Archive of Our Own

“Do you know,” Vox began, then bent over giggling so hard and fast that the casing of his screen cracked the corner of the coffee table. 

Alastor himself chuckled, one hand over his mouth, watching as Vox slid a few inches down his red (apple-patterned, ugh) wingback chair, shirt dragging itself untucked from his pants. 

 Vox looked up at Alastor, giggled again. His screen flushed teal, then rheumy pink, then neon green, then back to teal. He was like a kaleidoscope, Alastor thought. Vox-O-Vision, maybe they could market that. Vox would love that, incessant, self-absorbed capitalist that he was. Alastor wouldn’t suggest it. He preferred to be the only one staring at Vox while his screen glitched technicolor.

“Do,” Vox paused, the breath stuttering in his throat. “You know—?”

Vox doubled up once again with laughter. He set Alastor off as well, snorting a little animal snuffle that he wasn’t present enough to be ashamed of.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Vox waved his hand, claws dragging a trail of sparks through the air. “I’m trying to say— I’m trying to tell you— do you—? Do you know—?”

Vox let out a sharp bark of laughter and slumped further. His untucked shirt dragged further up his torso, revealing a tantalizing strip of navy skin between his waistband and the button down. Vox’s ubiquitous jacket and sweater vest were long-since shed, a few buttons of his shirt already undone, and if Alastor knew him, the remaining clothes wouldn’t be with them long either.

“Do,” Vox paused with intention. “You. Know—”

“For the sake of the Seven Rings, Vox, do you know?!” Alastor asked.

Vox shrieked with laughter at this, fully melted in the seat of his chair, face blasting colors at the ceiling while he pounded the chair’s arm with his fist. It was a truly ridiculous display, juvenile and humiliating and absolutely beneath Vox’s station.

At some point, Alastor realized that the shaking in his chest was also laughter, and that he had fully tumbled onto the floor while cackling at his…

Hm. At his Vox. 

(There was no label that was appropriate for the two of them, no word that properly fit their dynamic. They were enemies, certainly, but surely to be such good enemies for such a long time entitled a person with the benefits of friendship on rare occasion, no? And surely enemies who were sometimes friendly and who didn’t really want the other gone weren’t proper enemies, but surely, too, friends did not often try to murder each other in the streets ? And then, Alastor was also quite sure that neither friends nor enemies sometimes snuck each other into their respective buildings in the dead of night fuck each other senseless. Wrists and ankles shackled, excessive amounts of lube, bent into unlikely positions sort of sex seemed like the sort of thing one didn’t do with their friends or enemies. Alastor never had before, anyway. 

As such, Alastor determined, there was really no proper term for them!

Maddeningly, Angel Dust had said this was called a “situationship.”)

Vox’s fans began to whir as he gasped for breath, tongue lolling, slightly. He turned, saw Alastor, and let out another aborted shriek of mirth.

“Stop, stop it!” he cried. 

“Stop what?!” Alastor said. (Also laughing, dammit.)

“Stop— looking at me!” Vox whined. “I’m never gonna get it out unless you— just look the other way, okay?”

“Are you shy?!”

“No! You’re just— I can’t stop laughing if you don’t stop looking at me!”

Given the amusing way Vox was spouting off sparks and blushing the full rainbow of colors that yellow/cyan/magenta could make, Alastor had very little incentive to try and help him stop laughing. He had even less incentive to stop looking at Vox while he was being so…

Well, Vox was always being so in one way or another. He was rather famous for being eye-catching, for drawing all the room’s attention onto himself. It wasn’t Alastor’s fault that Vox was finally getting just what he wanted: Alastor’s full attention on him and him alone.

“For the love of Satan, Vox,” Alastor said, his smile glowing as he gave Vox a pointed once over. Vox looked… good. 

Very good.

Alastor didn’t want him the way he was supposed to, necessarily. He didn’t got hot under the collar when Vox was modelling Velvette’s new line of business suits for the rich and heinous, nor necessarily when Vox took his clothes off and gave Alastor his best pre-programmed “Come hither” face. 

But, on occasion, Alastor wanted. He wanted to feel Vox’s half-smooth-half-sharp sharkskin raking over his own, wanted to feel the firmness of Vox’s bicep between his jaws, wanted the warm weight of Vox on top of him, the the clammy heat of Vox lying under him, the lightning-bright crackle of Vox’s screen in his face, the soft scratch of Vox’s claws behind his ears—

And oh, Hell no, that was not a road Alastor let his thoughts wander down. 

(Suddenly the fur behind his ears was maddenly itchy. He ignored this.)

Alastor cleared his throat like his mind hadn’t circumnavigated the Pride Ring and did his level best to glare at Vox. (It was hard to glare, though, since his eyes were already half-lidded.) 

“For- for the love of—” (what had he been saying?) “I— Vox, you always want to be the center of attention!” Alastor said. “What could possibly be so different now?”

Vox looked at Alastor, and the screen under his eyes went teal, and he giggled.

The great and powerful media overlord giggled.

“You,” Vox started, paused, giggled again, hand held halfway to his screen like he could stifle the noise. “You make me nervous.”

“Good!” Alastor said. “I ought to!”

He couldn’t quite puff himself up the way he wanted. He’d gone oddly boneless, puddled on the ground across from Vox. This, he thought, was a somewhat undignified situation.

Alastor didn’t get back in the chair, but contented himself with looking up at Vox, blue and white and shining.

“Aaargh!” Vox clamped his hands to the edges of his screen with a tink of metal on glass. He inhaled with his whole body, exhaled and bent over his knees. He sat up straight and turned his screen up towards the ceiling so he couldn’t see Alastor.

And, consequently, Alastor couldn’t see him properly. Rude.

“Do you know,” Vox said, each word measured carefully. “Why they’re called Jazz Cigarettes?”

A beat passed, then another, then a full measure.

And then Alastor bent double with laughter. 

“What?!” Vox fluttered his claws uselessly, his eyes widening till they took up most of the screen. (Said digital eyes were pink-tinged just as though he were still a flesh and blood man.) “What’s so funny? Do you know?!”

Alastor did not respond, but wheezed, pounding the coffee table with his fist. 

“What?!” 

After a fashion, Alastor fell flat to the floor, his spine fully extended on the ground, still hiccupping with laughter.

“Vincent,” he said, measuring his words carefully so that he was still somewhat capable of speech. “I was a jazz pianist in New Orleans for the entirety of the 1920’s. Do you think there’s anything about jazz, cigarettes, or marijuana that I don’t know?”

Vox slumped still lower in his chair — Christ, it was like he had fully melted into goo, this fucking man — and had enough presence of mind to look embarrassed.

“I mean—!” he wriggled. His shirt had pulled up nearly to his ribs, his navy blue navel was—

Jesus, Alastor needed a drink. Maybe even water, he was far enough gone to want that. Looking at Vox’s exposed stomach just had the incredibly odd somatic effect of drying his mouth out.

“-- only person who listens to my fun facts even half the time, anyway…” Vox was saying.

Alastor had tuned out, but he leveraged the coffee table to bring himself sort of upright. 45 degree angle from the floor. Close enough.

“I don’t listen to your fun facts,” Alastor said. “And surely your Vees do?”

He hadn’t meant to ask, but his throat was apparently only taking 75% of the commands from his head, so he sounded interested and (ugh) concerned both.

“Oh,” Vox’s claws clanked against the casing of his screen as he aped scratching the back of his head. He squirmed. It would have been less distracting if he just fully took the damn shirt off. “I mean… I tell lots of people cool facts, it’s just. You seem like you… listen?”

“I do not!” Alastor said, offended.

“Oh, yeah?” Vox said. He didn’t look particularly intimidating even as he switched to his angry voice, his CEO voice. Like a kitten playing at being a lion with its yarn ball on its plush couch. “Why are zebra sharks called zebra sharks when they’re spotted?”

“Because while the adults are spotted the juveniles are banded like zebras,” Alastor said promptly. He frowned. “Hey, wait—!”

“Aaaaaaand how do thresher sharks hunt?” Vox prompted, his screen depicting him biting his lip.

“Hmph!” Alastor glared at Vox. But he did love being right. “With their tails. They crack them like whips and it stuns schools of nearby fish so that they can eat their fill.”

“Uh huh,” Vox said, his tone growing ever more eager. “And where did I grow up?”

“You say Brooklyn because it’s the truth and you hope people will think you mean New York but it was Brooklyn, Maryland, as in the Brooklyn of Baltimore.”

“See!” Vox said. “You listen! Val doesn’t know any of that?”

“He doesn’t?” Alastor said. “Good Lord, Vox, that’s depressing.”

He supposed, after speaking, that it was unkind to say it so baldly. Still, it was depressing. 

For his part, Vox didn’t even look as embarrassed as he might have.

“Uh,” his screen lolled at a tipsy angle, his tone long-sustained. “It’s not, really. I mean, I don’t listen when Valentino tells me about, like, his favorite banned porn movies from the 70’s. None of us got here being polite.”

“I’m always infallibly polite,” Alastor said primly (or as primly as he could when it felt rather like his mouth had been filled with marbles). 

“You eat people!” Vox said. 

“Not while they’re alive,” Alastor said. He thought about it. “Hm. Not usually, anyway.”

Vox giggled. “Gross. Do you ever—?”

He blushed brilliant teal and stopped talking entirely, and oh, if that wasn’t the most enticing thing.

“Do I ever what?” Alastor asked.

“It’s nothing,” Vox said hurriedly. “Don’t even— don’t worry, it’s nothing.”

“Oh, come now, Vox,” Alastor said. “What could you possibly be embarrassed about?” 

Still, Vox just sat in his chair, boneless and goo-like as he had been, gnawing on his digital lip. Alastor wanted to drag his teeth over that screen and scrape the static that fuzzed over Vox’s face when he blushed like that into his mouth. He wanted to suck on the corner of Vox’s screen till the pixels distorted under the pressure and made a broken green hickey on the display. He wanted to unzip Vox’s skin and curl up inside his ribcage.

Luckily for Vox, Alastor had lost touch with his fine motor control a good while back, so he could not launch up and act on any of this. He just watched and wanted.

“Come onnnnn,” Alastor wheedled. His clothes were still on and straight, but if he needed to unbutton his shirt for a good cause, he could do so. “Vox…”

“I was wondering if you ever… thought about…” Vox was glowing so bright a blue that Alastor did not hear the last words he mumbled.

“Come again?”

Vox curled his claws into fists and turned his screen up to the ceiling. 

“Have you ever thought about eating me?”

“Of course!” Alastor said without hesitation. “I wasn’t much of one for shark in life, and I imagine you’d have an unpleasant ozone aftertaste, so I never felt inclined to actually attempt it, but I’ve considered the possibility at length.”

For some reason that Alastor couldn’t fathom, this made Vox blush more profoundly, his screen deepening and brightening in blue. 

“Right,” Vox said. “Of course. So you haven’t eaten me because… I… wouldn’t taste good?”

Alastor hummed, wildly aware of the vibration in the back of his throat as he did so. His body was so present with him under the influence of marijuana. Alcohol never did this to him. The sensation was so dramatic that it took a good deal of effort for Alastor to first remember the question, then to gather his strewn thoughts enough to answer it.

“That’s an odd thing to ask,” Alastor told Vox. “I mean— goodness, did you ask yourself every time you passed a cow farm in life why you hadn’t eaten all of the cows in the pasture?”

“Noooooo,” Vox said. One of his legs had managed to move upward while the rest of him sank further into the chair. Said leg was draped over the arm of the chair, thigh muscles visible under his well-fitted slacks. “That’s different, isn’t it? Isn’t eating people, like, personal?”

“No,” Alastor was quite certain in this respect. “It started as pure pragmatism. Meat is expensive, and if you’re already killing a man, well, waste not want not, am I right?”

To his credit, Vox looked only a little bit horrified.

“I… guess that’s practical,” he said. “Ugh. But now I’m hungry. Not for people!”

Alastor snorted and let his head thunk back on the floor. His head was very heavy, as were his limbs, every part of him, really. But the carpet was incredibly plush and thick to Charlie’s tastes, and so it was quite comfortable to lay on like this.

“Sinner meat is too expensive to waste on someone who wouldn’t appreciate it, anyway,” Alastor promised. 

“Good,” Vox said vehemently — or, as vehemently as he could while still boneless and tipped at an improbable angle on the cushions. He kicked his leg up into the air — his shoe was dangling off the tip of his toe, Alastor noted — and hummed. “I’m still hungry, though.”

“Congratulations,” Alastor said. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t know! Isn’t this your stupid hotel? Feed me! The service here sucks!”

“It’s Charlie’s hotel, dearest,” Alastor said. “And there’s no room service. If you want your food delivered don’t you have some sort of… button on your cellular phone that does that?”

Vox turned on the sound effects when he blinked at Alastor, presumably so that Alastor could get the full comedic effect of the “sproing” noise as Vox expressed his disdain.

“You mean an app?” Vox asked. “Like a deal melivery app? Wait. Shit. No. Mealy deliver. Meal delivery!”

Alastor laughed silently, but hard enough that his stomach hurt as all his muscles tightened. Vox flushed cyan, per usual, but he didn’t look all that upset about it. 

Alastor drew his finger in circles in the carpet. It was soft, pliant, scratchy. His nails were ripping through it, somewhat. He needed to be touching Vox’s skin but fuck, he could not make the first move, not now, not while he was — ugh — under the influence. He would roll around on Vox like a kitten in a field of daisies and then never recover from the humiliation.

“Al!”

Vox’s voice was hardly sharp, but it was louder.

“What?!” Alastor asked. His head was halfway under the coffee table, a new ceiling between him and the ceiling proper. He could feel every inch of his skin and all of it was too tight. He needed Vox like water and he would die of dehydration before ever asking for help.

“Food, motherfucker.” 

Vox was starting to go marblemouthed as well. Vox did lots of drugs, Alastor knew, but he also knew Vox rarely smoked weed. It made his thoughts slower, he had once explained to Alastor, and he only ever wanted to go faster, so he saw weed as basically useless. A reckless indulgence, a waste of time. 

Why he’d chosen to light up with Alastor when they were still sworn nemeses (and NOT just a situationship, stupid portmanteau) was beyond Alastor, but he was fond of it in any case. Vox was so pliant with his guard down.

“Food! Alastor! ‘M hungry!”

“Then eat something, darling,” Alastor said. “I’m not your mother.”

“I’ve asked you like five times what you want!”

“I want filet mignon made from a poodle sinner, ideally a rather young and lean one,” Alastor said. “But I imagine you can’t call up and have that delivered.”

“Oh, wanna bet?” Vox asked. He waved something bright at Alastor, a miniature version of his face. Phone, right. “They’ve got a bunch of cannibal town restaurants on here, I’ll check.”

“No self-respecting cannibal would deliver,” Alastor said disdainfully. 

“First of all, weird, why? Second of all, it’s a third-party delivery service, kinda like GrubHub and— you know what, don’t worry about it. I’ll make the food appear, okay? Just like magic.”

“Hmph,” Alastor said. “Whatever you say.”

Vox’s stupid little high heeled shoe fell off with a clunk onto the floor. He was wearing sock garters, the absolute freak. (Alastor was also wearing sock garters, but his outfit wasn’t designed to be aggressively contemporary.)

“Are you trying my food after all?” Alastor asked. 

“Hm?” Vox blinked slow and stupid and cow-like at Alastor over the top of his cell phone. “Who, me?”

“There’s no one else in the room.”

“Oh, right, I guess— no, I got myself pizza.”

“Of course you did.”

It might have been a few days or merely a few seconds before someone knocked at the hotel door, but Alastor, who had smoked another joint in the interim, was in no state to answer it. Vox staggered off his seat instead, and Alastor resisted the acute urge to drape Vox in his jacket before he opened up to the delivery person. Vox was not indecent or anything, his shirt even fell back down over his lithe belt of abdomen, but he was… disheveled, and widely regarded as quite attractive, and Alastor was not generally a fan of sharing.

Luckily, the transaction was fast, and then there were two steaming cardboard boxes on the coffee table.

“There we go,” Vox said. “Pizza and, uh, human flesh a la mode.”

“What?!” Alastor said. In his horror, he sat bolt upright.

“What?!” Vox asked. His eyes still shone rheumy pink. “That’s what you asked for, isn’t it?!”

“No!” Alastor cried. “Why in the world— where was that even an option?!”

“It’s just— it’s what you always order, right?!”

Alastor paused, thought about it.

“What,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Exactly do you think a la mode means?”

Vox scratched the back of his neck.

“Um… fancy?”

Alastor opened his box and, thankfully, found absolutely no ice cream. 

“You’re a buffoon,” he told Vox. 

“What?!” Vox pleaded. His eyes took up solidly 75% of his screen. Alastor hated him and he wanted to lick all the static off his screen, the stupid little—

Alastor took a bite of meat and had to grind his teeth to prevent himself from moaning aloud. Juice dribbled from the corner of his mouth, and Alastor swept his tongue down halfway to his collar to lick it up, to not lose a single drop.

“I know,” Vox said. 

“It’s been soooo long,” Alastor said. He tipped his head back, genuinely worried he might start drooling. “I forgot… mmm, I forgot just how much better food tastes after smoking.”

Vox said nothing in response to Alastor, and when Alastor looked up, he realized the cause of this was that Vox was deliriously… hmm, involved in his pizza.

Withstanding only 15 seconds of the noises that sounded more like they belonged in one of Valentino’s films, Alastor managed to reconnect his tongue to his foggy brain.

“I’m sorry, do the two of you need a moment alone?”

Vox, grease splotching his screen, looked guiltily over at Alastor. 

Alastor had a flashbulb memory of his life, of the raccoons that always found the dumpster behind Mimzy’s favorite speakeasy and how they would stare at whoever opened the back door, paws near their mouths, blinking guiltily in the sudden onslaught of electric light. Vox looked exactly like a raccoon pawing through the trash.

(And it was, maddeningly, still fucking cute.)

“Alllllllllll,” Vox said. He had taken a new, jellyfish-like position in the chair, his knees bowed outwards and his stomach bared. There was a drop of tomato sauce in his lap. “Al. It’s. This is so fucking good, Al.”

Alastor snorted. He took another bite of his entree and pushed the meat around in his mouth, savoring every strand of muscle while he laughed at Vox for doing the same thing. 

Vox took another bite, pulling the cheese to a foot-long strand before it snapped, greasy and dangling over his shirtfront. He slurped it up like a noodle and moaned again, long and loud and pornographic. 

One was almost jealous of the pizza — it took Alastor several minutes under the best of circumstances to get Vox making those kinds of noises. 

“This is the best fucking pizza I’ve ever had,” Vox moaned, though with his mouth full and his being extremely high, it sounded more like “vish issa bess fuckn peez iver ad.”

“Chew and swallow, dear, chew and swallow,” Alastor said. “I don’t want to claim credit for your death if you choke to death on pizza which, by the by, cannot possibly be that good, given that we are literally in Hell.”

Vox swallowed. He looked almost mournful about it.

“Why wouldn’t you wanna take credit for my death?” he asked, almost enunciating all the words properly. 

“Stolen valor,” Alastor said. “I want to kill you myself when the time comes.”

Vox scoffed and went back to enjoying his pizza. Really, really enjoying his pizza. Loudly and uncomfortably enjoying his pizza. 

He had been joking before, but a part of Alastor really did wonder if he ought to give Vox a minute alone with his meal. The noises were uncomfortable.

Alastor finished his meal all-too quickly, savoring it as best he could, but also devouring it. There was something about weed, even the weed you could get in Hell that was much less pleasant than hash on Earth, that just made all food taste like ambrosia. 

Soon Alastor’s takeout container was, tragically, empty. He set the box aside and scooched (gracefully!) a little closer to Vox’s chair. 

And leaned his head on the cushion where Vox sat. He was, he suspected, not sitting up at the current angle, but he was sitting up, which had to count for something. He twisted and wriggled adjusted until his head was bare inches from Vox’s right hand. It would be easy — very easy! — for Vox to move said hand just slightly and start raking his claws through Alastor’s hair.

Vox held his right hand painfully still, nearly petrified, all while with his left hand he continued to — Alastor didn’t know, deflower? — the pizza. 

Since Vox was apparently NOT going to take the open invitation to touch Alastor (rude) Alastor watched him. His tongue spiralized around the pizza slice, dripping spit. The tip of his tongue came to a delicious point that Alastor felt some kind of way about. His brain, disconnecting from all the tethers that usually kept him semi sane, suddenly conjured up the image for him of him sucking on the tip of Vox’s tongue, lips wrapped around it, hearing Vox moan into his mouth—

“-lastor?”

Alastor shook his head like a dog shaking water out of its ears. Vox was staring at him, big-eyed and screen tilted.

“Pardon?” Alastor said. 

“I said are you just gonna keep staring all lustfully at my pizza, or do you want to try some?”

It really wasn’t the pizza Alastor was staring lustfully at — not that he was staring lustfully at anything — but he was, now that Vox mentioned it, still hungry!

“Sure,” he said. 

He made no move to grab a slice. He thought about it, but his arms were so very heavy, two leaden rods at his sides. He couldn’t lift one to grab food off the coffee table, he was almost certain of it. 

A beat passed. Vox sighed. He leaned forward, his thigh pressing in close to the side of Alastor’s face, making Alastor’s ear twitch, slightly, and grabbed a slice out of the box. The cardboard was soaked in grease, the pizza was dripping with it. He folded it half over itself and pulled it up to Alastor’s mouth.

The idea of being hand-fed by Vox was so undignified that Alastor would have wept if he had any presence of mind left. Unfortunately, all of his thoughts felt something like soft cheese, dense and impossible to comb through. 

Alastor opened his mouth and ate the pizza. He had no memory of liking pizza, and indeed usually looked askance at Vox whenever he ordered it at a restaurant, and yet— fuck, this tasted good. The sweet, salty cheese on his tongue, the hot red sauce bursting under his teeth, the resistance of the dough. Somewhere between his first joint and now, pizza had gone from an unappealing and somewhat oily concept to pure, ecstatic alchemy.

Unbidden, from the back of his throat, Alastor moaned.

“Good, right?” Vox said. His voice had gone husky. “Best pizza in the city.”

Alastor chewed with reverence. He experienced the food like he’d never experienced it before, he understood all of Vox’s obscene throat noises. He took another bite, and another, greed roaring through him, and closed his jaws suddenly on something hard, teeth cracking against metal.

“Ow! Al, fuck!” 

Alastor blinked. He’d bitten down on Vox’s wrist, he realized. Slowly (his reflexes were shot, dammit, if the hotel were to fall under siege right this moment, Charlie’s only defense would be her angry girlfriend and single angelic spear) he released Vox, opening his mouth slowly and pulling back. 

In spite of the shout, Vox didn’t look that upset. He rubbed his wrist, screen trained on Alastor the entire time. 

“I know the pizza’s good,” he said with a little hiccup of a laugh. “But try not to uh. Bite my hand off?”

Alastor licked the salt off his lips. “No promises.”

Vox gave Alastor yet another hapless smile.

“You said you didn’t even think I’d taste good,” he said. “I know you don’t actually want to eat me, so don’t…” he twirled his hand for a moment. Alastor saw the teeth marks in his wrists. 

“Uh,” Vox hummed, a low mechanical drone as he stuck his tongue halfway out. “Don’t uh. Whazza fuckin word? Oh, bluster! Don’t bluster!”

Alastor’s eyes were fixed on the teeth marks he’d left in Vox, more hypnotizing by far than his ridiculous eye. Don’t be so sure about that, he thought. 

It was a little unclear to Alastor how they ended up migrating into the bayou.

He remembered wanting to be in the bayou, wanting to be surrounded by the night and the water and the sky, even if it was just his own little simulacrum of nature, but he did not recall voicing this desire to Vox or standing up and walking from the plush red side of the hotel room into the dreamy blues and greens of his only half-remembered life. 

The memory hadn’t been stolen from Alastor, that much he knew. His lack of recollection was not sinister, it was just the sands of time working a little bit faster than usual. All memories were water in cupped hands — weed just made the time itself pass slower in exchange for the memories vanishing faster. 

There was an especially soft patch of moss that was — normally — just the right size for one demon to recline at his full length and gaze up at the facsimile of stars above. This evening, the bayou had reshaped itself just slightly, and the small mossy knoll, so perfectly soft, had expanded to a little more than double its usual width. Alastor would have loved to accuse the very biome of being an obnoxious meddler, but he knew that he was the one who controlled the space. Consciously or subconsciously was difficult to concern, but hardly the point at present.

When he was this high, Alastor’s subconscious was conscious and his id and ego were indistinguishable.

“This is… nice,” Vox said. 

“Hmm,” Alastor said, there enough to acknowledge Vox, not quite present enough to make his mouth form words. 

The two of them lay close. Not touching, not yet, but their fingertips were close enough that Alastor could feel the presence in his skin, could feel the electricity in his fingerbones. Their shoulders, too, were very nearly touching. The faint buzz of Vox’s screen was close enough to Alastor’s ears not to be drowned out by the chirrupping of insects of the gentle lapping of water near their feet. The lush leaves of the tree whispered against the spanish moss above them, and beyond that, the night sky glittered. 

The illusion was, in Alastor’s not-so-humble-opinion, excellent. 

“I don’t remember there being so many stars,” Vox said, voice gone sleepy and happy. “This— your sky is so bright.”

“I remember it being this bright,” Alastor said. He sounded annoyed, he thought, but he wasn’t. Luckily for him, Vox never much cared if he was annoying Alastor.

“I thought-t-t-t,” Vox said, his tongue stuttering on the last consonant, not quite slurring, not not slurring. “That you were from New Orleans. What about the light pollution from the city?”

Alastor was so comfortable, the moss under him softer than his bed. A firefly blinked, yellow then gone, in the corner of his vision. 

“I am,” Alastor said after a long pause. “I was. That is— this is how it looked in— outside the city.”

“Where?” Vox asked.

“Plaquemines Parish.”

“Like, a church?”

“No, a parish is— ah, it’s like ah, that other word. Fucking…. county!”

“Oh, right, yeah. Heard of that. I only went to Lousianna once, and—”

“Don’t say it—”

“--it was back when I was doing fluff pieces for Channel 6 so—”

“We were having a nice night—!”

“--I went to New Orleans to cover Mardi Gras.”

Alastor inhaled, exhaled, listened to the water murmuring against the vegetal banks. Whatever irritation he felt washed away easily.

“So, since you haven’t been to Louisiana,” Alastor said. “A parish is the means by which the state is subdivided, rather like a county. Plaquemines was where our— my cabin was.”

“Wowwww,” Vox said, letting his mouth stretch over the word. “Moneybags over here with his multiple houses, look at you go.”

“It wasn’t really a house,” Alastor said. “It was my father’s, only one room and it was— I never liked the place.”

His fingers curled into the ground as he spoke, tightening around the thick coils of cool, damp moss. 

Vox hummed, his motors and fans eerily in tune with the low drone of the insects around them. 

“Sooooo you hated the place so much you conjured a romantic pocket dimension about it?”

Alastor snorted, felt his knuckles loosen again. The inebriated weight returned to his limbs and pressed him heavily into the earth, his chest expanding in full again as he breathed in the scent of peat and brackish water. 

“I liked… the air,” Alastor said. He could feel Vox’s body heat all the way through the layers between them, his shirt, his jacket, Vox’s shirt, and the ribbon of air separating them. “I liked the smell of the water, the sound of it. I liked the stars.”

Vox hummed in harmony with the night.

“I like the stars, too,” he said. “Sometimes my dad would try to teach me the constellations, but he only knew Ursa Major and Orion, so it wasn’t much of a bonding activity.”

Alastor snorted and was embarrassed at how deer-like the noise truly was, like some wild animal chuffing in the woods. 

“I always thought it would be cool to like, navigate by the stars,” Vox said, lifting the hand further from Alastor and drawing a line with it across the firmament. “I loved all the adventure stories where people would like, get shipwrecked and remake their boats and navigate back home with nothing but the night sky. I always wanted to do that.”

“You get seasick watching your favorite shark movies,” Alastor told him.

“Okay, well, obviously shipwrecked adventurer wasn’t actually a viable career path, so does that matter?”

Alastor let out his stupid little deer-chuff of a snort again. The thought occurred to him that Vox might never make the first move tonight, and the mere concept of going the whole night and barely touching Vox filled him with a dread so all-consuming that his vision warbled darkly around the edges for a moment. Unacceptable, Alastor thought. He could not possibly have Vox alone in his room and not touch him. More than that, what was the point of being an overlord in Hell if Alastor couldn’t do exactly what he wanted?! What was he, some kind of Puritan? What was the point in abnegation in a place like this?

Having thought this through, Alastor rolled on top of Vox, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, and face very nearly to face. Alastor held his head perhaps an inch over Vox’s screen, beaming down at him.

“Hello,” Alastor said. 

Vox let out a startled giggle.

“Um,” he said. He was blushing again, yes, oh YES he was blushing again, Alastor didn’t care if it burnt his eyes out, he loved to see it. 

Vox squirmed, but not enough to dislodge Alastor, and not in a way that made Alastor think he was especially uncomfortable. 

“Hi,” said Vox. He giggled again, his chest shaking slightly. Alastor was balanced only on Vox, with no anchors to the ground, so he shook with Vox, the tremors passing through them both.

“Hmm,” said Alastor. He ran a finger around the edge of Vox’s screen, his nail scraping the line where the screen met the casing. “Your face is flat.”

Vox laughed again, though Alastor hadn’t been trying for a joke. “I’m not that greened out, Al, I remember that I’m a television.”

“No, but,” Alastor drew his finger across Vox’s face, felt warmth where the turquoise pooled center screen. “You have a mouth.”

“Well spotted,” Vox drawled. 

“You have a tongue,” Alastor continued. “You have a— what’s behind that?”

“A uvula?” 

“No, I meant— wait, do you?”

“I— shit, I don’t know,” Vox said. “Do I have a uvula?”

“How should I know?”

“Well now I don’t remember, and it’s a little upsetting! Do you have a mirror or like—?!”

“THROAT!” Alastor jammed his finger into Vox’s screen with a tiny clink. “You have a THROAT!”

“Yeaaaaahhhh I do,” Vox said, eyebrows waggling like a game of Snake over his eyes. 

“SO!” Alastor said. His knees dug into Vox’s hipbones as a means of anchoring himself, their pelvises—

Well, Alastor had a mission, he wasn’t going to get distracted.

“So,” Alastor said. “That’s all… inside bits. You don’t have lips?”

“I… kinda?” Vox said. 

“What the fuck is ‘kinda’?” Alastor said. “You either have lips or you don’t.”

“It’s, uh,” Vox turned a brighter shade of blue and Alastor felt a curious combination of fondness and a desire to sink his teeth into Vox’s shoulder. Odd. “I mean. My screen is solid most of the time, you know?”

“Yes, we discussed that.”

“No, I mean— my mouth, it’s just a display most of the time.”

That was revelatory. Alastor tapped Vox’s mouth, and yes, it clinked like glass.

“Oh,” Alastor said. 

“So I, uh. I have lips when I. Need. Lips?” Vox said. 

Alastor wriggled down Vox’s body, rested his chin on Vox’s sternum. The shirt was still mostly buttoned. Criminal. 

“And when exactly do you need lips?” Alastor asked.

Vox swallowed. He made swallowing into a whole production, his throat contracting, his Adam’s apple bobbing. 

“Al,” Vox said. “C’mon.”

Alastor braced his hands on Vox’s shoulders. Fireflies danced a warm glow all around them. The scent of ozone emanating from Vox was just barely stronger than the sweet breath of decaying wood. 

“Can I see?” Alastor purred.

Vox’s screen flashed an error message before resolving into his big-eyed, blushing display. 

“You and your experiments,” Vox said, voice quavering too much to hold any bluster.

“I’m just sooooo curious,” Alastor said.

Again, Vox swallowed. It took wholly 30 seconds and all the pixels on his screen trembled as he did it.

Then, he nodded.

“Okay.”

Alastor kissed him. 

For a fraction of a second, it was like pressing his lips to cold glass. Then Alastor felt a mouth under his own, an open mouth, breath warm and sweet against his teeth.

A warbling, almost keening noise came from underneath Alastor, so pained Alastor worried for a moment he’d inadvertently snapped one of Vox’s ribs. But when he tried to pull back to check, the whine under him sharpened in its pain, and claws clamped down on Alastor’s back, holding him in place. 

Well, then. 

Normally being restrained by Vox was reason enough for Alastor to rip the man to shreds but…

Well. Alastor himself wasn’t exactly opposed to the position he was in at present. Vox was very warm and firm underneath him, and his mouth felt wonderful against Alastor’s. (He did have a mouth and yet he didn’t. It was maddening, because if Alastor thought too hard about it suddenly he felt glass and plasma on his lips, but if he just let the high carry him and he continued to kiss Vox while his brain burbled like an unbothered brook, it was just like… kissing? Normally? 

It occurred to Alastor that, given his lack of experience in the matter, he actually had no reference for normal kissing. He hadn’t, before. He and Vox hadn’t, and before Vox there had been no desire, so, huh. A first. Over a hundred years old, nearly a hundred years dead, and Alastor was still getting firsts.

In any case, kissing Vox was nice. It was nothing like tongueing a flat screen, as Alastor had wondered (feared) it would have been. It felt right, it felt like pieces designed to slide together, like grabbing a radio mic for the first time, like his fingers on the keys of a piano or wrapped around the handle of the night. It felt warm like a belly full of whiskey or a spray of arterial blood to the face. 

The hands on Alastor’s back, Vox’s hands, were very heavy. Not weed-heavy, but intentionally heavy. They were held loosely, like it was a total accident that Alastor was pinned in place, but with the sort of weight disproportionate to mass that was usually only seen in cats who did not want to be picked up by their owners. (Ask Alastor how he knew. He would do just about anything to get on Charlie’s good side, but cat sitting ever again was firmly on the “not worth his soul” list.)

Also catlike, Vox’s claws were digging into Alastor’s back. Not hard, not piercing through his coat, thank heavens, but enough that Alastor could feel the sharpness through his clothes. Enough to tantalize. Enough for Alastor, under other circumstances, to start wanting more. Normally the presence of Vox’s sharp fingertips made Alastor start to cant his hips forward — hey, Television might not be his preferred method of media consumption, but even Alastor could admit that Vox was the most entertaining person in Hell — but. At present, the warmth was nice, the warmth of just a few drinks, the warmth like a late summer’s night, the warmth of Vox still trembling underneath him. Alastor stroked the edge of Vox’s screen and did not break their kiss.

Eventually, Vox stopped pretending and actually relaxed into the kiss. He sighed into Alastor’s mouth, his palms went flat over Alastor’s spine. Alastor could feel Vox’s erection pressing up against his thigh, but Vox wasn’t rutting against him either, so it just felt like another point of connection. A pleasant warmth and pressure. Alastor slipped his tongue in Vox’s mouth experimentally, didn’t like the sensation, and removed it promptly. They kept kissing, though, as unmoved as though their lips had sealed together. 

Fascinating, Alastor thought, how they could be so still and yet so active. Their mouths weren’t moving all that much, he was almost certain of it, and they hadn’t been reduced to humping each other. Alastor’s one hand was braced on Vox’s shoulder, his other tracing the casing round his screen, and Vox’s hands were static on Alastor’s back. They were very nearly still, for them, and yet Alastor had never felt so bright, or in so much motion.

When finally Alastor raised his head, Vox had an incredibly hapless smile on his screen, little pixelated hearts rising and popping around his eyes like so many bubbles.

“Uh,” Vox said, sounding breathless even though his shirt was undone to give his gills easier access to the air. “Hi.”

“You said that already, sweetheart,” Alastor said. 

He kissed Vox again, and a little jolt of electricity popped from Vox’s skin into Alastor, just the right edge of painful.

“Sorry!” Vox said. “Wait, fuck. I mean— was it, uh— hold on a sec! — was it good for you?”

He did his best to change the dopey grin into a smirk. Alastor grabbed his antennae and yanked. Vox shouted and let off a fountain of surprised sparks, and Alastor tossed his head back, cackling.

“Oh, dear, dear, don’t try to play cool with me now, that’s just pathetic.”

Before Vox’s eyes could look too wet, Alastor kissed the corner of his screen.

“It was nice,” Alastor said. “I didn’t know… is it always— I liked it, yes. Now, close your mouth, or you’ll— well, I guess you wouldn’t catch flies, would you? Not unless you wanted to—”

“Hey!” Vox said. “You’re gonna— you’re gonna give me whiplash, being this nice and this mean. Can you give a guy a warning?!”

“No,” Alastor said. He stabbed a the sharp nail of his index finger into one of Vox’s gills, and while Vox was still shouting, Alastor cut the noise off with a kiss. 

Oh, he absolutely had to do more of this. Vox screaming into Alastor’s mouth was sublime, it was orgasmic, it was—

Vox dug his claws into Alastor’s back, and Alastor sat bolt upright.

“Not very polite,” Alastor said. 

“You tried to rip my antennae off!”

“Darling, if I had tried to rip your antennae off, I would have succeeded, don’t be silly.”

Vox was pouting. He looked darling, he really did, and again Alastor was struck by that odd, two-way pull, wanting to kiss Vox senseless and wanting to crush him between his hands till his organs popped from his chest like a jack in the box.

“I’ll be… nice,” Alastor said. “As nice as I can be, how’s that?”

The loopy grin returned, and Alastor felt hideously soft. He unbuttoned the remainder of Vox’s shirt to get proper access to his chest. 

“That sounds… nice,” Vox said. Obliging as ever, he shrugged his shirt off onto the moss below. 

A wonderful idea occurred to Alastor then, truly inspired. He took off his coat, then, hesitatingly (and a little clumsily too, sue him, he hadn’t smoked this much in decades) he began to unbutton his shirt. 

“I CAN HELP!” Vox shouted, so loud Alastor’s ears flattened backwards reflexively. He sat completely upright, muscles stiff.

“Shit!” Vox said. “Sorry, I meant— no volume control, you know, the stupid weed, I just— I can help? If you want?”

“Mm-hmm,” Alastor said. He lowered his arms and gave Vox a jerk of the head to acknowledge him, to give some sort of assent. “You know, I learned this wonderful new slang term recently, ‘simp’--”

“Who the fuck taught you the word ‘simp’?” Vox said, claws slipping and nearly slicing through Alastor’s nice shirt. Vox caught himself, thankfully for him, and undid the buttons. It took him a while, but he managed it, and Alastor was, humiliatingly, grateful for the help.

“Angel Dust,” Alastor said.

“I have gotta squash that fucking spider one day,” Vox muttered.

“I think you’re a bit of a simp for me, dear.”

“Woooow, breaking news. You and all of Hell, dumbass.”

If Alastor could only hear Vox, he would think the blow hadn’t landed. As it was, he could see the cyan glow reflected on his own chest. 

Divested of his shirt, Alastor pushed Vox flat on his back again and lay down atop him, their chests together, their faces close.

He was right. The skin to skin contact felt glorious, better than the pizza in his mouth, better than the moss under his back. Vox’s skin was the perfect texture, the perfect temperature, and eminently Vox.

“You’re lovely,” Alastor said. 

He kissed Vox again while Vox was too dumbstruck to speak. He kissed him till his mouth felt swollen and sore, till his lips felt tired, till Vox’s breath was so intermingled with his own that Alastor would be damned to guess where he ended and Vox began.

In the dark, listening to the buzz of electricity and insects, the sussurus of leaves and skin, the wet thrush of the bayou and Vox’s heartbeat, Alastor felt even-keeled with the universe.

“Al?”

“Mmm?”

“You made all this, right?”

“Yes, dear.”

“So… why are there still mosquitoes?”

Alastor laughed, his head resting on Vox’s chest. “What else would the dragonflies eat?”

“They’re conjurations, aren’t they? Why do they have to eat anything?”

Alastor giggled into Vox’s chest.

“Are you being eaten alive?”

“YES!”

Alastor cackled.

“You’re such an ugly laugher,” Vox complained. “Your eyes go into different timezones when you laugh.

“You’re going to be itching all night long!” 

“AL!”

Another indeterminate amount of time later (time passed like a dream, like blood from a wound) Alastor took pity on Vox and moved them back into the hotel room.

“I’m too stoned,” Vox said, swaying where he stood. His gills, when Alastor petted them, were bone dry. His screen was pink-tinged and too reflective. Even when he was attempting to stand still, he kept swaying gently from side to side, visibly rocking like a child seeking to comfort itself.

“To go home?” Alastor finished.

Vox nodded, screen bobbing. “I can’t go back like this.”

“No,” Alastor agreed. “I don’t suppose you can. Imagine if the press caught you out and about like this!”

He took Vox’s hand and spun him, and Vox moaned a little as he twirled, stumbling when Alastor let him go.

“Aaaaallllllll—”

“Oh, don’t whine, dearest,” Alastor said. “I’m not so unchivalrous as to kick you out. You’re perfectly welcome to stay the night.”

Vox looked momentarily nervous.

“I don’t… I don’t really want to—”

“For goodness sake, Vox, you can sleep on the floor if you prefer, but the mattress is more comfortable,” Alastor said. “And I’m not that chivalrous. I’m staying in my bed tonight. Whether or not you join me is entirely up to you.”

Vox, whose dress shirt was draped over his shoulders but not put back on in any meaningful way, crossed his arms somewhat self-consciously over his chest. 

“I should change, then,” he said. 

“Did you bring pajamas?” Alastor snorted.

“Ugh, no, I—” Vox’s eyes betrayed him per usual, darting over to a messenger  bag he’d brought with him and dumped unceremoniously in the corner of the room when he entered. “But I bet Val did. He thinks he’s funny.”

“Oh?” Alastor said.

Vox flushed neon.

“It’s a bit,” he mumbled. “A joke.”

“Voooox,” Alastor said.

“Ugh.” Vox turned his screen to the ceiling, hands fisted at his sides. “I will. I will get changed. Only because these pants are super uncomfortable. But just—”

He paused. His voice went so soft that Alastor’s bones ached.

“Please don’t laugh?”

Alastor made no promises, but he nodded over to the adjoining bathroom door. Vox slipped inside, still displaying his uncharacteristic embarrassment. Alastor was maddeningly curious for a moment, then he became distracted by the overwhelming sensation of the duvet cover under his palms, and he rubbed his hands back and forth of the the apple-and-fleur-de-lis pattern for a while, humming to himself in a way he thought was tuneless, but soon turned into “Clementine.”

The door opened either a few seconds or an hour later, a little snick of the lock and click of the latch. Someone shuffled out, the fabric noises soft and heavy. Alastor turned around and—

Oh.

“Vincent,” Alastor breathed. “You look adorable.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Vox whispered. His arms — his fins — were crossed over his chest, his screen so brilliantly teal that Alastor could hardly see his eyes. 

Vox was wearing a single clothing item, one that covered him foot to neck. The whole thing was blue and white and, while rather plush, evidently designed to look like a shark. Alastor had heard of this before, he’d seen Charlie wearing something similar, though for a different animal, if he could just recall the word—

“You’re wearing a shark onesie?” Alastor said. 

“Uuuuughhhhh NO, I’m not, I’m changing,” Vox said. 

He managed to only turn halfway round before Alastor clamped his hand down on Vox’s wrist and dragged him over to the bed. 

“You are absolutely not allowed to change!” Alastor said. Maybe through his teeth, a little, as Vox looked briefly alarmed. “This is— fuck, this is darling!”

Vox once again turned his screen up to the ceiling. “It’s stupid, I know it’s stupid.”

“I feel like I shouldn’t be looking at you directly! I ought to get an old pinhole camera so as not to damage my eyes!”

“You can stop whenever you want, by the way.”

“Wait!” Alastor laughed. (He wasn’t laughing at Vox — he was supposed to be laughing at Vox and he wasn’t, he was laughing for pure delight. He should be mocking Vox, but. Well.) “Wait, Charlie’s onesie had a hood. Vox. Vox! Do you have a hood?”

Vox gave Alastor one pleading look. Then he lifted the hood of his onesie over his screen.

“It’s got shark teeth around the edges!” Alastor cried. He twirled Vox in a wide circle, admiring the fin on the back of the onesie, cooing over the little fabric teeth. “Your screen is so much wider than a normal head, though! You would have had to have this custom made!”

“I did,” Vox said, putting on an unconvincing show of misery, his smile slipping through the cracks when he thought Alastor wasn’t looking. “It’s stupid, okay, it’s just— it’s comfortable, and I know everybody thinks it looks dumb—”

“Who all have you met in your shark onesie?!” Alastor crowed.

“Just— Val thinks it’s ridiculous,” Vox said. He was getting mush-mouthed again, rubbing his arm, and that wouldn’t stand. 

Alastor pounced on him, knocking them both onto the bed. 

“Are you comfortable?”

“Mostly,” Vox said. 

“Good! Your pajamas are ridiculous, but you are adorable.”

Vox squirmed under Alastor. “I’m not some fucking puppy!”

Alastor kissed him. “Oh, but you are.”

Vox crossed his arms. (His fins! Fuck! He was so cute Alastor wanted to light the building on fire!) His blush was ever-present. His face softened a little.

“So we just… sleep together?” he said. “In my stupid pajamas? And neither of us gets off?”

“Do you want me to fuck you in the shark onesie?”

“Not especially.”

“Well then!”

Alastor dimmed the lights and wrangled the blanket on top of both of them. This took a good long while, for his coordination was still not quite up to snuff, his limbs still heavy and slow with the fading influence of the drug. 

But they were still high, and there was still plausible deniability…

Alastor snuggled into Vox’s side, kissing the corner of his screen. He got poked with a fabric tooth for his efforts.

“Good night, Vox.”

Vox rolled on his side, kissed Alastor full on the mouth, and then, before he could roll over again, Alastor took Vox’s hand and placed it on his head.

“Huh?”

“Behind my ears,” Alastor said, a thin whisper. It was dreadful to ask for, even in the dark. He huffed. “Please.”

Vox looked, in his frame of teeth, like Christmas had come early. He started working his claws back and forth, scratching Alastor’s scalp so very gently, working through his hair, very tenderly scratching behind Alastor’s stupid ears. 

It felt so fucking good. Better than Alastor had hoped. Better than he'd imagined. He wriggled closer to Vox and swiveled his head to better let Vox's claws rake over his head. 

A noise smaller than a moan and lower than a whine crawled out of Alastor’s throat. Vox, wisely, said nothing. It was a bad idea to throw stones in glass houses and to mock other people while wearing custom shark onesies, Alastor supposed.

“Good night, Al,” Vox whispered. 

As Alastor fell asleep, he realized he was warm down to the core.