Archive of Our Own

“Whz-whx-what about my ankles,” Vox says softly. “Do you lz-lx-like them?”

“Yes,” Alastor answers quietly.

“And my thz-thx-thighs, too?”

Alastor’s eyelids droop lower over the dim radiolight glow of his eyes in the darkness. “Also,” he replies patiently.

“Do you… thz-thx-think they’re pretty?”

It’s not Vox’s ego he’s feeding. It’s that thing that only reared its ugly head in the dead of night, that quiet voice that grows to a deafening roar, the only demon Vox is powerless to. (Other than Alastor, of course.)

“Very,” Alastor tells him. It should amuse him that Vox needs this kind of reassurance, that the man behind the curtain is truly no more confident than any of the weak-willed plebeians he manipulated. It does entertain him. But it also makes him feel very singular. Powerful.

Vox removes his tie, takes out the pin from his cravat, and lays them on the dresser. He unbuttons his coat, feels that soothing brush of radio frequency in the air by his shoulder before Alastor’s dangerous-delicate claws curl over the collar and help slide it from his shoulders. He feels that frequency drift away in the dark room, hears the whisper of a coat being hung, the rustle of Alastor doffing his own coat.

He loosens his cravat, slowly removing layer after layer of his clothes he wore like armor over his electric skin. His throat feels vulnerable once he has his collar unbuttoned. He keeps his waistcoat on out of habit, distracted as he goes to sit on the edge of the bed.

He looks up, Alastor’s crimson ensemble washed out in the light of his screen. He winces through his automatic grin. “... Do you lz-lx-like my face, too?”

Alastor knows this is the most important question. A sign of just how small Vox felt. How afraid. “Yes, I love your face,” he says without hesitation, beginning to pull at the fingertips of his gloves, one by one, methodically. Once one hand is bare, mottled gray with scars, he touches the edge of Vox’s screen.

Vox smiles. It’s weak and flat but true. His eyes are dull, listless as they watch Alastor remove his other glove and place the pair on the bedside table. Trying to deflect from that bittersweet call and response, his grin ticks up a few degrees and he asks in an almost-playful voice, “Do you thz-thx-think I have a pz-px-pretty backside?”

Alastor smirks at him, a kind of dark-sweet smile Vox savored most in these quiet near-midnight rendezvous. “Very pretty,” he replies, just a touch sardonic. He looks Vox over, notices how haphazardly he’s still dressed. It’s past time for this routine--but Vox is always a little addled, a little out of sorts beforehand. He kneels down to take off Vox’s shoes, like he were a child.

“Whz-whx-what about my az-ax-ankles? Dz-dx-do you like them?” Vox asks, his voice laced with static that made him sound almost breathless.

Alastor sighs quietly to himself. It was not uncommon for Vox to repeat himself when he was like this, to be forgetful. Whether it was due to a higher likelihood of errors, or because of his fear, Alastor couldn’t say. Wouldn’t ask.

“Yes. Enormously,” he replies in an even, calm tone as he sets Vox’s shoes aside. He did like Vox’s ankles--narrow, almost fragile. He traces over the knob of bone as he slides his fingers up to remove his sock. Vox is so anxious that his bare skin does shock Alastor a bit. 

When he was more in his right mind, when they were in these private moments, the chemistry of frequencies and currents played nicer--made contact with Vox’s skin tingle instead of burn. But Alastor doesn’t mind the prickle of pain against his cold, half-numb fingertips.

Once he’s dealt with Vox’s socks, he moves to sit with him on the bed. He greets his body first with a touch to the middle of his back, skin separated from skin by his shirt and waistcoat, dulling the shock of Vox’s skin to a mere hum of contact.

Vox turns his screen toward Alastor. He reaches for his hand, feels the twitch of the radio demon’s fingers as he shocks him. His brow narrows on his screen, apologetic, self-loathing bared in this crystal-fragile moment in time. He concentrates, reaches out with his current to align himself with Alastor’s frequency. His system whirrs and hums, the fizzle of static rising with effort. 

Ah--there it is. 

He exhales static and some of the tension falls from his shoulders as he rubs his thumb over the back of Alastor’s hand. He draws the other demon’s hand toward himself, places it against his bare neck. His touch is so damn soothing.

It never fails. It always surprises Alastor how much he enjoys touching Vox. He can feel his skin, warm, sizzling with energy, a vivid sensation he usually lacks in his dead fingertips. He traces along Vox’s throat--narrow, almost fragile--a throat he had ripped open more times than he could count. Now it bares its vulnerability so willingly to him.

Alastor catches himself staring at his grasp on Vox’s neck, holding him like he might throttle him. It seemed the natural position for his hand, really. His gaze lifts to focus on Vox’s expression. He looks so at peace now. The only demon he trusts in Hell to hold him in his most vulnerable moment is the one he trusts not to let anything else destroy him.

Alastor brings his other hand to Vox’s throat, hands that could so easily choke and maim him. But not tonight. His fingers brush against the cables that run along the back of Vox’s neck, letting Vox become reacquainted with his touch.

There’s no need for words when they connect like this.

Alastor moves his hands gradually from Vox’s neck, strokes over his cables, brushes the backs of his knuckles against the underside of his screen. Vox’s eyes close on his screen. Alastor wonders what he sees--knows that he’ll be relegated to true darkness soon.

Wordlessly, Vox turns, exposes his back to his rival. Alastor’s hands slide over his back, giving him a soothing stroke over the square of hardware between his shoulder blades. More and more tension melts from him in a slow sigh of pleasure.

Delicately, Alastor traces his fingers along Vox’s cables. Oh, how he loved to have his nemesis in the palm of his hand like this. The thrill of power surges through him. One by one, Alastor unplugs the cables from his screen, the shift and twinge of his current, the sound of Vox’s screen power going null, all more arousing than any conventional sexual pleasure.

It’s eerie how Vox moves with his screen unplugged. Alastor has become so accustomed to Vox’s unconventional anatomy, that ridiculous screen of a head, that he seems like a moving corpse when he lifts his hands--like a dullahan, the Headless Horseman of myth--removing his head from his shoulders.The silence of his powered down screen washes over the room like a wave, a brief, still quiet before the storm, followed by a much louder crash of static surf as the screen leaves its usual position.

The image is fuzzy at first, like the static that laced Vox’s words and crawled just under his easily rent flesh is pouring out of him, pouring out like a haze of smoke from his headless neck. But the illusion of Vox’s static spirit leaving his form stops short of fulfilling some terrifying end Alastor might have once dreamed of. The static coalesces and takes shape, fills out, becomes strangely solid, the shape of a head, the skull of the ghost in the machine.

Vox puts his screen aside, leans it up against the bedside table like yet another accessory, like his shoes or a watch, removed before going to bed. He turns to face Alastor, takes him in with the featureless ruin of his face, meets his eyes with naught but static.

“You like all of me…?” he asks, his voice deep and horribly distorted, but without that signature hitch and stutter. The sound of Vox’s unmasked voice makes Alastor’s skin crawl in the most delicious way. “My mouth, my eyes, my nose, my ears?”  

It’s proof of Vox’s anguish, his desire to be beautiful, to be validated in the form of his torment, that he asks about so many features his static form lacks. He does have a mouth--a scar of darkest black, fangs that shine with electric glow--but the rest is smoothed over, erased in that snowcrash blind.

Alastor answers not with words, not with sounds that could lie or obfuscate or coddle, but with his hands, sliding over warm static that buzzes with noise, with his lips, kissing an uncertain mouth.

A static sigh breathes into Alastor, he can feel it all the way down his throat, tinged with almost-nervous current as they make contact with such sensitive flesh and pseudo-flesh. Alastor kisses him with latent fury-turned-passion, ferocity built over the years and softened by familiarity, by Knowing one another.

That passion fills Vox, directs his anxious current into the fresh-familiarity of intimacy with Alastor. He cups Alastor’s face in kind, greeted by skin warmed by the promise of this evening, by that radio frequency tuned to him.

Alastor tastes the black void of Vox’s mouth, tastes the flat, ashen flavor he’s cursed with. It’s the most dissatisfying flavor--but unique to Vox. A flavor Alastor has never had before him, a flavor he could not replicate, like kissing the smoldering ashes of a fire, sticking one’s tongue to an electrical wire. It burns in a way that excites him. It tastes like hate, but to Alastor it tastes like love. This strange, caliginous, bittersweet draught brewed between them over the ages.

He can taste his fear, too. It tastes so sweet, so rare. Vox is not afraid of him. He is afraid of what may happen when the lights go out. He is afraid of midnight --of the hours in which he would sleep that stillest of sleep.

Alastor feasts on that fear. Vox is so malleable in his grasp, so fragile, so earnestly desperate to feel before he goes offline.

Vox is greedy for touch. Once past the point of no return, he pulls at Alastor’s clothes, almost clumsy in his desperation on a night like this. Alastor is accustomed to Vox’s craving, surrenders to the needy pull at his clothes, and is rewarded by touch that is unlike anything else. So familiar even before their relationship had turned intimate, that literal-figurative spark that had always compelled them.

Vox slides his hands over Alastor’s bare chest, breaks from the kiss to look at him, eyeless static drinking him in, all his beautiful scars like a mottled tapestry. Untouched and yet too touched with violence. He knows which ones are his--the ones that fork and scatter across him like lightning--and they never fail to make him smile. Souvenirs, treasures, of their past that Alastor chooses to wear always beneath his clothes.

“You’ll see it all again come sunrise,” Alastor reminds him as Vox studies him--as if it were the last time. Vox always fears it will be the last time, and the fear is not unfounded on a midnight like tonight.

“ You’re beautiful, ” he tells him, chasing him down onto the bed with another kiss.

Alastor may not experience desire in the same way Vox does, but he is not immune to the effect of being complimented--not by Vox. Not by someone who knows him so well, respects him--has hated him so well, and loved him even better. Less is more, Vox knows. His arms wrap around his shoulders and nails dig into his shoulder blades, knowingly on either side of the sensitive transistor fused to his spine, drawing a moan from the media demon.

Some of their hunger vented and shared in that kiss, Alastor resumes his methodical pace. It’s so unlike the passion he could show with his mouth, with lips and teeth and tongue, so incongruously patient, it makes Vox’s current fizzle with anticipation. Deft fingers slide down the lapels of his waistcoat, slip the buttons one by one. Vox is so attuned to Alastor in that moment that he feels the loosening of the tension of his clothes. He is being stripped in more ways than one, uncovered and revealed to his base parts.

It used to make Vox anxious to be naked around any other demon. His electrified skin made him a ticking time bomb of pain to anyone foolish enough to touch him under the best circumstances, but without his non-conductive clothes, he was a live wire waiting to fry.

But not with Alastor. Their natures, their frequencies, their currents, were more alike than different. A synchronicity could be achieved, a likeness borne out of their similarities--it had taken decades to uncover that beneath their many differences. His skin was still electric, even to Alastor’s touch, but Alastor was resilient, receptive, to his current in ways that lesser demons were not.

Vox lets out a breath of relief as Alastor unbuttons his shirt. He still has yet to touch him, but just the whisper of fingers on buttons is some sweet release from his usual composure, the promise of something to remember him by before he goes under.

Distracted, fuzzy-headed, Vox shrugs off his waistcoat. He’s hyper-aware of his transistor just beneath a thin layer of cloth, soon to be exposed. He’s further distracted as Alastor kisses him again, seeks to distract him from all his worries.

Alastor’s nerves sing and his muscles shiver as he slides his palms over Vox’s bared chest, tingling against dark skin teeming with static, too, just beneath the near-black surface. He’s thrilled by that sensation, waking something that so often sleeps in his being-- desire.

He does these things for Vox--but he is not innocent in the transaction. Vox knows this. He knows what his electric touch and monstrous static form does, what his vulnerability and muddled cocktail of fear-anticipation-longing do to his beloved rival. Alastor craves it, an opposing attraction to Vox’s desire for Alastor’s power and danger so close to his skin, the singular way in which Alastor makes him feel. He needs that reminder--needs to remember he’s more than just his mechanical system--that he is organic and more than just spare parts and wire and current.

Clothes peeled away and their bodies mirrored in position, Vox is full of feeling with Alastor over him. That animal of Alastor’s desire for flesh and blood and surrender mutates into a rare form of arousal, twin beasts manifested in the drag of hands along static-black flesh. When they are together, on other nights, it is often Vox who moves Alastor. On a midnight like tonight, it is Alastor who moves Vox.

Sparks sheer off Vox’s thighs under Alastor’s touch, part under pressure. Fangs glitter over Vox’s static, luring the television demon to lift his chin in supplication, in request . Alastor answers with a kiss, rewards him with smoldering passion for his sweet surrender. Fangs sink into static, but their only reward is a bitter singe, a shock that makes Alastor’s nose wrinkle and his fur stand on end--that delicious twinge of pain that electrifies Alastor’s nerves and intensifies every touch.

Fangs seek out the more pliant flesh of his throat, and there is the real reward. The cloying, copper tang of Vox’s blackish, brackish blood spills over his tongue. Vox feels the bite and the heat, the sting and his pulse. He can feel his system--his circulatory system, not the current and processes and wires he was so sure he was made of. He moans, wounded but healed by the revelation that there is something more to him than just machine.

Vox’s pain-pleasure song fuels Alastor. He marks his prey with teeth and claws, not to maim, but to bond their natures together. By the time he drags his tongue over Vox’s trembling belly, his mouth is a bloodied smear. The carnal sight, the singe and burn of his flesh opened to take in air, to let out blood, only intensifies Vox’s deepest desire for Alastor.

“ Please… ” Vox whispers. His current is so entwined with Alastor’s frequency that he can feel the heat of his body, their fields so in sync that he can smell him--a sense he was normally denied, but manufactured by the syncopation of their natures--can smell the blood mixed with the musk of Alastor’s arousal.

Alastor feels that whisper brush against him like a breeze, so thick and dark with static, more than he hears it over the loud hum of his own radio frequency. Vox need not beg--not tonight--but it spurs Alastors on to take him in his mouth, to feel that vulnerable organ at his mercy.

Vox might feel like he was going to short-circuit--but not tonight. Tonight he is too much blood and flesh to short-circuit. The pain grounds him and makes him feel real. The heat of Alastor’s mouth is more real than real, consuming him in a forbidden way for both the touch-starved and the cannibal-hungry. His moans surpass the static ruin of his voice, but he doesn’t hear it. Only Alastor is audience to the way Vox’s voice comes so organic in the throes of his most vulnerable desire, when he forgets that he is part machine.

Alastor feasts without devouring, walks that razor’s edge. Only Vox’s humming, crackling, blood and electric flesh keeps him so lucid. That, and his rarest of desire: to keep Vox. One day they might be destroyed--but it would be together.

Vox is a trembling puppet in Alastor’s hands, moved easily onto his stomach, a marionette with strings cut and lashed to Alastor’s fingers, drawn up on his knees with his bloodied throat held from behind. Not a threat, but a promise: I’ve got you. Vox’s spine bows, his frame heavy with trust in Alastor’s deadly hands.

When Alastor enters him, it’s rough but smooth. Vox anticipates it--feels it like a spectral premonition in their fused fields seconds before it happens. It’s harsh-- as was Alastor’s way--but effortless --as Vox’s body seeks to receive it. He feels so full, so real.

The room is filled with sound; harsh feedback and shrieking static, moans rent with the growl of signal noise, and the crystal-clear cry from Vox’s vocals. The whole of Hell might as well have been filled with noise as far as Vox was concerned. Alastor moves inside him and the whole world moves with him, suspended in his vice-like grip, powerless.

Alastor has been inside Vox many times throughout their storied history. Plunged to the hilt inside him like this, yes, but also knuckle-deep in his trachea, wrist-deep in his body cavity, shadows slithering around his organs. The satisfaction is almost the same. But with violence, he lacked that delicious feedback--the squeeze of Vox’s body so tight around part of his own.

Time is running out--but stretches on into infinity in this wordless embrace, sheathed and owned and held. Ripped asunder physically and mentally. The dissolution of psyche is not limited to one or the other, but both in this desperate attempt to reclaim some semblance of unbridled emotion and sensation, however it might come.

When the tense thread of climax is finally cut, they’re both stripped to their base elements. Alastor is pure animal, shredding ribbons across Vox’s throat, multiplying the bands of silvered scars over his hip, sinking teeth into his shoulder hot with breath and a visceral promise: I’m here. I’m here.

Vox’s very static shudders and smears above his shoulders, flickering a dying light--but this is a little death, one he is grateful for before the Big One. His vocals pour shredded signal noise cut through by pure vox-- the voice he wouldn’t believe was his even if he could hear it over the acceleration of circuits and precious pulse.

Vox sobs when it’s over, drops to his elbows, bloodied and burning and delirious in ecstasy. Alastor looms over him, dark and heaving, eyes blown wide and glowing, shadows pulsating behind him, his antlers a deadly crown. As Vox revels in the sensation of breathing, Alastor draws his own bloodied hands over his mouth, feels the slick dripping down his chin, wet on his hands. The field between them trembles and throbs, oscillates so violently they almost lose sync. That, too, is a dizzying rush almost like orgasm.

Finally, Vox rolls onto his back weakly, his legs tangled limply to the side with Alastor’s. He reaches up wordlessly, but breathing hot--the opposite of his usual mode of operation--and pulls his ‘tormentor’ to himself by the back of his neck. Alastor growls an empty threat, meets Vox’s mouth bloody but sated, softened through that current wearing him down. 

So melded together, Vox can taste his blood on Alastor’s tongue. He shivers, and Alastor’s sure hands are there to hold him. He trembles, and Alastor’s steady frame is there to still him.

Alastor lays his weight on Vox and feels that soothing rumble of low-level current like a caress over his own sharpened edges. He breathes Vox in, breathes him out, and wraps his arms around his bitten and scraped shoulders. They melt together, condense into a thick, insulated, unified signal. Alastor lays his cheek on Vox’s chest, eyes closed.

“... I don’t want to go…” Vox whispers.

“It’s nearly midnight…” Alastor rumbles quietly.

“I don’t want to go,” Vox says more urgently.

“Best say your goodbyes…”

“Alastor!” Vox protests, his voice thick with real anguish.

Alastor smirks to himself. Old habits die hard. He lifts his head slowly, looking deep into Vox’s static ruin of a face, scarlet eyes betraying his fondness--for teasing Vox, even at his weakest moment; for Vox, full stop.

“Do you feel that…?” Alastor asks quietly.

“... What?”

Alastor’s hand drags over Vox’s chest pebbled with dried blood. “Your heart beating…”

“Yes.”

“Your blood pumping?”

“... Yes,” Vox says more calmly.

“Your lungs breathing?”

“... Yes,” Vox sighs, his chest slowly compressing. His next breath comes easier.

“Then, say goodnight.” Alastor kisses his nigh-formless lips. “And I’ll see to the rest.”

“You’ll stay until sunrise…?”

Alastor sighs softly, runs a stained hand over Vox’s static-glow skull. “ Yes, ” he says with great patience borne of love. “You’ll go to sleep… and when you wake up, I will be the first thing you see.” It’s like this every time. No matter how organic he makes Vox feel, the fear cannot be wholly wiped away.

“... Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Vox.” No matter how organic he makes Vox feel, Alastor’s fear cannot be wholly wiped away.

He slides his hand along the back of Vox’s neck, strokes the notches of his spine. He caresses slowly toward the large chip fused between his shoulder blades. Tendrils of shadow extend from the veins of his wrist, run like ice down Vox’s spine. The button is small--just a pin-prick--and recessed within the chip. When he presses it, the lights go out.

Then the emergency generators kick in. The lights flicker back on. But Vox is gone.

Not gone for good--only for now. The city runs on an alternate power grid, and the televisions broadcast reruns.

Any machine has to be restarted every now and then.

Alastor doesn’t move. He looks at the empty pillow where Vox’s static-formed head had been. Gone now, while he’s powered down. But the body below… keeps breathing. His freshly cut skin keeps healing--heals faster, in fact, while his machine brain is offline. Alastor slowly lays his cheek on Vox’s chest and listens to his heartbeat.

He listens for an hour or so. Listens to it slow and even out. He feels his body cool until it’s the same temperature of Alastor’s own chilled flesh. A little warmer. Their combined heat keeps them both a bit warmer.

Eventually Alastor is satisfied that it will keep beating, sure as his own heart will. He rises and goes to the wash room full of things Vox himself couldn’t use. His frequency carries like a cartoon melody in the air, a solid, tangible string of fate linked to Vox’s offline form. As Alastor washes up, he monitors Vox’s vital signs.

He returns with the necessary oils and towels to clean Vox, and does so with precision and patience. Vox’s body moves limply in his grasp, like a dreamer, not something dead. Alastor is familiar with the weight and slack of a corpse. There’s still life yet in Vox. Such as it is.

He keeps vigil. Sometimes laying against him to feel his pulse, to listen to the quiet organic noise of his body mending itself in stasis, sometimes sitting to watch the night pass slowly over the Pentagram, holding his hand.

He thinks about how many times Vox did this alone.

He fights the fear.

“Hey, beautiful… wake up…”

Alastor doesn’t know when he dozed off and he wakes with a sudden sharp spike of garbled radio noise. He blinks bleary-eyed and finds static laying once more in that vacant depression on the pillow.

Vox chuckles. “Sleeping on the job, huh?”

Vox’s sharper, crisper voice grates on Alastor’s nerves, but comes with a wash of relief. He rubs at his eye with the heel of his palm. “You’re a terribly boring corpse, darling,” Alastor grumbles.

“Not dead yet. Well. Not fully dead.”

Alastor scratches some of the irritable sleep from his skull. Enough to say: “... Good morning.”

“Good morning, sweetheart.”