Chapter Text
Alastor was lost.
Well, actually, that wasn’t quite right.
In truth, Alastor knew exactly where he was. He’d been here before, had spent an unspecified, unquantified amount of time in this exact position, so perhaps the correct word to use would’ve been stuck—Alastor was stuck.
For once, there was nowhere to run.
The darkness, the shadowy ocean crashing down on him, kept him trapped. Every time he thought he might catch a glimpse of the surface, every time he thought he might claw his way back into the world of the dead, he was unceremoniously slammed back down.
It was all he could do to survive.
So that’s what he did. For hours, for days, for weeks; he had no concept of time here, just like he had no physical body. It was his mind that kept getting repeatedly dragged down, his mind that would gasp when he was sucked under, his desperate need to live forcing himself to keep moving, to keep struggling, even when he wanted to do nothing more than sink.
It would’ve been so much easier.
And he considered it too. He considered it the first time the darkness threatened to swallow him whole, and he considered it the second and the fifth and the six-hundredth time, but Alastor refused to let the darkness win.
He fought it.
Of course he did.
All the while he heard laughter in the distance. It was a familiar sound, one as grating as it was grounding, and Alastor hated to admit how he clung to that fickle sound, to the amused chuckles of his dealer, the one who could stop all of this with a flick of her pinky finger, but wouldn’t.
That’d be too easy.
Something prickled at his consciousness, and Alastor readily dismissed it. He assumed his dealer was just poking him, like one might poke a fish to see if it was still alive, but when he refused to respond, to give her the satisfaction, it didn’t stop like it normally did.
It got stronger.
Now, it was practically kicking him.
Alastor fully intended to tell her to knock it off, to ask if his current suffering wasn’t enough and if she really wanted him to suffer more—even though he knew the answer. His dealer did what she wanted, and Alastor, ever the dutiful puppet, had to do the same. He’d struggle eternally in this crushing darkness until she found a use for him and decided to pluck his strings a few more times, to free him from the torment that was, in a way, of his own making.
That was the worst part.
It was the fact that the very darkness crushing him, drowning him, was his own. It was an extension of his powers, his very own shadow-realm, where time and space became meaningless, where it was just him and his thoughts. Normally, he was in control.
The darkness listened to him.
Obeyed him.
It was—and had always been—the only friend he needed.
But maybe Alastor was a fool because somewhere along the way, he’d forgotten that there are no friends in hell, Vincent applied to the darkness too. It had become the very thing trapping him, the very thing preventing him from returning to Hell, when it was supposed to be the one thing that would never turn its back on him. It seemed, in the end, that he couldn’t even trust himself—a truly pitiful realization, especially for someone who was supposed to be a great Overlord, the infamous Radio Demon himself, and Alastor wasn’t blind to the irony.
If he was in a better headspace, he would’ve laughed.
To think that the great Radio Demon would be brought to his knees by his own powers; it was the kind of thing that would make most power-hungry demons froth at the mouth, getting high off the fact that Alastor was brought low, was suffering, due to his own sick twisted games.
But Alastor was tired.
He’d been tired for a while now, and he was trying his hardest not to let the darkness lull him into a false sense of security, to remember that it was currently his enemy. He didn’t know for sure, but he had the worrying suspicion that if he wasn’t careful, if he stopped fighting, he would die here, and Alastor hadn’t come this far just to die in some weird shadow dimension.
Just as he thought that, something slapped him.
Alastor gasped—well, as well as he could gasp without a body—and he realized that the thing kicking at him, the thing now hitting him, wasn’t his dealer afterall. It didn’t share the same rush, the same all-consuming power, when it struck, but Goddamn did it hurt. Alastor felt its impact the same way someone would feel getting hit by a train.
It slammed into him.
Slammed into him so hard Alastor forgot to struggle, and there was a brief, precarious moment where Alastor thought this thing, this frequency, would be the death of him. He shied away from it, sank deeper beneath the waves, only to realize that it was horribly familiar.
This faint hum.
The pleading note.
It was the same sound he’d listened to for seven straight years, and while in all the years he was gone, Alastor had never once responded, had never once bothered to answer, and it had kicked him moments before, Alastor found himself lunging for that frequency.
He sank his teeth into it like a feral animal.
It recoiled from him—whether in shock or disgust, Alastor didn’t know, and he frankly didn’t care. He concentrated all his effort, all his energy, into holding onto that frequency, that single high pleading note, and even though he knew that he was hurting them both, that he was the equivalent of a drowning child clutching at anything and everyone that got too close, desperate to save himself even at the cost of both their lives, Alastor didn't let go.
He couldn’t.
If he did, he’d be lost for good.
So instead, he fought. Except this time, he wasn’t fighting the waves or the ocean or the darkness that came from his own mind; he was fighting that familiar frequency, the same one that was trying to pull him from the waves, and while Alastor wanted to be free, he was too panicked to distinguish friend or foe. All he knew was that something was here and that it was fighting back, trying to gain the upper hand and wrench him toward—something.
He didn’t know what.
He only knew that someone had to give eventually eventually, and it wouldn’t be him.
Sure enough, in what could’ve been a few moments or a few centuries later, the other frequency went limp in his grasp. It lurched, and Alastor, not expecting it, static screaming, shadows crackling, collided with it at full-force.
Naturally, Alastor expected to feel it.
He expected pain, however distant, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the other frequency dipped, giving way, absorbing the impact and Alastor felt his own static calm, quiet, the waves around them slowing down, becoming sluggish, as the frequency made space for Alastor.
As they fell, seamlessly, into each other.
They slotted into place, and in that moment, he wasn’t him. Or at least, he wasn’t only him. Him and this strange frequency, the one that he knew better than he knew the back of his own hand, became one. They formed a single cacophonous note, and the sea, previously sedated, reared back in one final attempt to keep him there. It lashed out, struggling to hold onto Alastor, but Alastor was no longer himself, and in this new form, it couldn't catch him.
Alastor felt the moment it gave way, felt the moment he lurched into consciousness, and he felt, almost as strongly, when he fell out of the airwaves and collided with Vox’s bed.