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“Princess!” Vox projects, putting a little bit of tele-broadcast oomph into his voice that rattles the hotel windows as the front door opens. “How lovely to see you!”
“Vox! Hi! Uh—come in!”
And it’s that easy. Vox steps into the Hazbin Hotel—which, pft, he’d make fun of Alastor for living in this place if he wasn’t fully certain that Alastor is the one that named it. It definitely wasn’t the bleeding heart princess that promised to let him in after he caught her attention and solemnly confessed his dear desire to reconcile with an old friend—after all Alastor had such a close call during Heaven’s invasion! He’s pretty sure he saw her wiping away a tear at some point.
Speaking of old friends: Alastor is right at the entryway, arms primly folded behind his back and his usual shit-eating smile plastered across his face. But Vox knows better—across their shared frequencies, he can tell Alastor is seething. He catches his eye and grins, eyes narrow and smarmy, and then grins even wider as Alastor blinks at him placidly and painstakingly packs away Vox’s access to his unintentional broadcast.
“Vox,” Alastor greets, interrupting the princess’s ongoing welcome spiel. Just as good: Vox wasn’t actually listening. “Charlie, dear, what is…this…doing here?”
“Oh, well—” The princess chances a glance back at Vox, biting her lip. She clearly doesn’t want to put him in a tough spot, which is just precious.
“I’m checking in!” Vox declares, and stares at Alastor pointedly. “Princess Morningstar has been very welcoming. We’ve gotten to know each other so well!”
“I see,” Alastor replies, cheerful as ever. He takes a step forward, and Vox very deliberately doesn’t take a step back. “Then as the hotelier, let me welcome—”
Shk.
“FUCK!”
Pain erupts in Vox’s foot. Reasonably, he immediately tries to yank his foot away from the source of agony—which just causes him to double over, shouting again, as Niffty—fucking fuck, it’s Niffty—yanks an enormous, dagger-like needle out of his foot.
“Welcome back, bad boy!” she says, wagging the now-bloody needle a little too close to his face. Despite the pain, Vox grimaces, and straightens back up. Fuck, these were new shoes. “I exterminate bugs,” she tells him, punctuating her words with a demented laugh, then looks him straight in the eyes. “All the ones that live in the walls. Even the metal ones.”
“Uh—”
“Ohmygod, I am so sorry,” the princess says, hands dropping from her mouth. “Here, uh—oh, I should really find Niffty and have a talk with her about stabbing the guests! Here, Alastor can help you out! There’s a first aid kit in the kitchen!”
“Wait—”
But she’s already gone, and Vox is left bleeding and alone in the entryway with Alastor. Alastor, who is circling Vox like a shark that just smelled blood, angling closer and closer—only to put a hand on his shoulder, grip firm despite his fine bones.
Alastor leans in. “Well? The kitchen is this way.”
Vox swallows. He is so fucking dead. “Sure.”
The kitchen is quiet. Vox ducks away from Alastor’s grip and beelines to hop on the island counter immediately, because it always annoyed Alastor when he did that back in—well, before—and then regrets his choice immediately when he turns to see Alastor standing in the doorway, smiling politely. His hands and cane are tucked behind his back, and his heels click on tile as he steps into the room.
The door shuts behind him with a snap, untouched but for a flicker of shadow that slithers back to Alastor’s feet. Vox flinches.
Shit. He thought he’d be safe here—Alastor’s the worst kind of demon out there, but Princess Morningstar is trying to redeem people, and there’s no way she’s letting him just eat the residents. Which is why Vox should have stuck around where the princess is instead of letting the fucking cannibalistic asshole lure him to a secondary location!
Especially a kitchen!
Alastor hums idly as he steps around Vox, as if he’s totally unaware of the way Vox’s claws are gouging furrows into the countertop on either side of his legs. He hums the same way he does everything: like an uncanny freak. Staticky music trails through the air after him, broadcasted ambiently, none of it actually coming from his throat. Vox is pretty sure he hears more of it than most people, because despite everything, modern wireless technology still runs on radio waves and he’s never been the kind of idiot to turn his back on an enemy.
Alastor stops by the stove and reaches for the knives.
Vox hops off the countertop, ready to run—and immediately buckles as half of his weight drives directly onto his injured foot, sharp agony stabbing up his calf all the way to his knee.
“Fuck,” he hisses. Why does this hurt worse than when Niffty actually stabbed him?! He can’t let it keep him down. He has to move. He has to—
A hand hooks under his armpit and tugs him up effortlessly. Vox yelps as he goes, and finds himself face-to-face with Alastor, who is holding…
A blue, metal box with a white cross on the lid of it. The cupboard above the counter where the knives are situated is still swinging closed.
“You should get back on the counter,” Alastor tells him, voice as crackly as ever. “Easier to reach that way! We wouldn’t want you to have another…accident, hm?”
His voice darkens on the last word, pitching low as his eyes go lidded, but Vox is too off-balance to process the way that tone makes his rabbit hindbrain want to bolt.
“You…want me on the counter?” he asks.
Alastor raises a hand, and smacks Vox on the side of the head.
“Fuck—OW! What are you—” Smack. Smack, smack.
“Fucking stop it!” Vox snaps, flailing his arms up and batting Alastor’s assault away. “What is your problem?!”
Alastor hums, blinking slowly. He sets the first aid kit on the island counter next to Vox. “That’s the issue with your newer models, old chum! It used to be that some good old percussive maintenance set you just right!”
“You mean when you used to terrorize me with concussionary threats?” Vox asks. Alastor steps closer and he backpedals—right back onto the counter, cursing himself as he goes. At least this way he’s a little bit above Alastor. “What were you even trying to fix? Niffty shanked my foot, not my head.”
“Your hearing,” Alastor says flatly, and shoves a stool under Vox’s foot.
“Well, don’t,” Vox says, crossing his arms and hunching down over them. Now his head and his foot hurt. Alastor hitting him back when they used to actually hang out—ugh, what a horrible way to describe it—was horrible, but it wasn’t too different from this. He thought smacking Vox in the side of the head whenever his screen went on the fritz was just the funniest fucking thing, nevermind that him doing that was half the reason he glitched out so regularly in the first place, but he also—
This isn’t the first time Alastor has patched him up. One time, some asshole friend of Mimzy’s saw Alastor smacking him and thought—you know what, the Radio Demon is right! That is hilarious! Maybe I should give it a try!
‘I apologize for your poor taste in employees,’ is probably not what Mimzy was looking for after she ended up short a doorman, but nobody ever smacked Vox in front of Alastor ever again.
And, fuck, he thinks as he watches Alastor pull his perforated shoe off with a painful, sharp familiarity, Niffty would never have hurt him before, either. At least, not on purpose. And now she’s out here sticking needles through his entire foot and comparing him to a roach like he’s the one that left them.
Alastor’s claws are sharp against Vox’s ankle, and his breath whistles through his teeth as he anticipates the way they’re about to slit through the back of his Achilles tendon, render him completely unable to run—but Alastor just snaps off the clasps to his sock garters, pulls his sock off, and steps aside to bin the whole thing. Vox should complain, but it’s not like he has a use for a blood-soaked sock with two holes in it. And—he already feels enough like a little kid getting patched up after a playground scrape. There’s no need to demean himself further.
“I can’t believe you’re actually doing this,” Vox mutters, watching Alastor pick through gauze and antiseptic. He eyes a suture kit for a moment, but thankfully decides against subjecting Vox to that. “I can put some bandaids on myself, you know.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Alastor says, and finishes tying off the bandage. He’s wrapped it all the way around Vox’s foot, not too tight and with thicker padding above and below. All Vox really needs is something to stop him from bleeding all over the place, to be honest—he’ll heal most wounds just fine on his own. The way Alastor is fussing at him, it’s like he thinks he’s still young and incompetent and…
Vox swallows. It’s fine. He doesn’t need Alastor’s protection anymore. Besides, Alastor never treated Husk quite like he did Niffty and Vox, either, and it’s a thought that’s haunted Vox for most of his death days. He could never tell if it was because Husk was more of a true, unwilling underling of Alastor’s—or because Alastor has a soft spot for women and Vox didn’t used to pass as a man for shit. And now that Vox is all brand new, shiny-faced, and totally lacking in tits…well.
He’d rather pry his own teeth out with a pliers than ask. Knowing Alastor, he’d give him the honest fucking truth. He’d rather poke out his own eyeballs. He’d rather bite off his tongue.
He opens his mouth, taking a breath—
“Gu-uys!” comes a loud sing-song just before the kitchen door bursts open. Vox flinches, twitching away from Alastor as if they’re doing something illicit—even though the only potential for illicit activity here is if Alastor was slaughtering and eating him—while Alastor carefully puts the first aid supplies away, unphased. Charlie Morningstar stands in the doorway, smiling hopefully as she stares at the two of them intently.
Vox blinks, and then smiles back, confused as shit. “Hey, Princess. We’re just about done, I think.”
“Great!” Princess Morningstar chirps, and clasps her hands together like an extra in an after-school special. “Just in time for group therapy!”
The Princess ends up apologizing to Vox extensively as they walk, though unlike Alastor she actually waits for him to tug his ruined shoe back over his foot, cringing at the weird sensation of wearing it without a sock.
“I know it’s a little intense for a first-time session,” she says, gesturing with her hands as they walk, “so please don’t feel like you have to put yourself out there too much, you know—I kind of learned that the hard way, that you can’t push people too hard before they’re ready—it’s just that this is part of program we’ve all been working on for a few months, and everyone’s been doing really well, even Alastor, and Husk, and I really didn’t want to disrupt things in case it kinda, you know, pops the bubble a little bit—”
Vox could not possibly give less of a shit. He’s literally here to spy on them.
“Don’t worry, Princess,” he says with a friendly laugh, pulling his shoulders back and tucking his hands behind him. “I run VoxTek! I’m great at being a team player.”
“Oh, haha, that—that makes total sense!” she says, actually pronouncing the ‘haha’ out loud. “Well—anyway, we’re doing a trust exercise today, so you’ve probably, maybe, done things like that at your company?”
Only to haze the new hires.
“So maybe you’ll be more familiar with it, even though you’re jumping into the middle!” she says, thumping a fist into her open palm, like she’s convinced herself. “It does require you to know the people you’re working with, though…”
They step into what is apparently a dedicated group therapy room, where everyone else is already waiting—including Alastor, Niffty, fucking Angel Dust, Husk, some guy in a top hat that Vox doesn’t recognize, and some chick Vox is pretty sure is an actual exorcist. He’s seen enough of those up close to tell. Either she’s here to enforce the heavenly standards for redemption, or the princess takes the whole redemption plot really seriously.
It’s a surprisingly cozy little seating area, all bright, cheerful colors that are more tasteful than childish, at least for the most part. There are some leftovers from what was probably a group art project, a bunch of drawings made by different people. He recognizes Husk’s monochrome pencil sketches—he’s a pretty dab hand at realism, actually—and Niffty’s eclectic scribbling, mostly indecipherable except for where she’s drawn the faces of Alastor and the top hat guy in terrifying, realistic detail, leaning toward each other like they’re about to—
Vox looks around at all the other art pieces, but doesn’t recognize anything that Alastor would have drawn. At least, not until he looks closer at the individual works. Alastor doesn’t seem to have contributed any independent pieces himself, but his sharp doodles are all over everybody else’s stuff. It’s all bright red ink, jagged-toothed smiles with or without frowning brows, and judgmental comments interspersed with genuine critique, like he’s the universe’s meanest grade school teacher. The only art without his commentary is the Niffty one where he’s about to make out with that other guy. Yeah. That’s Niffty, alright.
One of the more cheerful, rainbow-plastered drawings has a smiley and a thumbs up on it. The words underneath say, ‘Good job! If only it meant anything!’
“...Don’t worry, Princess,” Vox says, stepping into the room after her and shaking his head to clear it. “I know plenty of these los—errrrrr—people!”
Husk snorts, leaning back in his colorful yellow plush chair. “Watch who you’re calling ‘loser,’ sore loser.”
Vox bares his teeth at him in a delighted smile, and tries not to think too much about the number of times he’s thrown a hand of cards in Husk’s face over Alastor’s kitchen table while Niffty kicked her legs and cackled in the background. In the end, Husk lost the only hand that mattered.
“Ahem! Attention, please, everyone!” The princess stands at the front of the room, which all of their chairs are arranged in a semi-circle around. She’s holding some flashcards. Vox ends up in the last seat, a grassy green situated between the exorcist and the top hat guy. “Today’s exercise will beeeeeee…” The princess pauses excitedly, looking up from her flashcard at the various people in the room. A moment too late, the exorcist starts patting her own thighs in a little drum roll. “Oh, thank you Vaggie! It’s going to be—Defusing Your Relationship! Literally!”
There’s a long pause.
“Um! We’re going to be defusing bombs!” She grins sheepishly, and flings the cards over her head. There’s a lot of them, and way more text she seems to not have read. “Yay!”
Vaggie claps. It startles the top hat guy, who looks zoned out of his skull, and he follows suit. “That sounds great, sweetie! What, uh—what is it? Exactly?”
Well, holy fuck. Between the exorcist and this fucked up ‘trust exercise’—he supposes she is the princess of hell for a reason. The free lodgings and food at the hotel are the carrot, but he knows better than anyone that if you want people to do a job right, you also need a stick.
“So, um—oh, shoot, hang on, I still need the cards—” She scrambles to grab them from the air as they rain down around her, and finally snags the one she needs. “Right! Everybody is going to group up in pairs, and get assigned to a bomb! It’s kind of a way of giving everyone a little push to talk about the things that might be weighing on them, because if you don’t talk about your feelings in time, the bomb explodes!”
Vox stares at her.
“But don’t worry! It’s just, you know!” She wiggles a hand in the air. “Foosh!”
Right. ‘Foosh.’
What the fuck did Vox sign up for? No wonder Alastor loves this place. It’s like a brand new, worse version of hell.
She picks names out of a cup to match them, scribbling Vox’s on a new scrap at the last minute. Husk ends up with Angel Dust, which is honestly a relief because Vox hates both of them at this point in time, but Niffty then goes with the exorcist, which is unfortunate, because I’m really pissed off that you stabbed me through the fucking foot seems like an easy out for this one. The next name out of the cup is Alastor’s, which makes Vox’s stomach clench with an anxiety that he will acknowledge the day he dies, and after that…
“And next is….LUCIF—er—uh—” Princess Morningstar casts her eyes around desperately. They land on him. “Vox! Next is Vox! With Alastor! Haha. Isn’t that a great combo? I’m sure that couldn’t possibly end up more explosive than the actual bomb. Anyway, that’s good, since that’s the last person left that you know, Vox, so that just leaves me with dad, which—oh, man, okay, I guess that’s—yeah, we can do that. We…that’ll be good for us, I think.”
No fucking way.
“That’s Lucifer Morningstar—?” Vox manages before Alastor is grabbing him by the arm and yanking him away. “Wait, no, I wanna be with that guy! Princess! Princess!”
“It’s too late,” Alastor drawls, manhandling Vox into a corner. “We’ve been tagged for the session. Besides, I have it on good authority that His Majesty thinks television—ah, what was it? Rots the brain.”
The room flickers, and suddenly they’re not in the therapy room anymore. For a moment Vox thinks Alastor has yanked him through the shadows—but he’s not gibbering in abject horror or vomiting his guts out, so probably not. Actually, it’s just another room they’re in, just like any other in the hotel. There are two colorful, cushioned seats inside, and… a comically large, borderline cartoonish bomb. It’s a big black ball, and there’s a fuse on top, though it’s not lit. Instead, it has a digital timer on the side of it. It’s ticking down from ten minutes.
Vox swallows, and sits down in the blue chair. The other one is red. Alastor leans back in it, crossing one leg over the other, and smiles at Vox.
Of course this fucker isn’t planning on saying anything. Well, if Vox is good at anything, it’s this: getting a rise out of Alastor.
“So,” Vox starts. “Why’d Niffty draw you making out with Lucifer?”
“Why?” Alastor shoots back. “Wishing it was you?”
Vox flinches. “What the fuck is wrong with you—”
“Oh, don’t pretend you weren’t trying to goad me. Isn’t this little exercise about baring our feelings? Don’t worry, old friend—rest assured that I have no romantic or sexual attachments to our local deadbeat. He just hangs around because without his daughter nannying him, he tends to forget to eat.”
“What about any of that,” Vox grits out, “was baring your feelings? Being genuine isn’t the same thing as being an asshole.”
Alastor leans in, folding his hands over his knees. His teeth glint. “Maybe I’m a genuine asshole.”
Vox barks a laugh before he can help himself, and then clicks his teeth closed in irritation. “Look, just—I don’t want to blow up, okay? We have like thirteen minutes, we might as well rehash some of our old shit and get out of here before everyone else so we can rub it in their faces. Alright?”
Alastor shrugs, smiling like he always does. Vox used to be able to read more into his expression—or maybe Alastor used to express more around him.
“Baring feelings…what am I even supposed to talk about?” Vox complains after the silence stretches out a touch too long to bear. “Uh—hm. It’d be great if you stopped making jabs about the fact that I used to like you. There. That’s genuine.”
“Used to?” Alastors brows rise. “Interesting.”
“The hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means—”
“I know what you meant, jackass, it was rhetorical. Why do you say it like that?”
Alastor’s eyes narrow at him. “If you’re going to demand answers, then you should at least let me speak.”
Vox’s smile is grit-toothed. “By all means. Old pal.”
Alastor sighs, leaning back into his seat and lifting a hand up to peer at his own claws. “Your obsession with me is hardly subtle, Vox. Tell me, how long did you manage to hold off between finding out I was back in town and the little welcome party you threw me? One day? Two?”
Vox’s monitor fuzzes over in that way that always happens when any normal person would be flushing, and when he manages to clear it up, he knows his face is tinted pink. Alastor laughs at him.
“Oh, that’s amazing!” Alastor declares, sitting up. “Less than a day, then! Now you must tell me—really, how long was it?”
Vox is about to tell him to go fuck himself, actually, when his eyes land on the timer. Four minutes left. How long did they spend sitting there in awkward silence? Fuck, he’s too young to die! Again!
“...Like, thirty seconds,” he mutters. “Val dropped it on me because he was pissed I stopped him from chasing down that whore of his and sticking a gun up his ass. I don’t even know how long he knew about it and didn’t tell me for. Probably not long—probably the same time he threw his fit about Angel.”
Alastor clicks his tongue, all faux sympathy. “Trouble in paradise? Why don’t you tell me all about it.”
Vox eyes him balefully. “We’re supposed to talk about us, not other people.”
“Well, I simply don’t know what there is to talk about!”
“Are you serious?” Vox presses his palms against his face, dragging them down despite the way it pixelates his screen for a few seconds. “Why can’t you be genuine for once in your life? Your life literally depends on it! Fuck your life, my life depends on it! I haven’t died since the nineties!”
“I genuinely…don’t care,” Alastor says. “And that’s a fascinating request, coming from you!”
“That!” Vox says, pointing at him. “What does that mean!”
Alastor blinks, tipping his head to the side. His ears sway with the motion, unfairly disarming for an apex predator. “The last time we spoke about being genuine, you were rather on the opposing side. Weren’t you just telling me to ‘get over’ my alleged hangups in that regard?”
“‘Just’—that was literally years ago!” Vox throws his hands up. “Talk about fucking hangups!”
“Says the man who has at least one hard drive full entirely of useless video he can’t even make me out in.”
“I was trying to help you!” Vox says, shooting to his feet so quickly that the seat scrapes over the floor behind him. “I was trying to build something, together, because I fucking liked you, and you shit all over that! You don’t get to throw that back in my face now! In fact—” He steps forward, shoves his finger into Alastor’s face, who leans back very slightly with no change of expression whatsoever. “—you don’t get to throw my feelings into my face at all! I made it to where I am without your help, which means I was right, and you’re a has-been nobody that’s been gone for seven years—”
“And three months,” Alastor murmurs.
“—and three months and five days, whatever, we all—” Vox realizes he’s been baited and flushes. “Shut up! Just shut up, for once!”
Alastor spreads his palms, silent.
“You’re such a piece of shit,” Vox tells him. “There, that’s me baring my feelings! You really left me out to dry when I could have used a fucking friend, just because you have some superiority complex about the most outdated form of media entertainment in hell, which frankly only even still exists because you won’t let it die. And now that I’ve succeeded, now that I’ve improved myself, you’re going to get us both killed just to sate your own stupid ego!”
Alastor hums vaguely, and picks at his nails.
Vox’s next words dissolve into a screech of frustrated electrostatic, and he yanks at his own antennae. “Why won’t you just pay attention to me for once—”
The bomb explodes.
Vox will admit this much: he screams. He really doesn’t like dying, regenerating is a pain in the ass and he doesn’t trust these freaks not to have an angelic steel cherry on top of this already fucked-up cake—but instead of a painful, fiery death, his vision is instead filled with…
Glitter.
Reality fades back in as the room around them dissolves. Vox is left standing with his mouth hanging open, mid-flinch. His entire right side is covered in glitter. Alastor is standing primly across from him, similarly coated in tiny sparkles all over his left, grinning like a cat with feathers still stuck in its craw. His face shimmers, gold highlights caught in his hair, and Vox wants to cup his hand around his jaw so badly he thinks he might cry about it.
The others slowly fade into reality around them as well. Most of them are free of glitter, but Valentino’s whore and Husker are both surprisingly sparkly—if not entirely unhappy about it, looking at each other with a pleased awkwardness in their eyes. Nobody else is covered in glitter.
Alastor smiles wider. “Of course, having gotten so familiar with Charlie, you knew this was the type of bomb she would surely choose all along, no?”
“I.” Vox has no words.
“After all,” Alastor goes on with a limp-wristed little wave, “Charlie cares so much about her endeavors—she would never harm a member of the hotel.”
“Welcome back, everyone!” Princess Morningstar is announcing with a clap of her hands. “Don’t worry if you got glitter bombed! You still got some really valuable dialogue in, and progress is progress. Also, the next exercise will be pretty relaxing, we’re just going to be working with some local, native hell spiders—”
Hell spiders. Those things are the size of horses. Vox can feel the color draining from his display.
Alastor, to his credit, manages to look mildly chagrined. “...On purpose, at least,” he murmurs, before stepping closer to Vox.
“What are you…”
Alastor flings an arm around his shoulders. “Charlie, dear!” he announces, loud enough that Vox cringes and tunes down his audio receptors. “We’ll be sitting out this next one, I’m afraid fine particulates don’t mix well with Vox’s physiology! Do excuse us!”
“Oh, of course! I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize—”
Alastor keeps his arm around Vox’s shoulders as he leads him out of the room to the background tune of Charlie’s apologies. As soon as they leave the room, his arm drops, and Vox feels his shoulders come up around his proverbial ears.
All that, and all he got was glitter. Suppose he didn’t bare his feelings after all, did he?
“You know,” Vox says, deciding to fuck it all. “I’d probably hate you less if this whole thing didn’t feel like my best friend was abandoning me.”
Alastor, already turning away, pauses. His ears twitch.
The silence drags, and neither of them waver.
“Come back again later,” Alastor eventually says quietly, not turning around. “I don’t countenance spies and infiltrators in this hotel, Vox. But an old friend is always welcome to visit.”
Then he fades into the shadows.
Vox makes it about five seconds before he fist pumps so hard he scatters golden glitter all over the floor.