Chapter Text
“Repairs, Vox? Bloody REPAIRS?!”
That oh-so-familiar screech of vibrant rage crashed through the halls of V Tower like a goddamn stampede. If Vox hadn’t already been submerged in displeasure it might have done him in for the day, but as it stood his spirit was just crushed enough to allow that much more pressure onto the pile.
Velvette was hardly subtle, and neither was Vox. But when she exploded into the room like a police raid and found him all but doubled over on his sofa, clutching a glass of something far-too hard for the early hour, she didn’t so much as blink. His overtness didn’t even register over hers, a feat in itself, and one he was thankful for as he blinked up owlishly at her where she stood over him.
“You’ve got some explaining to do, you fucking HEAR ME?”
Her fury was such a change of pace from his morning leading up to it that he didn’t immediately realize he was being spoken to. Never mind that she hadn’t clued him in yet and he didn’t know what he supposed to be explaining to begin with.
“Uhh, what’s all this?” he managed vaguely, gesturing between them with a claw. She scowled over him and her hands firmly found her hips.
“I cannot believe you are making me ask you this, of all people,” she began, voice low and deadly and eyes deadlier, “but have you been living under a fucking rock, Vox?”
Vox squinted, tilted his hand absently to swirl his drink around. “I s’pose so,” he said flatly. Truth be told, he couldn’t have cared less about the world outside his rock today. Not after he’d been woken up so suddenly so early in the morning, thrust into the deep end of a fit of panic after a phone call that had ended far too soon to have unraveled him the way it had. He hadn’t even been given a chance to put up his normal walls in his disorientation.
Charlie hadn’t said anything to him. He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line, quick and stuttering. Nervous about something. And Vox had greeted her with an alarming amount of enthusiasm for the percentage of him that still had a foot in unconsciousness. Only really registering the edge of desperation in his voice after he’d been laying awake for a while in the aftermath, staring up at his ceiling and unable to retreat back into his blank dreams.
He’d no reason to be worried. He knew that. He knew that.
And yet, a three-in-the-morning call out of the blue sprinted laps in his head, in all its fifteen-second glory.
Fifteen seconds of something unspoken. Something that was enough to shake Charlie, of all people, and keep whatever it was she’d wanted to say to him glued inside of her throat.
Silence perforated, of course, by his own miserably eager voice. So lost, still drifting partially in sleep—a dream, perhaps, where Charlie had smiled kindly at him.
Fuck, had she heard that? Had it put her off of whatever she’d been about to tell him? What could it have been to elicit that reaction?
Was she trying to cut him loose?
Had she found some other miserable soul to cleanse? Or was she finally deciding to grant Vox his freedom? Shouldn’t he have been pleased by that? Shouldn’t he be concerned that he wasn’t?
He was spiraling and he fucking knew it. His abysmally organic brain was spinning tall tales, spewing speculation, all because of Charlie’s troubled breaths whispering through his phone speaker.
And he wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t recognize how pathetic it all was. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he’d been afforded an outlet. And for better or worse, he…
Fuck, he trusted Charlie.
And no matter how far of a reach it was, the idea that it might be yanked out from under him…
Vox had had more than enough of freefall. He’d been plummeting for years and had only just felt what it was like to stand on relatively solid ground. So when his phone chimed again, hours later, and he saw who it was, he was helpless to the blind panic that gripped him.
No way in hell he could bring himself to answer the phone after willingly throwing himself off the edge of rationality. Would he hear Charlie setting him loose like the family dog? Very unlikely, no. Did he want to give her a chance to try?
Also no.
Schrödinger’s fucking phone call.
So that had been the only thing on his mind all morning. It all felt a little too much like drowning himself in a puddle, but he was already broken enough so why not sprinkle a little catastrophizing on top?
Velvette was waiting for an answer. Truth be told, he’d nearly forgotten that she was even screaming at him. But the blank look on his screen must’ve done the trick because she was already searching for something on her phone while furiously muttering expletives under her breath.
When she located whatever she was looking for, she thrust her phone right into his face. “Tell me, Flat-Face,” she hissed, “what the fuck this is supposed to be?”
On Velvette’s phone, a video was playing. The watermark in the corner indicated that it had been uploaded to HellTube. The footage was grainy and dark, at first. Not enough definition to make anything out. But then the camera tilted and shifted almost nauseatingly as whomever was operating it seemed to pull it out from where it had been tucked in front of their body. A set of glowing red eyes appeared onscreen, atop a grinning mouth of sharp teeth. Par for the course as far as sinners went, frankly, but something about this one almost rang a bell.
The demon’s face was gray and mottled with patchy fur, and atop its head twitched a pair of large bat ears. As the camera pulled out even further, the demon’s torso came into view, as well as the membranous wings folded up neatly over its shoulders.
Oh fuck.
The demon’s voice was obnoxiously reedy when it launched into its intro, “What’s up guys! Welcome back to ‘Bad Places to Take a Shit’! I’m your host, Bat-tholomew, and I’m out here in this filthy fuckin’ alleyway to take a shit. As always, leave a like, subscribe, and comment below where you want me to take a shit next! Most-liked comment gets entered to win a $100 gift card, trust.”
Vox wrinkled his nonexistent nose (the effect being a scrunch of the features on his screen) while the bat—Bat-tholomew, presumably—ambled over to a nearby dumpster. A terribly, unfortunately familiar dumpster. Vox knew what was coming even as the bat began to squat to do whatever the hell people were apparently clamoring to get him to do online.
He interjected before he could think better of it. “Why the fuck am I watching this? Turn it off, I’m not that depraved.” As though he could erase Velvette’s memory of whatever he was about to see by pretending it didn’t exist. Velvette scowled at him over her phone screen and shoved it further into his face.
“Shut up and watch,” she growled. Noted. Vox swallowed and did as he was told. Like watching an asteroid descend and being helpless to stop it.
The bat demon filmed himself crouching against the gray brick wall of the alley next to the dumpster, reiterating for his evidently goldfish-brained audience that he was, indeed, about to take a shit for their entertainment. But fortunately for Vox’s eyes and unfortunately for the mechanical heart attempting to tunnel out of his throat, the demon’s efforts were halted by a bright flash of cyan light blooming against his face and the sound of wild, arcing electricity. Its source wasn’t visible onscreen, as his camera was still trained closely on himself, but his jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out of his skull.
“Shit shit shit fuck fuck fuck,” Bat-tholomew was muttering urgently, attempting to squeeze himself further back against the wall. From the adjustment of his camera’s exposure to sharpen his outline, he appeared to have found himself a decent shadow to lurk within. For a moment the only sound populating the turbulent footage was the demon’s heavy breaths. But then, as Vox anticipated, his own voice arose, quiet and unimpressed.
“Damn, that one sucked.”
The bat demon sucked in a breath next to his phone mic, and suddenly the footage flipped, brick alley walls blurring by as the phone was turned. “Holy shit, is that—” the bat whispered in alarm at the same moment that Vox himself was revealed.
He’d known it was coming and still it sent sparks jittering over his body. It did not go unnoticed by Velvette, who narrowed her eyes at him while the footage continued.
He watched himself dust off his jacket closer to the mouth of the alley, the street beyond blessedly empty. He’d a put-upon scowl on his screen, exhausted and irritated, until something caught his attention. The glint of hidden red eyes, Vox remembered. Something skittering accusatorily in the dark while he skulked in paranoia.
The footage was blown out as the glare of Vox’s screen illuminated the aspiring content creator, who hissed obscenely like a wild animal and took flight—at least Vox remembered as much, the footage was about as clear as if it was filmed inside of a washing machine, strobing red and gray as the world was upended and blue as Vox fired off blasts at his back and screamed obscenities. All the while, Bat-tholomew wheezed panicked entreaties to Lucifer, to God, whomever would listen. It was a shit-show for a good while after he’d left Vox in the dust, cursing and whirling and diving erratically in the air like he was in a dogfight, as he didn’t seem to realize he was in the clear for some distance. Vox would have gladly watched the demon’s escape for another hour or two, maybe even until Velvette got bored and left, but of course he wasn’t so lucky. She darkened her screen and shoved her phone back into her pocket after only a few seconds of reprieve, and when he finally worked up the nerve to glance up at her, she was seething.
That was the look she usually gave sinners seconds before converting the blood in their veins into glitter.
“That video was titled ‘Vox sneaks over to Cannibal Town’. Said he was next to the border in the description. It was up for over an hour before we took it down.”
Vox attempted to speak, but the words caught in his throat. And he attempted again, and again, and at a certain point, as her eyes began to glow menacingly, he became aware of a sickening hole in his torso where his stomach once was, now fallen through the fucking floor.
Vox had a way out. He always had a way out. Vox was the man with a goddamn plan, he was the face of the Vees, he had his shit together.
But no. He didn’t have a way out. He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have a fucking idea how to assuage the fury pouring out of his business partner, not after lie after consecutive lie. He was lost, and he’d already been well off the grid by the time she’d burst into his room.
Velvette spoke before he could find his voice, quiet and venomous. “I read the timestamp. Vox. You told us you missed our meeting because of your repairs.”
His glass found the end table beside him, rattling with the shake of his hand. His throat was dry. He tried to rasp, “Velvette, I can explain—”
“I don’t think you can, Vox. I think every time I’ve asked you to explain, you’ve bloody lied to me.”
“That’s not—”
“SAVE IT!” she suddenly shouted, somehow looming taller despite her diminutive stature, and her eyes flashed dangerously. “You have done nothing but lie to us—not just this week, but for bloody ages!” Vox flinched at that, and there went any attempt to try and deny it. How much had she known? As though sensing his question, Velvette spat, “You haven’t been as subtle as you think, Vox. Ever since your little stunt with the Radio Demon seven months ago you’ve been distracted, disappearing all the time, fucking dead-eyed.” She stepped forward until he had to tilt his head to look up at her (not terribly far but it did the job) and leaned into his space. “Do I need to tell you again to get your shit together? Will it make a difference? Or are you just gonna keep sneaking off, holing yourself up in your room and pretending like you’re not?”
The hole tore wider, too empty even for nausea, as it dawned on him.
She’d noticed. She’d noticed months ago and said nothing, waiting and letting it build and fester. Every time his boxy head ached from the pressure. Every time the wires under his skin seared hot, pulled tight, like taut stiches struggling to keep him threaded together as his mind warred with itself. Every single fucking whimper and aborted cry thrown defiantly into his ceiling in the dark of night. And she’d been there, playing along. Waiting for him to break? To admit it himself? Smirking to herself in secret, imagining the tide of shame that would roll in to envelop him and knock him from his perch?
All for her gain?
All for his loss?
So effortless for her, invisible in the time they’d spent together mere days ago.
Would he have done the same in her place? Seen a weakness and bullied himself under the shell? Vox was not a good man. This had never distressed him before. But now…
Slowly, water boiling, her red eyes filled the hole of his torso. She probably hadn’t planned on it. Vox felt the heat of her ire combust in his gut and suddenly his shame seemed so far away. All that existed in front of him was an oversight. A weakness he’d carved for himself by daring to think he could have anything more in his afterlife than traded utility. He’d done this to himself, lying to himself and yearning for the lie. Buying into some pitiful semblance of comfort, a blanket over a fucking bed of nails.
He'd done this to himself, and yet this woman capitalized on his blind spot without an ounce of regret. Vox might have stopped for a second and asked himself if he was overreacting. If he was holding her to a different standard than himself. But he could see it on her fucking face and it spiked every nerve in his body. The subtle little triumphant grin simmering beneath her fury. She’d known he was falling apart and chose to watch it happen, place bets, yank him down with her own might if need be.
Something snapped.
Vox rose from his seat abruptly, causing her to wheel backwards to maintain her balance. She glared up at him, unblinking otherwise, and oh did he want to knock that self-assuredness off of her face.
Cyan crackles raced over his form and he willed his left eye to pulse and spiral, voice practically a subsonic growl, rumbling beneath a blanket of static, “BACK AWAY. NOW.”
He saw the exact moment the realization set in—reveled in it—as her eyes widened minutely in fear that she was too slow to contain. His hypnosis snapped around her like a snare and her body went rigid. Like a marionette on yanked strings she stumbled backwards several paces, and as her command was fulfilled, her momentum was violently arrested against an invisible wall of Vox’s power. With a yelp and a fruitless windmilling of her arms, Velvette fell onto her back on the rug beneath her, huffing as the wind was knocked out of her.
But it wasn’t enough. The hole yawned wider, demanded its fill. Vox moved closer like a prowling creature to loom over her, and despite all of his brokenness and his body’s refusal to heed his whims—despite all those times his face cracked and his composure splintered—he knew his mask was firmly affixed this time. Stone-cold, deadly. Velvette’s own face flickered deliciously between trepidation and rage.
“You should consider who you’re speaking to, Velvette,” he said, icy and calm. “I am not your employee or your lackey. I am not some lesser demon toy for you to play with. I am a fucking overlord.” As he spoke, his cables began to wind out of his back, curling out from beneath his suit jacket. They slithered along toward her, untouching, licking just at the edge of her space as a threat. Valiantly, she didn’t shrink back from them. He stood right over her now, glaring down coolly, almost detached. “None of my actions of late have jeopardized our partnership. At most I have missed a meeting or two, and only one broadcast that went unnoticed by the majority of Hell. If there is anything afflicting me, it is personal and private and does not concern you.”
Velvette full-on hissed at him in her rage, scrambling up into a seated position but still unable to easily stand with his presence in her airspace. “Like hell it doesn’t concern me! If you slip, our image slips and we all suffer for it!”
“I haven’t SLIPPED.” The reply came too quickly and too harshly, his control briefly flagging and letting that word explode into the room like a gunshot. He had to suck in a frustrated breath to re-center. But damn her, Velvette looked all too smug down there. Tracing his loss of restraint with shrewd eyes. She knew but she couldn’t. It wasn’t an option. It wasn’t an option.
Vox crouched down beside her and refrained from dipping into his powers again to compel her to heed him. He needed this done right.
“But if any of us is jeopardizing our partnership, I’d argue it’s you.” Her eyes widened in affront.
“What—”
“You have constantly been up my ass, Velvette, doubting me and turning Val against me. Demanding to know things that aren’t your business to know and taking issue when I refuse to bite. My biggest crime to date has been missing a fucking meeting. You are sowing distrust and contempt between us. You are the greatest threat to the Vees.”
“How fucking dare—” her words were choked off with a gasp when Vox let one of his cables shoot out and snap around her neck. It coiled tight, burrowed in, snatched up loose indigo hairs from their ties and pulled them until she winced. Her hands quickly rose to try and pry the cable off, to no avail, and her teeth bared in a cornered snarl. Velvette wheezed, “Oh, you’ve fucking done it now.”
“Consider this a warning, Velvette,” he said, layering the static thick. “Stay in your lane, and I’ll stay in mine.”
The hole in his stomach ached, empty, hungry, screaming for recompense. She was right there in his grasp. Thin neck encased in his steel.
Maybe she was the lid on the bottle. Maybe she was the reason for his spiral.
Maybe he could be done with all of this. Free at fucking last. Maybe if he increased the pressure, squeezed just a little tighter…
He didn’t even realize he was doing it as the sick, sweet thought curled through his brain like smoke. Velvette’s eyes went wide.
But then one of her hands removed itself from the cable around her neck and whipped toward him, palm out. And he halted fully, stiff and frozen, when he felt the movement inside of him.
Deep in his gut, beneath a metal shell and all his wires and circuits, something stirred, suddenly alive and angry.
Vox’s organs were mechanical, but they were organs, nonetheless. Just made of flexible plastic and segmented metal plates instead of muscle and tissue.
He remembered too late what it meant for someone like him to battle someone like Velvette.
The squirming, roiling wrongness inside of him redoubled and pulsed waves of pain and nausea through him. He grunted through it, digital face screwing into a wince, and fought to maintain his hold on the Social Media Demon. Velvette, for her part, was looking just as worse for wear; her smugness had made way for grim concentration, probably identical to his own. Still, she managed to sneer up at him, strained and choking against his grip, “Should know better, Flat-Face. Body full of nonorganic materials like yours? I can tie your guts into fucking knots. Split all your pretty little wires in half.” Vox snarled and tightened his hold on her neck. Another good squeeze and her head might pop clean off. She groaned with the stretch, likely feeling it herself. Her crimson eyes were narrowed nearly to slits, glaring death up at him. “I know you c-can’t control your—hng— cables and expel my hold on your insides at the same time. Urgh, you gotta release me if you wanna k-keep me from tearing you to bloody pieces.”
The twisting in his guts spasmed and he released a pained cry, falling fully to his knees from his crouch. Warning messages flared in his peripherals. “And you,” he growled as sparks prickled over his body, “are gonna lose your fucking head if you don’t let go of my organs.”
Neither demon relented, both squirming and contorting in their respective agonies, both searing hateful glares into the other. After a few seconds, it all seemed to slough away.
The pain, the betrayal, the struggle, the strain, the flutter in his chest—vestiges of Charlie’s incessant calls—all of the fucking overwhelm, vanished like ice in the ocean.
He hovered above himself. Watched electrons race through his wires, sending impulses to his brain—danger—down to his limbs—fight—to circulate through him, a feedback loop. The recursive instinct to survive, folding over itself like echoes in a cavern until the sound was unintelligible and the threat obscured by layered waveforms.
He’d made a nonthreat a threat. He’d made a spectator a contributor. He’d closed off his clean escape.
What was Vox doing?
His soul slammed home and his hold gave out. Cables fell limp, the one around Velvette’s neck dropping into her lap like a felled serpent, and she sucked in a greedy, ragged breath. At the same time that his bodily awareness threaded back into his internals to wrangle control from her, she dropped it on her own, and the ache vanished with it.
Velvette fell backwards and Vox tipped the other way, both hitting the ground and panting up at the ceiling. Seconds passed. Maybe minutes. Despite the return of his faculties, Vox was numb.
She was the first to break the silence. “I’m reminded why we don’t fight,” she said dully, breaths still evening out.
Vox huffed humorlessly and shook his head. The ceiling vibrated above him. “Mismatched,” he agreed.
Finally, Velvette stood shakily and Vox followed suit. Their eyes were stony now, boring into one another’s, waiting for the first to break the tenuous calm again. Vox watched her, poised for another clash. Instead, Velvette turned without a word toward the door.
“I hope you realize what you’ve just done,” she said mildly over her shoulder. Vox didn’t have a chance to answer her before she slipped out and closed the door behind her.
The tension emptied from the room and melancholy flooded in in its place. And behind melancholy rolled numb, detached despair. No conscious decision was made, but for a while, Vox’s brain flipped off.
A hunk of sinner flesh was swallowed by the water below with a muted splash, sending ripples of shimmering light across Vox and the low ceiling above him. The refracted strobe and the sound were what drew Vox fully back into consciousness. However he’d ended up here, it must have been on autopilot.
Only three sharks were present for feeding time at the moment. Likely owing to the fact that feeding time was supposed to be… Vox checked his internal clock… two hours ago. One of his employees had probably taken care of it as usual, and here he was overindulging a few of his lucky pets. The rest would probably catch the scent and swarm like… sharks.
He shook his head, disoriented. Another chunk of meat fell from his hands without him having even given the order to release it, but as it was swiped up by one of his creatures the irritation fled him, gone like mist. Sluggish and weary, all that existed was the moment in front of him. And a ghost of a particular moment earlier in the day.
Vox’s head shook again.
He really didn’t want to, but he attempted to sift through the day. Unlike the subjects of his usual meltdowns, however, these memories were not corrupted or blocked in any meaningful way; just excruciating.
He walked the halls. He looked at screens. He walked the halls again. He stared at his ceiling. Rinse and repeat. And eventually he found his way down here with a bucket full of sinner meat beside him. Gray and bleak and monotone, a boring day—too boring, clinically boring.
If it weren’t for recollection spilling into his idle observation, he could have pretended that’s all it was. But as he watched himself exist without taking up space for hours, the horrible, gut-wrenching truth trickled in.
He’d finally fucking snapped. And he’d probably made an enemy out of Velvette.
Vox sucked in a breath, heart stuttering cold in his chest. He dragged his legs up onto the catwalk with him and hugged them to himself, making himself small and pathetic for the eyes of his sharks alone.
What did I do? What the fuck have I done?
I attacked Velvette. This is fucking it for me.
His breaths began to come quicker, pulse beginning to pick up. But before it could crest beyond the point of overwhelm, Vox grasped at his resolve like the string of a wind-caught balloon. He felt his claws tear again into the flesh of his palms, rumbling a low growl to himself. Defiance, refusal to sink back down. He’d already made more than enough of a mess of himself today.
The sting of his claws chased back the tide of fuzz in his skull and choked the panic, at least for now.
Now. Technically speaking. This wouldn’t be the first time the Vees had fought amongst themselves. Their partnership had begun with constant skirmishes and vies for higher standing between them. They almost always led nowhere. Velvette and Vox, in particular, found early on that their demonic abilities made them a dreadful match in a fight. With Velvette’s stature, Vox could easily bowl over her with raw strength, and his hypnosis wasn’t a bad play either. And Velvette, with a penchant for manipulating inanimate materials (the crux of her success as a fashion designer), could play Vox like a fiddle right back. Valentino’s methods were always more underhanded. Regardless, they’d quickly decided on equal pedestals, because the infighting would have torn them apart faster than they could hope to sweep through the whole of the Pentagram.
It had been a very long time since one of these fights, sure, but that didn’t mean it was completely out of the question. Right?
Or was this a harbinger? The end of the Vees? Or the end of one Vee?
Would this be how Vox found himself at the bottom of the pile again? Not because of his beef with the Radio Demon. Not because of the Princess’s blackmail. Not even because the truth of his condition made it into the papers.
But because he was so overloaded with the weight of everything all at once, and so saturated with answerless questions, that he simply lost his grip on his tether to sanity.
It didn’t matter that Vox was certainly fucked up enough to have pulled the same kind of stunt, had he been in her shoes. It also didn’t matter that his anger had been justified. That wasn’t a question. Velvette had been itching for him to snap so she could exploit it. Any other demon would have paid the price for that humiliation in blood. But she was a Vee, and an overlord, and that complicated things. Threw their whole dynamic off-balance. He was honestly shocked he’d managed to go the whole day without confronting it, but he’d certainly be dealing with the consequences tomorrow.
He glowered down into the water, its turbulence dying as his sharks finished their second meal and drifted deeper into the tank. There was no point in testing his resolve against the rippling surface; he looked small down there, reflected from his perch. He felt small. He didn’t feel like Vox.
And there was only one place in the godforsaken Pentagram that he could exist and not have to be large. Not have to be him.
In the second that the thought passed through him, his phone rang. He checked the ID internally and stopped breathing. It was serendipity. It was some divine joke, God’s rotten sense of humor. It was a lifeline.
The anxiety he’d had earlier of her hypothetical rejection was so fucking distant it felt more like something he’d heard spoken nearby. Vox pulled up the call in his head and answered before he could second-guess himself. When Charlie’s voice emerged, she almost sounded startled that the ringing had stopped.
“Uhh, w—hey? Hello?” she stammered against Vox’s silence. He inhaled slowly.
“Charlie,” he replied, voice low and borderline dead.
“Vox? Are you, uhh, okay?”
“Why would I not be?”
There was a beat of silence where Charlie was likely panicking on the other end, but Vox was startlingly patient. Dread would do that, he supposed.
“It’s just…” she paused to hum uncertainly to herself. “You haven’t been answering me all day. I just thought…”
Imperceptibly, Vox’s claws tightened again, serrated edges skimming the wounds in the synthetic meat of his palms.
“Been busy,” he answered simply, unable to commit himself to more. Not unless she asked…
“Right…” Charlie said cautiously. “Well I, uhh… I just wanted to know if you could meet me tomorrow instead of Thursday? There’s something I want to talk to y—”
“Yes.” Vox’s eyes widened when he realized just how quickly he’d answered. If that wasn’t a tell. Still, even as he scowled to himself, he recognized that he was talking to the one person in all of Hell who he could safely give that kind of ammunition.
Charlie was just as baffled. “Wait—really?” Excitement tinged her words, and Vox heaved a sigh. She… still wanted to meet with him. He shouldn’t have been shocked by that. But a weight seemed to fall away all the same.
“Yes,” Vox said tiredly, closing his eyes and ceasing his struggle. Letting himself sink to the bottom where he could wade in peaceful submission. “I need to… I… Tomorrow. Please.”
He heard the gentle smile in her voice when she replied, “Of course, Vox. Whatever you need.”
There was a certain juxtaposition here that Vox chose not to focus too fully on. Between his life and his double-life, neon lights and dim, dust-speckled glow. Something chosen for himself, something denied of himself. It would all come to a head sooner or later, he figured, so instead of shattering over it now, he hung up the call and counted the seconds until tomorrow.