Archive of Our Own

That invading the Voxtek tower had been the easy part wasn't really a surprise to Alastor. He already knew this game — though his specialty was knowing the player behind it even better — he knew the numbers, he knew the prestige of each of the demons lining up for the cameras, and he knew, more than anything, the face behind each jewel carved by the media and enchanting the audience. From this angle, it hardly seemed like he had disappeared; surely the Overlords would be proud to have him on their side. There were very few things that hadn't already been promised to him when the christian homilies of his backward era showed him Hell for the first time — before he even got there.

And it wasn't just Hell that Alastor sought to revisit that night—although stirring up nostalgia for the old days and deliberately poking at the wounds of a time when he was nothing more than a pawn in the hands of the weak wasn't exactly his idea of fun. But to be fair, Alastor also had no plans to become a receptionist at a seedy hotel or, worse still, a babysitter for the naive dreams of Lucifer's daughter.

And perhaps that was why, and only why, he had allowed himself to savor the thrill of his ascent up the ladder of the greatest and most powerful sinners. To partake in the delight as the mortal he once was. To desire a single night when his leash wasn't constantly being pulled by the invisible hands of his matriarch didn't seem to ask too much.

Before his name could become just another headline in the trashy newspapers of that same tower, Alastor had challenged them in the dark, while his shadow crawled among the indolent reporters. He brought the hottest news of the triumph of the most powerful sinner Hell had ever seen, and nobody knew. That was a face born for radio, only. Alastor was proud of it like a crown—never a cross to bear. It's different when it was the good guy who wanted to ally himself with demons, not the other way around.

There was only one person he would allow to put their face on a frivolous piece of television. And nostalgia—as Alastor had decided to pull it from its dusty box—was yet another soul that both Overlords would fight to possess.

A demon had left the door of the broadcast room that his shadow watched—none that piqued his interest. But when his dark eyes locked onto the colorful face, dull eyes behind rose-tinted lenses, it was as if his being—the soul chained to another's hands, the reputation breathing in his bargained sin—diminished. They would need much more than seven years out of town to erase all the knowledge Alastor had of the Overlords of Hell. Radio was never dead for those who yearned to know and entertain, after all; And there wasn't a single world where Alastor would forget Valentino's name, or even the things that despicable man did without even needing to hide. Like Alastor was doing now.

And that's why—and only why, he tried to convince himself—his ears drooped in the darkness, the thin scepter gripped between his bony fingers as his eyebrows arched. He sighed deeply, and the illicit, bitter, and raw delicacy—too much for demons like him to feel—that Alastor would never call jealousy—settled within him. Is this the hard part? he wondered, the irritating smile leaving his face for a single second. How pathetic.

And the next second, he was already in Vox's office.

"For a brand that arranges perfection even in hell..." he began distractedly, his nails in front of his face. "...a pimp leaving the boss's office isn't a good start."

The smile on his face was feigned, so typical of the business of his time that if Alastor squinted, he could hear the slow rhythm of the jazz and feel the warm New Orleans air clinging to his bones like a second layer of skin. The radio announcer pushed the memory away with a bitter breath, memories that insisted on penetrating him. It wasn't just at his core, in his heart—Alastor still had one, right? He had to—underneath the sternum that, in turn, remained firm beneath his impeccable scarlet suit. But it was also the way they invaded that room, as if they had been forcibly impregnated or brought from a fitting exile.

In his swivel chair—another thing so typical of the business era of his line of work that Alastor almost rolled his eyes—Vox's body turned toward him with an almost ritualistic slowness. He didn't linger in his gaze, though it cut Alastor like a newly forged blade. He always heard him before he saw him—as was fitting. For the Radio Demon, who was only visible when he wanted to be, only his voice was enough. Vox would recognize it, deaf, in the Extermination, at the end of the world.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

The old-fashioned transmission of a laugh rang out, as warm as Hell itself could be and so sharp it could have been mistaken for Carmilla's weapons.

"Welcome to you too, Vincent."

The use of the name made the air leave his lungs. His throat closed. His sense of touch went numb. Hundreds of lines of code and signals in his once immaculate transmission were lost in a matter of seconds. He felt his pulse quicken beneath the layers of wires as his eyes scanned Alastor from head to toe—but he quickly reconsidered the absurd idea. Vox didn't have a heart; perhaps he never had, and that had been his sin from the start. But to be fair, who still had one down there? Men with hearts didn't stay in Hell. That was a fact.

Just as rational men don't sneak through domains of entertainment and hungry headlines with nothing but their tails between their legs, and although Alastor was there, so was Vox, dancing on his tightrope like a circus clown. A rational man would have stepped aside to create some distance between them; he would have remembered his history not to emphasize nostalgia or deliberate on past tragedies, but to create an antivirus network, a fortress that the Radio Demon would never be able to break.

Instead, Vox rose from his chair with a despair too palpable for an empty man and moved away from his desk overflowing with papers. Primitive, crude technology. Alastor would have liked that; but Vox knows he could take down all the evils of the underworld with a live broadcast.

"Seven years..." he squeaked the words, the sound coming hoarsely from the back of his throat. "I haven't seen that radio face of yours in seven years! And you show up at my damn door out of nowhere?" As if it were you who was... who was...

Who was rejected.

An impetuous fist rose into the air and hovered between them, close enough to Alastor's face to resemble a threat—however petty and naive it seemed in the other demon's eyes. The curve of his ironic smile, like a constant and oppressive aura between them, displaying dimples on his gray skin that hadn't even been there seven years ago, gained momentum, vitality, in the face of Vox's hesitation.

"Is something wrong?" Alastor echoed, the transmission like a warm breath at the short distance between their faces. "Can't you? Is something stopping you, Vincent?"

Vox didn't answer, but Alastor could see clearly. The hypnotic eye tried, but gave up. An internal war was being waged in his instincts, and Vincent—and how Vox had entrusted that name to him; how it seemed almost like a song on those lips...—had just lost it to nothing. As always happens, Alastor thought, throwing his head back and savoring the other's expressions.

The fist between them fell, joining the body with the weight of someone lowering a white flag or giving up the fight against the gods. Giving up. Cowardly and insecure. What would the other Overlords think of this, if they could see him? Better yet, all hell would break loose? What would they think if they knew that Vincent Whittman could be so easily broken by the ghosts of the past, as if they were seventy years away again?

"You need to get out of here now."

"But already, Vox? I just arrived," said Alastor, finally. The scepter slipped from his fingers and he stuck it in the ground, like a primitive cane. "Don't I deserve a welcome? A glass of water? I'm almost starting to miss when you used to flatter me. It did you good. Lies and bluffs have always been your specialty."

This time, instead of faltering, it was Vox's turn to laugh—but the fist that had almost struck Alastor was still warm from the sensation of being able to touch him again, even if it was a fistfight.

"You haven't changed a damn thing, have you?"—in his voice, each word was as sharp as the cut of angelic blades. "You still think everyone lives at your mercy. That I... that anyone would drop their lives to see you triumph. And I... ha! I can only laugh! I'm sorry, Al, but you're seven years too late. I don't need you."

Alastor's eyebrow twitched for a moment. It wasn't the tone with which Vox spoke, rushing through words with a forced urgency that could never convince him of his feigned greatness. But rather the words themselves: the clarity with which he had said he didn't need him. That perhaps he never had. That Alastor, who had his own leash, needed him to come to his mercy, as everyone had done to him.

He cleared his throat before retaliating, fearing his voice would sound shaky on the transmission.

"Still, you'll want to claim your five minutes of fame at my expense," he laughed, hands raised high as if to embrace the distance they were from the headlines to come. "Damn it, you haven't changed a bit."

"Five minutes?" Vox laughed loudly, taking a step back. "Of course you wouldn't know what you're talking about. But I insist on showing you who's really in charge here, Al. When the Vezes do this story, you'll wish you'd never come back."

Alastor laughed at the threat, the sound curiously clear for such an outdated radio box.

"Vees?" e repeated, bending over the phrase with an animalistic laugh. "Let me guess. That's the name of your new team. Good for you, my dear "friend," that at least someone agreed to be part of your media madness. Sensationalist lies and bluffs have always been your specialty. And good that Valentino agrees."

Vox frowned, suddenly looking more offended than usual.

"What Valentino and I do is none of your business."

As if conjured, the phone on Vox's desk beeped with an irritating ring, drawing both their gazes. Vincent's was already irritated, as it had been since Alastor dragged himself into his office; the curve of his eyebrows on his screen was unmistakable, and the idea that it could be any of his idiotic employees permeated the core of his irritation like a plague. Alastor's, however, filled with scorn, only needed to stare at the device for a moment before knowing who it was.

"I have eyes," he justified, his gaze meeting as if a ritualistic death rattle. "And even if I didn't, discretion was never your strong suit."

Ah, and how it wasn't. Alastor still remembered the days when they were nothing more than interns in the grand scheme of infernal things, hands molding themselves into throats and bodies molding themselves between the sheets without the need to hide their sin like unburied corpses. The New Orleans salons and his contract with Rosie would never allow him such freedom again.

On Vox's screen, the deer could swear he saw a bluish blush color the once pale matrix. But if he wasn't imagining things, it didn't last long: the phone still buzzed above Vincent's voice when the man shook his head—to push away the memories or compose himself—and fired back:

"And you call that discretion?"

Suddenly, Alastor heard himself. The gentle way he fired his venom, the disinterest in his carefully sculpted posture meant to seem impervious, Valentino's name on his lips, embedded by the word he would never admit—all to mask the fact that, despite everything, it was he who had gone after her.

Before he could answer, their gazes were drawn to the same magnetic sound. The phone rang one last time before going to voicemail and an unmistakable accent rang out from the metal box.

"Vox, you fucking idiot!" —The hatred in Valentino's voice could be felt even from a distance, even if only to lie between the warm bodies of inarticulate desires and rusty nostalgia. "Why the hell didn't you answer me? That son of a bitch Alastor came back to town! Don't you remember how he fucked you up last time—"

A slender finger from Vincent pressed against the metal box was enough to silence the irritating voice and accent. He stifled an angry breath, his fingers firmly pressed against the bridge of his nose before groaning with his whole body, the sound echoing somewhere in his throat betraying the exhaustion—and perhaps the repetition—of that ridiculous behavior.

"Damn it, he's impossible."

“Impossible isn’t the word I would have used. And you already knew,” he guessed, or perhaps accused. With Alastor, it was always difficult to say. “No one goes into business with Valentino without first knowing that he doesn’t give opportunities to people like you without asking for something in return.”

Vox didn’t dare back down.

“And how would you know?”

“Oh, my dear,” Alastor finally moved, taking a step forward as if to seal the threats in molten gold. “It’ll take much more than seven years to make me forget about that kind of… ha. Well. The difference is that, with you, he succeeded.”

Vox rolled his eyes, making an irritated sound, but didn’t answer the accusation without first stepping away. He refused proximity. He rejected Alastor's sickly smile, rejected the reasons he offered, and above all, rejected his logic—but his fingers twitched with the urge to agree, to admit that this man would never be more than an anesthetic to his own anguish. Or perhaps something even worse: to say that he already knew, when he allowed Valentino into his empire. Working in a field like his, it was obvious that the moth would never invest in people without means, without possessions, without first getting his dirty hands dirty until nothing was left.

He turned away. For a moment, it crossed Alastor's mind whether he had worn him down or lost a much bigger war; that Vincent would unleash his hunting dogs on him and turn his back on the past once and for all. The coffin hadn't been closed yet, but there would be time for that. There always is, when talking about resistance and rebellions—and this is always talked about very frequently in Hell.

But suddenly, Vox's fists clenched around a whiskey bottle perched on a glass tabletop. Alastor hadn't even noticed or heard it twitch, but he wasn't surprised. He felt as if Vincent had used his hypnosis when he saw him pour a bronze liquid into a wide glass, recognizing the pure smell of alcohol from a distance and rolling his eyes.

"So what brings you here, after all?" Vox finally asked. "Bored with your little life as a receptionist at Lucifer's daughter's hotel?"

He brought the glass to his lips, savoring the liquid with the patience of a determined craftsman. Alastor made an unrecognizable sound, his ears drooping as if he'd been coerced into the hunt.

"The place was a desgrace."

"So you decided to help her of your own free will?" Vincent laughed, his fingers swirling the glass between them and creating eddies in the whiskey. "I thought there were no friends in Hell."

His adrenaline was pumping; anger and tension still colored the expressions on his screen, but the alcohol he'd consumed made him look more like a caricature than the man who had vowed to destroy him seven years ago. He reached for another glass and poured the whiskey again, this time taking it in his hands and taking cautious steps before offering it to Alastor.

Before accepting, he clenched his jaw. Alastor's smile hardened, but didn't waver.

"There are many things in Hell, Vincent. None of them lasted seventy years without rusting."

"The door is right behind you."

Alastor opened his mouth to reply, but held back. It was as if he had finally been caught in the traps laid in Vox's words; having the explicit truth thrown in his face as if his reputation meant nothing. It had been Alastor who had chased after him. Who had remembered Vincent during his absence and longed to even consider the idea that the Exterminations of the last seven years had purged his already condemned soul. And it was he who, more importantly—gnawing at his insides like worms in raw, morning-ready flesh—had felt his organs being dissected by the putrid feeling of jealousy, without ever considering opening the door and turning his back on that abyss.

The liquid in that glass was the only thing keeping them apart. If Alastor accepts, he will have already fallen. If he refuses, the doors of Voxtek will always be open to those who give up.

Alastor reached out and cradled the whiskey like an offering in his hand.

"You're being receptive," he observed attentively. "It doesn't suit you, my old pal."

Valentino doesn't either.

The liquor in Vox's glass reflected his face, and for the first time that night, he found himself speechless. It smelled of pure alcohol, far from sweet. Aged. It had certainly gained vigor with age—just like them, that night.

“I bet you love this,” he says, melancholy replacing the gloved anger in his tone. “This fame. The Vees… Valentino… everyone’s already talking about it. They’re bewildered to know you’re back. For someone who didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, you have quite a reputation, you know? I bet everyone wants to know how a guy from 1930 suddenly became one of the most powerful Overlords in all of Hell.”

“Not more than you, my dear.”

Half of his face is still buried in the glass. The first sip of whiskey is a whisper to his own reflection, and when Vox’s head turns toward him, Alastor isn’t smiling.

“It’s you who lives for it, Vox,” he explained, closing his eyes to savor what remained of the alcoholic taste on his tongue. “People. Journalism. Media. Video. It's you who uses it—"

The word burned on his tongue, lodging itself between the shadow and the bones, making him hesitate for the first time before a potential victim. But he quickly recovered, as great things tend to do. Alastor still remembered that proposal too well to let it burn in his core for another seventy years. Too raw, too absurd to let it linger any longer. Too naked not to wonder if Vox had also tried to lead him by his chains.

When he looked at him again, his gaze pierced him with a devastating indifference. It could have been the same indifference used seventy years ago, when his promised crossroads had been reminded that they were still in Hell, but it wasn't. This one was deeper, more significant. Impossible to mask with a characteristic laugh.

He finished the contents of the glass. He turned it over on the glass table in a ritualistic way and took a step forward.

“Come on, Vincent. You’ve been waiting for this for the last seventy-seven years. This can’t be all you have to offer. Entertain me.”

There was a lapse of time. Control hovered between their bodies like an opportunity to be seized; a tempting idea, an underlying, seductive whisper amidst threats and cheap whiskey that balanced past disagreements with the almost surrendered way Alastor played his cards. He won souls in the time it took Vox to empty a bottle. He killed men who disrespected him while he was just human. And yet, he bends so easily to the words spoken by Vincent Whittman’s lips—like a fool. What would Rosie think of this?

And if Vox realized it, he still chose to accept the invitation to return to the war—which perhaps had never truly ended.

“Waiting?” he finally echoed.

He stifled a laugh into his own glass, but it created cracks that Alastor noticed. He always noticed.

"That disgrace of yours certainly kept you busy. You lost all sense of how things work down here. It cost you the last bit of dignity you had"—a pause. A look. As if to study his reactions, like a predator," Vox laughed. "Shame on you, Alastor. You act like you don't even know me, talking like that."

Ah, but he did knew him. He remembered as if it were yesterday the presumptuous and proud way Vincent Whittman—it was still him, wasn't it? It had to be—had boasted of his infallible optics. Thinking ahead, bargaining with the devil and securing himself in front of the big screens and doing everything to leave Alastor eating his dust. Using those who showed interest in joining a bogus cause. Still, nothing that had been enough.

The other's gaze rested on the empty glass in front of him. The ice seemed to melt under the heat of the swelling tension and the lingering alcohol in their systems. Without losing his smile, Alastor pushed him aside and rested his elbows on the glass table, blinking slowly and letting his red ears droop with the strange certainty that, despite his actions, he was safe there.

"One thing I haven't forgotten. You would be nothing without begging for help, as you always do."

Vox's instinct was to open his mouth to back away, but Alastor interrupted him with impetuous words:

"Valentino? Seriously?" a muffled laugh escaped him. "I have to admit, Vox, I wasn't expecting that. I thought you had more refined taste in business partners or... lovers. I guess that's what I get for expecting too much from a freeloader like you. But I have to confess I'm curious. How long do you intend to use him to advance your career? Or worse! How long do you intend to let him use—"

"Valentino is intelligent" Vox interrupted, slamming his glass down on the table. "Consistent. Loyal. Much more so than you."

Alastor's head fell back under the weight of his laughter.

"He's "intelligent" and you're easy. Too easy. And you insist on talking about shame?" a step forward. Crossing the table and pushing him back into his swivel chair. "I bet he flattered you like the bastard son of a bitch he is. I bet he made you feel important. That's what you wanted from me, isn't it? That I should flatter you. That's the only way anyone could gain your trust."

Vox's mind was spinning. His back hit the chair, his body heavy against the upholstery, and having to look up to meet Alastor's smile was like granting a faithful follower the chance to look at the heavens—but also directly at the sun.

"You..."

You talking about loyalty, he thought to say. His clenched teeth and fists digging into the chair's armrests screamed at him to do it. You talking about what I need. As if a son of a bitch like you knew, Alastor. As if you'd stayed to find out.

But the words simply wouldn't come out. This was his first failure.

"Me?" Alastor repeated, so skeptical it was like being alive again. "You're right. I even respected you, Vox. And you were even worthy of it, back then. But you had to ruin everything with that speech of yours and…"

The shadow stretched its fingers over Vox’s impotent silhouette. Cursing them on its own, like a lingering omen on the moon outside—cradling Hell as Lilith had cradled them in her arms—it explored his throat only to keep him there, motionless, and not to cut off his breath.

As if Vox were going to run away. Even if he wanted to.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” Alastor said. His smile was slow and compassionate, befitting the shadow’s sneaky attitude behind them. “Aren’t you going to deny my accusations? Start a broadcast to show Hell how dangerous I am? Call for help from—”

“Al—” Vincent gasped, choking on his own saliva as Alastor tightened his grip on his neck. He hated that nickname. Vox knew he hated it.

The arrogant glint in Alastor's eyes gained vigor, energy, hunger, when he could perfectly feel the Adam's apple ripple beneath the fingers of his shadow as Vox swallowed hard.

"What was that?" he insisted, his tone cruelly calm, loosening his fingers around the other's throat to offer him a chance to answer.

Vox's mouth opened, closed, and opened again—inhaling the momentarily stolen air with the resistance of a drowning man. The hypnotic eye blazed at him, but dared not linger. He wanted Alastor's answer to be ripped from his lungs like a last gasp of wounded pride; even if he never got the truth, he wanted it to be real. He wanted to exorcise the confession from his clever lips.

"Alastor..." he began again, this time with an arrogant smile at the corner of his lips. "Are you jealous?"

For a moment, Alastor's posture wavered. The fingers of the shadow and his tangible body, carefully placed on the tepid flesh of the exposed throat, hesitated. The wound reopened by the words, once scarce for seventy-seven years away from its eternal smoke, was even more painful than the answer to the question. A knife to his pride, indeed; enough to leave him with wide eyes and a half-smile on his suddenly pale face.

The hands moved away, but Alastor still didn't answer him. So stoic and calculating in his reactions, always one step ahead, so inflexible in his decision not to compromise with the petty sin of greed... and yet, choosing silence says everything Vincent needed to know.

"Seriously, Alastor? You've got to be fucking kidding me."

Vox's voice rose, stunned. His timbre, muffled by the short-circuited systems, oscillated between anger and ecstasy—but mostly ecstasy. He had to bite the inside of his cheeks to keep from bursting into loud laughter, but Vox knew he wouldn't be able to hold back much longer. There was something strangely delightful about watching Alastor hesitate, lower his head, and swallow his jealousy to avoid admitting the tingling in his core at every mention of Valentino.

Alastor's hand moved away. The shadow, the eternal twilight that insisted on supporting his movements, dissipated into the rarefied air. He took only one step back, but it was enough for Vox to capture the longing, the dissimulation of having been caught in an impetuous moment, hovering in the tense air between them.

"You were saying...? I thought you loved to talk too much," Vox teased, pulling his hands away from the arms of the chair and letting them hang in the rarefied air. "I asked you a question, Alastor."

Whatever answer Alastor expected, the grimace on his face indicated it wasn't that.

"Don't be ridiculous," he stated firmly. "That whiskey really didn't do you any good, did it? You're only seeing what you want to see. Typical of you."

"I'm not an idiot."

Questionable and easy to refute, the deer thought, but the words vanished from his lips when he felt the meticulous gaze slide over his body, slowly and deliberately, as if Vox were studying every spark of his reactions. Every misguided sigh on his parted lips, the slow rise of his panting chest... it was as if Vox was the one being hypnotized, and by what? A flattering illusion that Alastor never even admitted to—and never will, not today, not ever. Pathetic.

"That actually makes sense, you know?" Vox continued. "People like you... sinners like you... just expect everyone to live at their mercy all the time. That fucking pisses me off, Alastor. How selfish you are. Don't tell me you thought you'd show up here, seven years later, and I'd still be waiting for that partnership. Don't tell me you thought I'd be so stupid."

Vox didn't need to touch him. The step forward his feet traced on the living room floor was touch enough—or perhaps the absence of it, and that's what made everything increasingly overwhelming and hungry at the core of their selfishness. Human sins, identical, incapable of encompassing all that monsters like them would one day become. Something in Alastor knew that his core was the greatest traitor. Otherwise, he wouldn't want more.

And he wouldn't want to say yes, he had thought.

Suddenly, Vox reached out to take his hand. The tenderness in his exploring touch didn't match the venomous words, but Alastor didn't need to dwell on it for long to understand what Vox was really after.

The fingers moved upwards. Through the fingers, tracing imaginary lines on his palm, so firm yet strangely liberating that Alastor almost doubled over at the touch. Vox's hand traveled across the flesh like a curious sailor until it reached the racing pulse.

"And this?" he chuckled softly. "Already so exhausted from containing your greed again? I remember this, from that time."

With a fury Alastor hadn't felt in years, he pulled his hand back and rested it on his staff.

"You really think I spent seven years thinking about you? I concoct better distractions than you and the rest of the Vees" he tilted his head, feigning consideration. "You? You're loud. Exhausting. Frivolous. And on top of that, you're still pathetic. If you need other people to succeed, well, I don't, Vincent. Do I need to put you in your place a second time to make you understand?"

Jealousy, Vox thought. He was sure of it.

"God, you're so tortured when you're jealous! Has anyone ever told you that?" he laughs, with the same harsh sound as before. It wasn't his real laugh. Not the one Alastor remembers.

"I'm not—"

The sudden approach was enough to alarm him. At first, Vox simply stares at his face, trying to dissect his smile like a hungry animal, and now, without the fascination that seventy-seven years had ripped from it, his study is brutal like an open wound. Which at least makes things fair for Alastor. He's had his share of that charitable, flattering look, especially from Vincent—and never from Vox—even if that happened a long time ago. At least, it's not a pity. Not that he expected to find that there, anyway.

Vox seemed drawn to the magnetism of the rarefied air between them like a shark to blood, and soon his fingers slid smoothly across the cold palm. Although he positioned his hand with measured tenderness, seeming more to explore the flesh than to dare claim it, Alastor was about to repel the touch as he had done before. But then Vox revealed a genuine expression on his screen, so close to the deer's face that Alastor had to half-close his eyes to avoid burning his retinas.

"Just so you know," he began, so slowly that his voice seemed to vibrate in the small space between their bodies, "Valentino means nothing to me."

The shadows, which had just made a move to pull Alastor away from the clandestine touch, froze somewhere in the room and remained there. Despite being a hypocrite—the first thing Alastor admitted in the face of so many accusations—ecstasy surged through his core with a tingling sensation that vibrated, pulsed through every cell, and this time he allowed himself a slight smile, definitely less than Alastor would have displayed in any other situation, but more than Vincent deserved at that moment.

"And why don't you seem happy?" I thought you loved putting people in chains. "I don't see you jumping for joy."

Vox's hand rose. From his arms outstretched over Alastor's own body, feeling the warmth and the occasional slight swaying radiate from the tepid, once unwavering flesh, to the red tie on his jacket, dangerously close to his immaculate throat. He can feel when Alastor swallows hard. He can feel the rhythm of his pulse, consistent with the rhythm of his calculated breathing. Methodical, but cracked.

"He's useful."

The shadows finally move. With them, Alastor is even quicker than the other's provocations, grabbing his own tie—already tattered from the heat of the moment—and loosening it with the dexterity of a determined, yet slow, craftsman. His eyes fixed on Vox's prevent him from seeing most of the scene. But the vision that remains to him—Vincent's neck slowly exposed by his own shadow, the magnetic Adam's apple rippling as the man swallows hard, the nonexistent resistance when ecstasy and control enter the discussion—is tolerable. Though not tolerable enough for Alastor to ignore his last statement.

"More useful than me?"

Alastor stops before the shadow enters the loose suit. His hands rise—his, this time—touching the loosened knot of the tie, pulling it from Vox's neck and throwing it somewhere in the room. Buttons were undone at the speed it took Alastor to lead a redeeming guest. His smile widens at the sight of Vincent's bare torso, the way he leans into the touch and lets his hands fall onto his own skin, as if to feel, through ignition, a touch deeper than the removal of ties. He always liked that part; how Vox yields first, though never completely. Satan knows Alastor remembers everything perfectly.

"Right now?" Vox laughs, as deliberately as he is hungrily, while his hands do the same to the tie of Alastor's impeccable suit jacket. "Unless you want to broadcast this live to all of Hell, no."

Alastor doesn't laugh, but he's the one who makes the first move. With his hands pressed against his bare chest, he travels across the skin, carrying between the flesh a pathological urge to put that feeling—that jealousy, as Vox had dangerously named it—somewhere. He didn't even look into his eyes when his fingers left trails, marks, scratches on the skin taken over by the constant claim that they were still in Hell, after all. But a hand reached his back anyway, propelling him until their lips were inches apart, while Vox's hand that wasn't holding his tie boldly dug into his waist.

There's a brief lapse of time before they both manage to reorganize their thoughts. There's a lot of breathing, anxiety, and stolen glances in the sloppy—and frankly pathetic—haze of the moment. Alastor can't tell which of the two feels like laughing more. In past decades, his rhythm had never been so deliberate or simply so slow; clothes and shoes were thrown from one side of the room to the other in the time it took to empty a glass of whiskey.

Today it doesn't last long, however; seconds later, like the Extermination—a temporary fix for an eternal divine flaw—Vox looks down again, as melancholic as the last time Alastor saw that face so close before tonight, in the bar where he turned his back on everything.

"My proposal was genuine."

Alastor breathes in, but doesn't interfere. He knows exactly what he's talking about. He knows that insistence won't get him anywhere. And he knows it's true.

"I'm sure it was."

He restrained the urge to withdraw his hand. The warmth that had embraced her, the comfort that Alastor had forgotten—or perhaps abandoned in that bar as deliberately and cruelly as everything else he did—spread across the flesh of his palm like a million seeds, and only Satan knows how long they would have to wait to get so close to that again, when that was the greatest answer Alastor would ever give him.

Vox's hard expression disappears and he lets himself fall into the constant contact of her dark eyes. It's the same face Alastor remembers, though in his memories it was a more imperfect, more bruised, more angry canvas. Vox seems to understand that the other man won't linger on the thought, for the next second he sighs with his whole body, pondering.

"I'm... tired of living on your leash," Vox began, reaching out again and taking him by surprise by slipping his fingers through the pink strands of his short hair and pulling them close. "Look at me, Alastor. Maybe this is what you need."

Alastor watched. And he knew that, deep down, his eyes were the worst kind of traitors, greedy for deliberating on impossible desires and for trying to recognize, even now, what had truly changed. The previous moment had shattered like glass, but it was impossible not to feel at least a little awe at its form. How kind time had been to Vox. No chains, no contracts... no ghosts in an unsanitary hotel to haunt a primitive and decadent past that dissected his insides.

At least that hadn't changed: the way they never fought fairly.

Alastor didn't answer. Vox just laughed, indignant, but whatever anger remained in his tone quickly turned to scorn when he could feel him struggling against the hand that guided him.

"Tell me. What did you want, coming here? Don't tell me that was your plan."

The firm grip on his hair disrupted his thoughts, but Alastor struggled to categorize his words, so as not to stumble over the emotions accumulating in his lower abdomen.

"Just to start, I didn't come looking for any moral lesson."

Whether the answer satisfied him or not, Vincent didn't allow himself to show it—though a slight smile danced on his lips, and Alastor noticed. And though they both knew he could use the shadows to break free, he didn't.

"So, this?" Vox asked, pulling his hair lower, lifting Alastor's head with the force of the movements. "I don't see you complaining."

Alastor gasped, but didn't back down. His hands rose, tracing the contours of Vox's body with his fingertips before settling on either side of his face, forcing him to look into his eyes.

"Shut... shut up."

Before Vox could retaliate, Alastor held him, his hand on the back of his neck, while the shadows did the rest to keep him in place. Perhaps it was an exaggeration, since, as soon as their mouths touched, Vox melted into his lips like a hostage freed from his sentence.

Vox's response was a muffled moan, caught off guard by the lips that had collided with his. It's still exactly as he remembers it, even today; rough at first, as desperate as it is possessive, with a dose of violence tailored to keep Vox waiting, hungry, at his mercy—and he knew Vincent was. His surrender tasted good. Alastor felt it in their mingled breaths, in the way sounds that resembled moans—though Alastor would never admit that such pleas touched his lips—were swallowed by mouths advancing without any control.

Driven by the desire that pulsed in his veins, Vox yielded to the instinct to push him back, one fist fixed in his pink hair and the other finding its way to his waist, guiding him toward his desk. Alastor's body followed, already too caught up in the nostalgic haze of the moment to question how it was being driven by a sickly magnetism. But there was also a certain tone of reverence as his body buckled with each touch, or when the kisses lingered for a single second longer and Alastor felt himself molded to the other's lips, as if to create something new from the certainty that they were born for this. From the moment they began their lives as sinners, or when they killed a man for the first time, it was written. He was sure of it.

"Fuck it... Vincent..."

Alastor murmured between kisses, too stunned by the sensation of being anchored by Vox's lips to know where the words came from. His skin betrayed him, that was a fact; his demon body surely knew more than to sigh each time Vox's hand grazed his abdomen, longing to feel him, though never completely.

When Vox's hand finally released his hair, Alastor grunted in frustration, still on his lips. He would never admit that the urge to be guided by the other was almost pathological. He had kept the vision of his last night with Vincent like a talisman throughout all the Exterminations of his absence; a selfish and dangerous part of himself always yearning for the next time he would have him like that, breathless and eager to fill him again.

Vox sat him down on his own office desk, fitting himself between his open thighs and placing his hands on either side of his body.

The sound that escaped his throat wasn't a scream, but something deeper and more familiar; just as Vincent remembered it. A groan. A vibration echoing through his vocal cords. Their arched, primal bodies, buckling before any hope of relief, were proof of a regression to everything Alastor believed in. The ephemerality of life only served him when it came to performing rituals to secure his place among the demons; existing in Hell as a tortured soul was a cruel fate, even for him. And yet, there he was.

When their lips parted, gasping for air, Vox's hand gripped his chin, forcing Alastor to look into his eyes.

"Ah," Vox laughed, "you're already hard."

Alastor's breath caught, making him look away. He had barely noticed how the articulate kiss had ripped the air from his lungs, much less that the heat accumulating in his lower abdomen could be so... revealing under Vox's analytical gaze. His first impulse was to laugh scornfully, retaliate with sarcasm, and arm himself with the armor that such mockery provided.

"Very observant, Vincent. One can really see why they put you on such big televisions."

The tension dissipated, but not for long. The harshness vanished from his voice as Vox's hips thrust forward, their neglected erections colliding only to make Alastor bite his lip. Efficient, at least, he thought. I should have done this much sooner.

“You talk too much, Alastor,” he teases, but the irony has vanished from his voice, now replaced by an unexpected, panting breath. “It’s very… ah… very easy to shut you up. Did you know that?”

Something in that deep tone of voice made Alastor’s being melt. It’s just Vox, but still; he’s everywhere, in every sense of his body, and it would be madness to ask Alastor not to compare the moment to their shared nights seventy years ago. It’s Vox’s eyes, radiant despite the anger that had clouded his thoughts earlier. It’s Vox’s hands on his body, possessively gripping his waist, and, by God, it’s Vox’s erection against his, rough from the limitations of the fabric, but still the closest they’ve come in years to that which also carries a certain tenderness. The way he satisfies him with so little makes Alastor feel small under direct scrutiny.

He had never felt so easy.

Such was his desperation for clandestine freedom that Alastor finally, finally, made the first move.

His hands snaked across the covered body; from the chest adorned by the pompous suit to the pale neck, meticulously tracing every inch of his sweaty flesh, the weak points that Alastor still kept in his memory like good luck charms. His own eyes were also a reflection of his soul, a not-so-discreet revelation of carnal desires—laden with a mortality that Alastor simply couldn't help but hate—crossing them, shameless and frantically. From that angle, Vox was different. Brutal, in a way that Alastor wouldn't even associate with the naive newcomer trying to make a name for himself in Hell decades ago, but still beautiful in the anemic moonlight. She brushes against his skin, penetrating the office blinds without asking permission, and that makes Vox seem more human than anyone. That part Alastor doesn't say. The hands paused provocatively above the evident erection. Without making any move to unbutton his suit or even yield to the touch of his hips; but each deliberate movement was made with a smile on his lips.

"You're no different," he stated, observing the bluish tint coloring where his cheeks should be. It's so easy to revel in Vox's embarrassment.

One hand falls on Alastor's, prompting the inarticulate touch, sighing close to his face as the other's hands finally caress his forgotten member. A desperate attempt to compose himself, and for what, if all it took to make Vox bend before the touch like a primitive animal was to have Alastor's hands on his penis?

Alastor finds it pathetic. He was about to make a comment when Vox's other hand suddenly settled on his penis, drawing a strangled sound from his throat.

"Needy, then?" His greedy eyes watched every reaction with a smile, savoring the deliberate way Alastor struggled to remain unshaken. "Is it too much for you?"

Alastor tried as best he could to contain the sighs that insisted on escaping his lips, forcing his shoulders and his own flesh, crackling with heat, to appear stable. It would have been almost convincing, if Vox hadn't already realized what his resistance really meant: a bluff.

"You've always thought you had more than you possess."

"And you've always underestimated me."

"I see no reason to do otherwise."

"That means I have all night to prove it to you" Vox was quick in his reply, although the way he had taken the bait might have sounded disingenuous or a pathetic attempt to restore his own pride.

There. The look on Alastor's face was one of delicious disgust, but a disdain that Vox welcomed like a gold medal. When he didn't respond, Vox contented himself with reveling in the sight of Alastor writhing beneath him like the whiskey they had shared earlier. He attributed it to memories of the nights they had spent as lovers before all else. Night fell slenderly over Pentagram City, fueling forbidden nostalgia, and for a moment, Vox didn't smile. The memories fit over his bones like a second layer of skin, where spirit meets heart, pulsing through the tissues as if to remind them that they were still human—despite everything.

But it lasted only a second. The next instant, his body folded over Alastor's, capturing his lips once more.

I should demolish you just for making me dwell on all this, he thought, while his mouth swallowed Alastor's with a constant desperation, very different from the deliberate slowness of the touch wandering over the other's body. But what's the point, if you're still here?

He was surprised by the speed of his own nefarious mind. The thought itself had been a confession forcibly ripped from him, leaving him sublimated to the desires of a soul that Vox only allowed to exist in dark rooms and in the rare moments when he was Alone. Without Valentino to numb the longing for a profane touch or to confuse it with genuine feeling, he was as pathetic as any teenager sliding his hands over himself in a dark room, sighing Alastor's name into nothingness while the sticky, undeniable proof of his orgasm cooled in the palm of his hand.

But this was nothing like the real thing. Having Alastor panting beneath him, allowing his icy fingers to slip under his open blazer, his hands and hips creeping toward his trembling erection, kissing him with teeth and tongue, and, by God, Vincent felt he would never tire of it. If they were human, they were compatible; as alike in their positions as assassins, in their flesh and blood as the closest they would get to it in Hell. They were never naive. Assassins never are. But before they broke free from their skin shells, they were limited.

If they were demons, then they were each other's exorcism; they were the cough that keeps them awake at night, in different beds. Vox in his luxurious tower, all seven years, pondering his absence and cursing himself for what could have been. Alastor traveling through Hell like a disloyal servant or an unburied corpse.

Alastor's back leaned away from the table to allow the removal of his impeccable blazer. His ears were lowered, tangled with his short pink hair. The red sky invaded the room through the half-open shutters, painting Alastor's face with an old-fashioned burgundy. It suited him, his clothes, his eyes, his flushed cheeks—the blood of his victims. The strongest sinner in all of Hell had earned it.

"Definitely needy," he confirmed in a whisper, his lips falling towards his chest and leaving a hickey there. "And a hypocrite too. Suits you."

Despite the harsh words, Vox helped him lie down on the table again. And despite trying, his eyes couldn't stray from the sight of his bare torso, illuminated by the moonlight. His gaze traveled down the skin that glistened with a sublime sheen of sweat, to the waist where the trousers still served as a fragile barrier, the representation of an incomplete freedom. He became intoxicated by it, feeling his own member tighten even more within his suit.

"You can look."

His words seemed to awaken Vox from some kind of trance, for the next second his screen flickered with an embarrassed interference. Alastor was propped up on his elbows, looking at him with an ironic smile and with too much condescension for someone who was, well, on the bottom for the first time in his life, with messy hair and an erection evident in his trousers.

"You..."

"You can look, Vincent," he repeated, spreading his legs apart and sliding his hands down Vox's back, impatiently tugging at his blazer. "But I think you're still wearing too many clothes to demand much."

Alastor's body was a pulsating altar when viewed in that way. Armed with his captivating indifference, fortresses that had certainly brought him more good than harm in protecting his spirit, but with cracks too raw for Vox to pretend not to notice. There were signs everywhere that ruin had come for everyone, and that even if time had worked wonders on him, seconds had also been stealthily impetuous in their hunger for flesh and sex. He was needy, as Vox was too, but with something more, illicit and new. Vox called it despair—which suited Alastor perfectly.

Tomorrow, when the sun—or the closest thing to it that can exist in Hell—bathed the City of the Pentagram, they would be a notable reporter and a receptionist bound by a contract.

But today, when Alastor's hands finally freed his cock from his suit trousers, Vox granted himself the freedom to indulge. To hell with Voxtek's ongoing projects and their relentless plans to burn the reputation of Lucifer's daughter's precious hotel. He had more important things to attend to at the moment, and all of them involved Alastor's fist gripping the base of his member, masturbating him so firmly that he felt his legs threatening to give way under the controlled tension of the touch.

"Al..."

The nickname caught the other's eye. His eyes gleamed despite everything—the same way an organ would gleam in his mouth, illuminated by a blood eclipse.

"You look so... ah... so beautiful like that."

And he did. The mental image of Alastor holding his cock and conducting a painfully slow rhythm was already a topic Vox had stored in his database for a long time, since that time. They were naive, childish, and each touch was made with an added appreciation for the audacity of lust between two men. But to update it with the Alastor that all of Hell feared and reduce him to a tameable beast under the right touches—and in turn, reduce himself as well—was a new way of shaping him. For Vox, Alastor had always been beautiful, but today it was different. That wasn't even the word. Alive was better.

Alastor froze. The sudden tenderness, the naiveté of the living words, made him look away. It was strange even for Vox to feel like he was leaving the Radio Demon speechless, but the next response was enough: Alastor pulling him forward and sealing the moment with his lips again.

This time, Vox didn't hesitate to imitate him. His hands pressed firmly against the erection through the tailored trousers, feeling the heat emanating from that area and Alastor's lips parting his to release sighs and moans—something that even for Vox, who had pondered all the scenarios of what it would have been like if Alastor had returned to Pentagram City sooner, was a surprise.

Sometimes Vox wonders what it would have been like if they had met in life, far from the scrutiny of the Sovereigns, but the thought quickly rots in the sunlight, highlighted by the sensation of Alastor's thumb on the glans of his already fully hard and lubricated member. That this has brought him more lucidity than his small lapse in judgment may be a concern for later, but for now, the conclusion Vox reaches is exactly this: that their homes are always doomed to failure, destined to exist only within an empty office or dark rooms.

Alastor raised his legs, and Vox understood the message immediately.

With almost desperate speed, he slid the trousers off his legs with the dexterity of someone erasing an unwanted sketch.

A blush spread across the screen as his eyes slid over Alastor's naked body. He didn't even bother to pretend he wasn't impressed. The warm skin of his chest glistened in the dim light, anointed with sweat and bearing the signature of his teeth, marks that would surely linger longer than the deer cared to admit. Red hair fell over his red eyes—probably the result of his fist once possessively digging into the strands. And, God, Alastor's cock hovered over his abdomen, cruelly untouched… Vox felt his own member tighten even more in his hand, though he felt incapable of further embarrassment. Because he had already been infected, and because sick men tend to seek a cure rather than wallow in poison as he had done, he knew he would never forget the image of the dreaded, stoic Radio Demon hunched over his office desk, waiting for him.

His eyes rose and met his face again. He hadn't noticed how dilated Alastor's pupils were. A weak laugh escaped Alastor's lips, like a divine ether, but profaned by its essence: sarcastic, venomous, as if bulletproof, but Vox always knew too much when it came to Alastor's arrogant mannerisms. His attempt to come out on top was a desperate plea for his carnal desires to remain unspoken.

His hand shot towards Alastor's penis, masturbating him in the same slow, torturous rhythm that his hands had been around his own cock.

"You still haven't answered me," he said, positioning himself between his legs again. "What did you want, coming here?"

"Vox," he reprimanded him. His demanding tone made Vox's smile widen.

"Hm?" he asked with feigned innocence. "Don't tell me you're ashamed now. I bet you remember I've made you come with just my hands hundreds of times before."

As if to prove what he was saying, his hands danced frantically over Alastor's member, but only for a moment. He didn't want Alastor to finish too quickly—nor did he want his own pleasure in seeing him so surrendered to fade so fast—so he quickly returned to the deliberate slowness of his mocking fist, ironically mocking the desperate way Alastor desired him at that moment. Vox lost himself in the moist sounds of the lubricated tip of his penis, in the hoarse moans left by his lips, in the feeling that anyone could open the office door and see them in that embarrassing situation... the danger caused the last vestige of self-control to crumble; he was already going crazy with all that anticipation.

Alastor's legs wrapped around his waist, pulling Vox closer.

"Do you always have to make me beg?"

“Ah, of course not,” Vox replied enthusiastically to the challenge whispered against his lips. “That’s just me. And you love it, don’t you?”

His hand moved to his own member, sliding it into Alastor’s entrance while the other held his legs in place. He felt the other’s body tremble beneath him, like a twilight descending from the heavens to bend to the shape of voluptuousness. Terribly adaptable, Vox realized—not that he hadn’t known before, and especially not that he could resist it any longer, not when Alastor became so strangely docile under his touch. It was as if any resistance had been transformed into the inevitable necessity of replacing their ominous lives ominous, numbed by sex. What would his tragic victims, reduced to voices in an antiquated broadcast, think if they could see him that way? Probably the same thing they thought seventy years ago, when the Media Overlord had become the closest thing to a friend or lover Alastor had found down there. That he was weak. A false and petty demon whose broadcasts were scrap scriptures.

The thought filled Vox with a strange pride, a delicacy difficult to name when deliberating on the past without the necessary dexterity to unravel the knots woven from the troubled history they shared. Perhaps, when their bodies cooled and the adrenaline of the moment died down, he would wish Alastor had been cruel enough to simply kill him when he had the chance. A part of him would always be reserved for cowardly escapes and flimsy excuses; Using regret and pride to maintain the facade of a tycoon and recover a small dose of dignity, however pathetic it might be, was a predicament. The gates of Hell will always be open to those who give up.

"Vox" he repeated, with a stronger rebuke this time.

But there was something in that shrewd voice, trembling with desire as it enveloped the sound of his name, that stirred him and, for a moment, made the thought dissolve. He leaned forward, close to his ear, kissing his neck and cheek—a strange tenderness for a moment postponed for decades. As if Vox were still devoted.

However, a single gasp was enough to break the slow movement Vox had established. Alastor bent back on the table, and the unexpected friction caused a dry, low sound to escape their throats.

"Enough games," Alastor said, a pathetic attempt to disentangle himself from the knots of the past, though the anticipated resignation in his voice betrayed him. He yearned. He pulsed for him in a static way. Vox understood the feeling very well, and was growing tired of waiting.

Pushing his hips toward him, Vox finally, finally, found himself penetrating him.

Immediately, his breath caught in his lungs. The warmth that enveloped him clouded his eyes and his thoughts, reducing him to the rawest and most distorted need to give in to instinct; being at rock bottom and embracing his sins was the only thing Vox could possibly do at that moment. Each instant of the air that invaded him could be a breath of fresh air or a poison, but he decided to risk the latter. They had always been irredeemable poisons in all lives, in all the bodies their souls possessed—always tormented by their own hungers—but Alastor was more. His venom was sweet, a mixture of static and the metallic smell of ancient blood that seemed to emanate from his pores whenever the mask of civility fell.

"F-fuck, Alastor. So... so tight," Vox murmured, his claws pressing forcefully against the flesh of his hips. The screen flickered, but a smile appeared at the corner of his lips. "Did you missed me that much?"

A blush rose up Alastor's neck, betraying him before he had a chance to confess anything. His parted lips, stripped of the smile he wore like a gold medal, made a sound that was neither human nor demonic; but the noise of an out-of-frequency tuning, a sharp, vulnerable hiss that vibrated against Vox's chest. His claws dug into the television's shoulders, almost tearing the warm, still so human flesh, searching for an anchor amidst the invasion.

"How many times do I have to tell you to shut up?"

A brief laugh fills the short space between them. The very air surrounding them smells of instinct, terribly thinned by the sounds that Alastor, despite all his discipline, failed to contain. He had never been a man of appeals or the type to silently beg for the mercy of religion—he had always been a demon, even before knowing Hell—but Alastor was a man like any other when it came to the need for easy escape routes and armored fortresses. Only in this way could he become impervious to the machinations of more powerful Overlords or, as he had done in life, magnates who rolled their eyes at his potential. There were always bigger fish.

But Vox perceived the cracks behind his facade. And, God, how beautiful and vile he was, savoring the pain of the member inside him as Alastor would suck venom from a rattlesnake; trying to kiss him again to disguise how pleasure affected him—though Vox refused this feat just to see him groan on his cock; Pretending that his eye roll wasn't because, even in his resistance, Alastor still clung to a refuge; that his mouth didn't perfectly mold to Vox's name, escaping his lips like a spell.

Nothing works. He lets out that hoarse, restrained groan once more, his voice trembling beneath each of his charades.

"You don't need to hold back, Alastor," Vox says. Bluish fingers, with well-groomed claws, delicately reached the back of his neck, bringing their faces closer again. "Your desperation is nothing I don't already know."

"Your impatience too," Alastor retorted, feeling the other lean in to bite his earlobe, feeling the tremor that ran down his spine. "That's always been... ah... your special—"

Suddenly, Vincent kissed him, firm and precise, noticing the pang of surprise on Alastor's face as his thrusts deepened, without a single trace of that deliberate rhythm he had established moments before. He could evoke, with a clarity bordering on torment, the naive fantasies of his other nights with Alastor. He often found himself wondering if the man, too, had felt the blade of longing tearing him apart inside all these years; if their games had become boring without the right partner to melt into his words, or, God, what it would have been like if they had met in life. How much easier everything would have been. Would they meet in seedy bars, like in Hell? With a constant, oppressive audience of scrutinizing eyes circling them like hungry vultures throughout their nocturnal escapades? Vox would take the risk anyway. Even if his name might be dragged through disgrace for desiring, for loving another man, he would do it.

He fed only on unbridled desire. The flesh was a vortex, a harbinger of hunger. Vincent Whittman hadn't changed at all. He was still that convinced and obedient lover, so eloquent on the surface, but still so restrained when it came to fulfilling his own desires. There was a part of him that had always been bastardly and idealistic towards the desires of his own flesh. Decades passed—tears dried, tabloids never ended—time contingently molding him into a god in his own eyes. But the present moment, Alastor's very presence, was the relic of a painful defeat and a poignant reminder of his wounded ego. And it didn't surprise him that Vox had gotten along so well with other people.

Vox, who had eliminated them one by one until the crossroads spelled out his name. Vox, who knew how to be a flatterer when he pleased. Vox, who knew the game better than anyone. Vox, who had always dreamed of becoming a face for the rebellions of his exterminated people, who had always wanted to be a God. So adaptable for the purposes of fame, so... hungry, and so disloyal to his own flesh that he tried to detest the Radio Demon. Betraying himself in thought by imagining him in his arms; in dreams that spelled out Alastor's name, in memories of past nights, and in words—bridges, paths, mechanisms, but nothing truly crude or worthy of display. He clung to Alastor and bled in his hands, but only in his mind.

Did you missed me that much?

Alastor would like to say no—or at least not consciously. But the truth burned within him as if his core had been reduced to nothing but piles of rubble beneath Vincent's ashes. Ashes of the naive, dreamy man, full of plans for the future, whom his own fire had destroyed. Alastor had already taken them too close to the sun, but Vox was getting used to the heat. There were no more magnates or sovereigns there; only two ghosts from different eras, colliding in the only language that Hell never failed to teach: lust permeated by hatred.

And how could Vox judge him, when his waiting could be translated into just one name? For years, he had believed he would never be able to fulfill his illogical desires. His story had already been sufficiently fueled by pathetic attempts and pride placed at the top of his lists of accomplishments.

But now? He had nothing to lose.

The glass table beneath them creaked, protesting under the weight and movement. Alastor tilted his head back, his pale neck exposed as a sacrifice, while his shadow on the walls writhed in grotesque, hungry shapes. His gentleness was not out of weakness—it would never be weakness—but a calculated surrender, a collapse of barriers that made pleasure agonizing. He enjoyed the brutality of Vox's movements, the pain that rose through his flesh as if every drop of blood in his body were returning to its source.

"Stronger," Alastor said, and for a moment the phrase dangerously resembled a prayer. As if noticing the tenderness in his words, he hastened to correct himself: "Hurry up... and finish what you started, Vincent."

His hypnotic eye flickered with irritation, but even Vox understood. Alastor had sought the invitation to become the strongest sinner in all of Hell even before knowing death; he had gained the trust of His Highness Feathers with a malicious smile and words driven by a foolish contract. Of course, he never learned to kneel.

"And I'm the one who's impatient?" he mocked, but Vox gave Alastor what he wanted anyway.

As Vox deepened his grip, filling the void the Radio Demon guarded so zealously, the world around them—the technological studio, the neon lights, the decades-long rivalry, Valentino's own name shrouded in his age-old jealousy—seemed to suffer a violent interference. But the frenetic pace slowed, the deer pulling itself back from the burning claws of irrational ecstasy and forcing them to linger on each brazen touch. He gripped the tycoon's waist with a tender squeeze on his legs, briefly pulling back to command:

"Look at me."

Vox obeyed. The anticipation provoked a melodious moan from Vox. He, indeed. He knew how to kneel—all it took was the right command.

As always, Alastor smiled.

"You and your arrogant wretch... aren't you forgetting something?"

Alastor's hands, thin and icy, moved up Vox's chest, his nails digging lightly into the bluish skin and pulling him closer. He longed for contact, for the raw connection that only happens when Vox is inside him, and sought to unleash his own pleasure from within; just as he tortured his victims, Alastor was now being manipulated. The Radio Demon's smile didn't waver, but his eyes...they betrayed the facade. There was a haze of lust and possession there that no contract or agreement between Sovereigns could simulate.

"What?" Vox murmured innocently, the electric blue of his eyes rigorously scrutinizing Alastor's every reaction. "This?"

He pulled his hands away, causing the table beneath him to tremble with the frantic movement, lacking the support of palms resting on the glass. Piles of loose papers slid across the smooth surface and hit the floor. The phone, with which Valentino had tried to contact him, toppled aside. And finally, the hands, once still in the rarefied air, landed on Alastor's throbbing member, with an illicit and dangerous provocation.

His fingers danced over the forgotten erection with deliberate slowness, his impetuous eyes fixed on the slender figure below him. Each sound elicited was a cross Vincent carried like a gold medal—a poison coated like a love potion. But Alastor was poison anyway...

Alastor arched his back, feeling the other's weight crush him against the glass, a delicious contrast between the artificial heat of the screens and the coldness of his own skin. He wanted to recoil, wanted to pretend that control was still in his hands, but the cracking of his mask betrayed him. His sounds, his strange sweetness... Alastor didn't have the means to pretend that just anyone could wrest that from him.

"Ah!"

His lips, still tracing the shadow of a kiss, curved over the warm flesh of Alastor's throat, his teeth biting into the flesh, the mark left on the dark skin promising collapse or—worse still—redemption.

"I'm close," Vox whispered, surprisingly soft and trembling. He kissed the mark once before thrusting his hips toward Alastor—harder, faster, more desperate than ever. "God, you're beautiful, Alas—"

The tension between them shattered as Alastor kissed him—trembling in his arms, hands once flat on his chest darting to the crumpled papers beneath him, pulling them toward himself in a failed attempt to channel the overwhelming pleasure flooding him somewhere, anywhere. He was close too, it was noticeable; With the screen's glare so close to his face, his tongue entwining with his, the burning sensation inside him, his fingers enveloping his wet, trembling penis... even Alastor, who always valued frequency, decided to yield when it came to Vincent. Two alternating currents fighting for dominance of the same signal had more force than a pathetic, one-sided struggle. And there, on the cold transparency of that table, the static finally allowed itself to give way to an absolute and devastating harmony.

He surrendered. He surrendered his soul into the hands of another and never felt used by it—a rare thing for Alastor these days. He surrendered to a kiss that was more of an invasion, a short circuit of tongues and teeth than anything else. He surrendered, embracing him while his member, compressed by their bodies and Vincent's hand, was masturbated as if their lives—or what little remained of them in that place forgotten by Lucifer—depended on it.

The rhythm, which began as a mutual punishment, finally found its trigger: a possessive vortex, each thrust an assertion of dominance he tried to convince himself was real. Alastor felt every inch of that union as a definitive mark, a sacrifice of his isolation in favor of something far more dangerous.

— V-Vincent...

The name, the memory it evoked... suddenly, he found himself in a relapse. A relapse as promising as a heart beating towards death. What good would that do, when he knew there was no longer a single place where they could they possibly exist outside of that dusty studio? Perhaps that was the curse of the thing—because there always is, when it comes to Alastor. His lips would forever taste of him. No mouth would ever taste the same, the same poison; that was the only thing he could achieve. No man or woman would ever call him by that name again. He buried him under the ashes of his empire, of his cult, and Alastor was the only one who held the key to his time machine.

Vox stifled the thought. Alastor stifled a flimsy apology.

"I'm... close..."

Vox didn't back down, nor did he slow the pace of his fingers or his cock. The air between them was a shared whisper, and the empty office, an improvised stage for that spectacle of exploits. But, in the name of the foundations and seraphim of Paradise, how he wanted to see Alastor break. And soon, as certain as the day when all of Hell would be hunted down with a set date, he would succeed.

The nimble hand on his cock was like an exorcism when the climax hit him, whitish streaks staining Vincent's fingers and making the deer writhe in his arms, on the table, on the lips where Alastor tries to kiss him again to disguise his unbridled reaction. But Vox recoils to watch his eyebrows furrow, his red eyes rolling vigorously, and the demon's mouth closing to prevent him from making any sound. Nothing works. With the sight, with the vibration of his failed resistance echoing in his chest, he feels his core melt inside Alastor.

Vox still tastes his name on his lips as his body falls on top of his, exhausted and panting. He still feels the poison in his veins, on his tongue, on the tips of his fingers stained with his sticky fluid.

"I…" Vox tried to begin, rearranging his thoughts to formulate something coherent. He didn't dare move. He didn't dare shatter the tenderness of that moment with yet another cheap provocation. The wind was the only constant that dared to manifest itself between them.

It was Alastor who made the first move. His parted lips still released sighs; the undeniable evidence of his orgasm cooled in his abdomen and in Vox's fingers, but his hands moved only to grip the back of the television, sketching a tired smile at the bright screen.

"I really am back, aren't I?"

That managed to elicit a laugh from Vox; a laugh so brief that the air around him didn't even flicker.

"You never really knew how to leave, Al" Vox murmured, his voice hoarse, stripped of its usual electronic distortion. "You're etched into every frequency of this place; they still whisper your name instead of shouting it. And you're…" he hesitates. "—especially marked on my system. On my fucking head."

He slid his hand, still dirty and trembling, along the side of Alastor's face, lightly soiling his pale skin. Vox expected retaliation, a scathing comment about the lack of decorum or the invasive touch, but Alastor simply closed his eyes, accepting the mark as if it were a seal of belonging. This barely expresses a fraction of what he feels.

"Seven years is a long time to feed only on echoes, Vincent," Alastor murmured, using the name as if testing the weight of a weapon wielded in an ancient war. "But I admit... the reception today was... invigorating."

He let his head fall onto Alastor's chest, breathing deeply into his neck. The man always smelled of something raw; Vox remembered this from when they were younger. Alastor never changed his strong magnolia cologne, but it was now masked by the sweat of his labor. He could still smell the alcohol they had shared moments before and the scent of dried blood emanating from the bite left on the vulnerable flesh of his throat.

Somehow, immortality in Hell was less cruel this way. Alastor made it simpler, less of a burden and more of a gold rush. They welcomed the filth of their destinies with trembling hands, reveling in the blood in the same way that revelry only comes to them when there is sin, sweat, desecrated rosaries, and the hypocrisy of soliloquies. That was why their hearts cried out when their souls met.

He could have stayed there forever, feeling Alastor's heartbeat echo beneath his sternum and watching his eyelids droop under the weariness that afflicted him, but curiosity—an almost morbid preoccupation, in fact, if he were honest—struck upon him like a blade.

Suddenly raising his head, Vox searched his eyes.

“And he’s here to stay this time?” he ventured.

He could go, he thought for a moment, while Alastor’s expression twisted in deliberation. Seven more years wouldn’t be the end of the world. I can wait.

The sound of Alastor’s laughter was like the crackling of embers in an old fireplace: cozy for those who held the fire, but a promise of ashes for those who got too close. Vincent felt the tightness in his chest lessen only to be replaced by a sharp melancholy. Alastor tilted his head, the corners of his mouth tearing at his cheeks in that unchanging smile that was both his armor and his weapon. He extended his bare hand, touching Vox’s chin with a delicacy bordering on mockery.

“That crappy hotel needs me, doesn’t it?”

Vincent didn’t look away. He could feel the hypocrisy of his own soliloquies burning in his throat. Deep down, he wanted to ask what a run-down little hotel could possibly have that was so special that it deserved the attention of the Radio Demon himself; what the princess had offered him to make him give up what little dignity he had left to become a hostage to a childish dream. But he restrained himself—at least for now. That was what his empire was for. Think of the headlines, Vox...

"You..." Vox began incredulously, glancing at the studio around him, as if the reality of the newspapers that would soon spell his name was closer than any of them wanted to accept. "Damn it, you're impossible."

But at least you're still here.

Alastor narrowed his eyes, his pupils dilated. He approached, the smell of ozone and dried blood enveloping Vincent like a shroud.

"Complaining? At worst, we'll meet again in the headlines."

Silence stretched for a single second before Vox blurted out:

"And at best?"

"At best?"

A smile lit up his face, as if Alastor had just been waiting for him to ask that question. He brought Vox's dirty fingers to his lips before completely enveloping them with his tongue, feeling the bittersweet taste of his own climax spread across his palate. Vox could feel his own dick hardened at the mere sight.

"At best, this office is empty more often."