silence felt shaped like him. So Vincent worked. Relentlessly. Obsessively. He filled every second with noise, with scripts, with broadcasts, with meetings that stretched into sleepless nights, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering, and remembering…
“Fuck that.”
Work turned into control. Control turned into hunger. And hunger… hunger turned into something uglier. And he fed it.
Cocaine, mostly. At first. Then whatever kept him sharp, fast, untouchable. Whatever kept the edges of grief blurred just enough to function. Just enough to stand under the lights and shine brighter. The network loved it. Ratings climbed. Viewers multiplied. The press started throwing words at him like offerings: phenomenon, visionary, unstoppable.
And eventually…
God of entertainment.
Yeah, that tracks, he had thought. Because if there was a god left in his world, it sure as hell wasn’t the one he’d been raised to believe in. That one had gone silent a long time ago—if it had ever existed at all. No heaven. No hell. Just power. Just influence. Just the ability to shape reality for millions of people with a few carefully chosen words. That was divine enough.
And by the way, Vincent was very, very good at it.
The first time he snapped, it barely registered as such. One of the producers had pushed back, something about boundaries, about standards, about how far Vincent was willing to go for a story. Vincent remembered the way the man’s voice had grated on him, the way his objections had felt like… obstruction. The aftermath was messy, but manageable. It always was. Money, influence, fear… those were tools Vincent wielded with increasing ease. The network didn’t collapse. If anything, it adapted, adjusted and became more aligned with him.
That was one of the many things Vincent always admired about sharks. They didn’t stop moving. They couldn’t afford to. Stagnation meant death. So, Vincent kept moving.
He took more, demanded more. The boundaries that had once defined the structure of the network dissolved under the weight of his ambition. Presenters who didn’t fit his vision –gone. Shows that didn’t serve his narrative – cut. People who questioned him –
Well.
It became easier each time. Cleaner. More efficient. The hesitation faded, replaced by something colder, something instinctive. Blood in the water. He started to believe it fully then. Not just the headlines. Not just the praise. He was the apex predator. The fucking top of the food chain. A fucking shark.
Alastor would be proud. Or not. He would have something to say about his methods, Vincent could swear it. But at the same time… Alastor was always the one who said he had potential.
The drugs helped blur the line. Made it easier to pretend his presence wasn’t entirely imagined, that Alastor was still there, just out of sight, guiding him, pushing him further. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Because the more Vincent gained, the less it felt like anything.
The followers came next. They were not just viewers. They were devotees. People who didn’t just watch him, but believed in him, quoted him, defended him. Elevated him beyond something as mundane as a man behind a desk. They hung on his words like scripture, reshaped their opinions to match his, built him into something larger than life: a cult, in everything but name. Vincent leaned into it, of course he did. If they wanted a god, he’d give them one.
Vincent was everything to them, and he loved that, and that’s all he ever wanted… So… why did he feel son… exhausted? Why the emptiness? The creeping realization that no amount of control, no amount of power, no amount of blood in the water could fill the void Alastor had left behind?
He’d built an empire on noise to drown out the silence. And it didn’t work.
What kind of god needed this much to feel anything at all? What kind of god was this close to…
He’d think about it, sometimes. About ending it. Everything. Letting the water go still for once. Because he couldn’t stand it anymore. This endless, gnawing absence.
And he wondered… what it would feel like for a shark to sink?
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By the time Vincent announced the event, no one questioned him anymore. They didn’t question the tone of his voice, or the setup, either, even when they stepped into the room and felt the cold water soak through their shoes, rising to their ankles, rippling faintly with every movement. They didn’t question the cables, the dozens of television sets hanging from the ceiling like suspended eyes, their screens flickering with static, with his face, and fragments of past broadcasts looping endlessly.
They trusted him. Of course they did. He asked them to. He had built them that way.
“Tonight,” Vincent said, standing at the center of it all, his reflection fractured across a dozen screens, his voice echoing slightly in the damp air, “we will redefine what it means to rule the airway.”
His followers watched him like he was divine. Some of them were crying already. Oh, they had no idea. Or maybe they did. Maybe, on some level, they all understood exactly what this was. The culmination. The inevitable end of something that had burned too bright, too fast, too violently to last.
The cables above him swayed slightly, almost imperceptibly, the televisions humming faintly, alive with artificial light, and Vincent was looking at them, the faces turned toward him, full of devotion, of belief, of something dangerously close to love. And it still wasn’t enough.
“Now, who's ready to be baptized into a new era, of entertainment?” he continued, voice steady out of habit more than conviction.
His head throbbed, a dull, constant ache that had long since stopped responding to anything he put into his system. His thoughts felt loud, overcrowded, like too many voices speaking at once, overlapping, distorting into something unbearable. And then… A TV fell from the ceiling. Straight onto his head. Electricity surged through his entire body. Vincent screamed in pain.
The pain was so deep, so relentless, it cut off every thought—and fuck, it felt good. Nothing left but the pain. And soon, the void… and finally, peace.
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The first thing Vincent understood was that he was not gone. The second was that something was very, very wrong with his face. He gasped – or tried to. The sound came out distorted, metallic, like feedback scraping through a broken speaker. His hands shot up immediately, frantic, fingers digging at something hard, smooth, angular where his skull should have been. His hands were quite bigger, too. And sharp.
“No, no, what the fuck!” His voice crackled, warped by static. Panic surged through him in disoriented waves as he stumbled upright. His surrounding felt… wrong. Real, but not familiar. Like reality had been rebuilt from cheaper materials.
He staggered forward, vision flickering in fractured panels. And then he saw it: his own reflection. Every surface, every broken shard of glass, every glossy stain, every darkened window, showed him the same thing. A television. Where his head should have been. A fucking TV. There was a low, constant electrical thrum inside his skull, like his thoughts were being broadcast instead of formed. And then…
“…You took your time, sweetheart.”
That voice… his voice, hit him immediately. That was the voice that used to slip through radio waves late at night, smooth and warm and wrong in a way Vincent had never been able to resist. It wrapped around him now just as easily, just as intimately, like no time had passed at all. And it was real.
Vincent turned slowly. His vision stuttered, static flickering across it in fractured frames, and then it settled. There he was. For a second, Vincent didn’t breathe.
This… deer-thing—this thing with antlers and that too-wide, too-knowing smile—was nothing like the man he remembered. Not really. Not anymore. The shape was wrong, the presence was wrong, stretched into something sharper, something less human.
And yet, he knew him instantly. The way he stood, relaxed and composed like the world had never once managed to touch him. The way his eyes held that same quiet, unsettling awareness. Or maybe it was his smile. God, that fucking smile.
It had never been comforting, never been safe—but it had never been this… this much before. There was something in it now that made Vincent’s system stutter, something that should have pushed him back… but didn’t.
Because beneath the shock, beneath the distortion, beneath the overwhelming wrongness of everything, there it was, raw, immediate and undeniable.
Oh, God… he missed him.
The realization hit like a punch. It didn’t matter what Alastor had become. It didn’t matter what he had become. It was still him. Vincent’s system overloaded for a second. Something in him tried to speak. Failed. Rebooted. Failed again.
“…You’re…” The word broke apart into static, glitching mid-formation. He swallowed, pointless, instinctive, and forced himself to try again, pushing through the distortion. “You’re here.”
Alastor tilted his head slightly, studying him with that same measured curiosity.
“Indeed,” he replied pleasantly. “And you appear to have… upgraded.”
Vincent let out a sharp, broken sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t cracked under the weight of everything behind it.
“Fuck you.”
“Ah,” Alastor said, delighted in the way only he could be. “Still functional. Good.”
Silence stretched between them, alive with everything Vincent wasn’t saying. And God, it was the best silence he had experienced in fucking years. No noise. No screaming thoughts clawing at the inside of his skull. No endless static demanding to be filled.
Just him.
Vincent took a step forward before he fully realized he was moving. Then another. His balance wavered, uncertain, like the ground itself might give out if he trusted it too much. Like reality was still deciding whether to hold him up or let him fall.
He stopped close enough to see the faint glow in Alastor’s eyes. Close enough to notice the way nothing about him had softened, enough to feel something inside himself snap violently back to life.
“I thought…” Vincent started, then faltered. His voice glitched again, quieter this time, like it didn’t have the strength to hold together. “I thought it would end.”
Alastor hummed thoughtfully, as if considering something trivial.
“Many do.” A pause. “You were wrong, of course.”
Vincent exhaled shakily. His hands twitched at his sides, too large, too sharp, unfamiliar, like they didn’t belong to him anymore. Like none of this did.
“I don’t…” he began, then stopped again. A bitter sound slipped through the distortion, something close to a laugh but stripped of any humor. “I don’t even know what I am now.”
Alastor watched him for a moment. Really watched him. Then his smile widened, just slightly.
“Oh, I think you do,” he said.
Vincent went still.Alastor stepped closer, closing the distance the way he always had: on his own terms.
“You’ve always been rather consistent,” he continued lightly. “Just… louder about it now.”
Vincent let out a breath that felt like it scraped on the way out.
“…I died,” he said.
“Yes,” Alastor replied. Then, almost conversationally: “You were quite dramatic about it, if my sources are accurate.”
Vincent huffed, a flicker of something defensive sparking up out of habit.
“You were supposed to be gone,” he said, quieter now, the words dragging more than he intended. “That was the point of all of it. You…”
He stopped. There it was again, that truth he hadn’t wanted to look at too closely.
Alastor’s gaze sharpened.
“Ah,” he said softly. “So that’s why you did all this.”
Vincent’s hands curled into fists.
“I made something that worked,” he snapped, the words coming out harder than he felt them. Then his voice glitched, cracked, slipped. “People were calling me god, you know.”
It sounded pathetic the second it left his mouth.
“Oh,” Alastor replied smoothly, amusement threading through his voice, “good for you, Vinny.” The nickname landed like it always had: light, effortless, and just sharp enough to stick. “And yet, you’re still following me.”
Alastor’s gaze lingered. And Vincent froze. He obsessively orbited around him even in life, even in death, even in whatever this had become.
“…Yeah,” Vincent said finally. “I guess I am.”
Alastor inclined his head slightly, as if that answer had always been inevitable.
“Good,” he said simply.
Then, with a faint, unmistakable edge of amusement:
“We have much to catch up on, Vincent.”