Chapter Text
♕
In the weeks following the disastrous party, Lucifer found a task to put his latest bout of mania towards that would actually benefit Hell and his daughter as opposed to only the fickle ministrations of his soul. He had started by working with the other Sins to tear down the barriers between Pride and the rest of the Rings, but ultimately the only agreement that could be made at this juncture was Sinners being able to pass through in the company of one of the royal family to ease the denizens of the other Rings into the idea. That worked out well, in the end. He only needed Alastor and Vox to be able to pass through at his side when he went to Envy, as every bit of information in Hell lay within Envy’s server farms. Levi had taken it upon himself to hoard knowledge like the dragon he resembled. Even the Archivist Goetia Purson made his home in Envy for that reason.
Vox could work technology better than anyone and Alastor knew what they were looking for in a roundabout way, having spent the most time with Eve. That left Lucifer to visit Purson’s estate while the two Sinners wandered about in Envy unsupervised but hopefully- and he knew what an ask this was- on their best behavior. At least Levi’s infestor and possessor demons were more familiar with humans, albeit living ones. They were the least likely to make it weird and trigger either of the two Sinners’ tempers... Maybe. Actually, the infestors were the worst type of demons to trust not to make things weird.
He pushed all the worry about those two and what they could do to the side to focus on the task at hand here in the Archivist’s sanctum. Purson was a tall, pelican-like Goetia who pulled tomes out of his enormous beak and deposited them in front of Lucifer. Not a one of them was the slightest bit damp when he prodded them experimentally, which was nice, if not a bit weird. Pocket dimension beak. Boy, the Hellborn really went off when they began to evolve true, physical forms in the Light.
“Obviously, we didn’t keep records in the Dark Times,” Purson shrugged in his strange, lilting accent. “Everything we have is based on the time that came after. Even I cannot recall great swathes of information from before we had form.”
Lucifer stuck his tongue in his cheek to keep from laughing nervously. The way people spoke about the time before he came to Hell and the time after made him so incredibly uncomfortable, especially with how impersonal they made it to his face, as if people didn’t want to reconcile the idea that the hero who had brought Hell into a time of enlightenment (on accident, mind you) was the same anxiety-ridden carnie loser who stayed in his ivory tower and contributed very little since.
“Thanks, Purson,” he said, and then paused. “Heh. Your name sounds funny when you say it out loud like that. Kinda like I’m calling you person, like super rude and informal. Is there a better way to refer to you?” He wheezed. “Like… Archivist Purson? No, no, nope. That sounds worse. Archivist Person, like who’s this archivist? I dunno! He’s just a person.”
Purson blinked and stared at him with all the dismissiveness a pelican could manage- and really, when something as weird-looking as a pelican looks at you like you’re a complete schmuck, you’re really and truly a lost cause. “I will be in the drawing room if you require further assistance, your majesty.”
He opened a portal to get out of the library faster instead of just taking the door, which said a lot. Lucifer pursed his lips and frowned at the fading, scintillating motes of neon purple light. “It wasn’t that bad of a joke,” he snapped at the spot, paused, and then mumbled, “Oh who am I kidding? It sucked.”
He knotted his fists in his hair, placed his elbows on the table, and began to scan the tomes, page after page of information he already knew because he had been there to shape it, and not a fucking word about the Root. Of course not. Heaven had been the architects of whatever the hell that was, having created the Tree that originally sealed it to begin with. An hour into this and his attention was flagging, his mania depleted on account of very little results.
He needed to go to the Embassy, try to demand an audience with Sera, but his one attempt to actually put on his big boy pants and knock on the door was met with silence. He’d scouted the entire place since it wasn’t warded against his entrance and found it completely deserted. And any attempt to contact Heaven had been left spectacularly on read.
Heaven was afraid of something and treating Hell like a quarantine zone because of it. It rankled him, knowing that they were intentionally keeping him and his family in the dark, exposed to something so dangerous and unknowable.
“Well, Lucy,” he muttered to himself, “if you had paid attention to the shit Michael and Gabriel were always spouting off, maybe you wouldn’t be fucked right now!” He laughed, high and miserable and faceplanted into the tome he hadn’t been properly reading for the last five minutes.
“You know, if you want to talk to someone, you can always call me, Duckie. I know you don’t always consider yourself good company.”
Lucifer’s head shot up to gaze upon the visage of his lovely wife. Every day she walked into a room was a new opportunity to feel emotions he’d thought were dead and gone. He had forgotten she’d come with them on this outing, so absorbed in a task that had utterly failed him.
“Heyyy, Lily,” he drawled, casually, trying to pretend like he was the very model of a researcher and not a failure. “How’s Fred and Beth?”
While Vox and Alastor went off to deal with the secrets stored in the myriad of servers and whispers across Hell’s infrastructure, Lilith had gone to pay a visit to the Von Eldritch family- something that Lucifer himself hadn’t done in years. Fuck, he was bad at keeping up with things. Leave it to Lilith to be gone for seven years and immediately pick up the same pieces that he had been fumbling in her absence.
“Absolutely beside themselves that you haven’t visited or called, but I smoothed it over.” She slid into the seat across from him and pulled one of the tomes towards her. He’d already checked that one, but given how his eyes were glazing over, he couldn’t be certain he hadn’t missed something and therefore kept his fool mouth shut. “It got me thinking, though.”
“Oh?” He pushed his own tome aside, eager for a distraction. “What about?”
“We’re…” She trailed off, sorting through the words to find the right ones and sighing over the ones she ended up choosing, “out of touch.”
“Whaaaat?” Lucifer leaned back, his chair scraping against the hardwood floor with an agonizing screech that set his teeth on edge and made him glance around, expecting glowers even though he knew there wasn’t anyone else in Purson’s library. “We’re not… We’re cool. We’re hip… We’re…” He paused for a beat and slumped. “Yeah, we’re out of touch. You were in a staff for seven years, though. You have an excuse. I… I just… Uh.” He made a helpless gesture.
“You’ve been working very hard on not retreating back again and with Vox, we’ve made more public appearances than we have in ages, but… that’s as King and Queen of Hell. We used to have fun, Lucifer. We used to be right there in the thick of things.”
“When we were in the circus, Lil’,” Lucifer cringed. “And then more Sinners started showing up and the Exterminations and Charlie being born… and now we have this.” He waved a hand at the tomes. “We’ve been chasing shadows for weeks! Not even Alastor can get back to Eve’s demesne. There’s no actual mention of the Root in any Hell lore and Purson’s been keeping it since the beginning.” All of that, he said in one singular breath.
“And Heaven knows something,” he added, breath coming out in panting wheezes as his lungs fought to keep up with his words. “And I can’t talk to them.”
“If you could, do you think they’d help?” Lilith’s smoky amethyst eyes turned dark like stormclouds passing over the sun. There were few things that could get her riled like Heaven did.
He reached over to touch her hand. “Lily, no… We talked about this. It’s why… You know.” He winced when she pulled her hand away. “I’m sorry. I- I’m not blaming you. They just wouldn’t listen when I told them you weren’t planning to storm the Gates, and it just… ” He waved his hands helplessly.
“I don’t know why they’re so full of themselves to think I would come crawling back,” she scowled. “I don’t want their Paradise and I never have. They gave me Eden as a cage and expected me to obey. Here I have everything I want.” She tentatively reached out to entwine their fingers- forgiveness, easily given. Understanding where they used to fight about this all the time. The world was different now and they had Charlie to thank for it. “I just… want us to be able to keep it, and we can’t do that if we’re running ourselves ragged. If you don’t want Charlie to suspect we’re hiding something from her…”
“…we have to take care of ourselves, yeah. I know.”
“Because if she asks, we both know you’ll fold like a cheap card table.” She booped him on the nose.
“Exactly,” Lucifer laughed, nervously. “Fine. What do you have in mind? Ozzie’s? I know we just went, but it was with Charlie and Vaggie. We could go ourselves.” He leaned over the table a bit, waggling his eyebrows. “Get a private room.”
“I don’t think the solution to being out of touch is to go hide in another Ring.” Lilith planted one hand on her cheek, her other hand occupied with her thumb idly stroking the side of his left hand. “I think the solution to our problem is learning how to live the way the Sinners do. That was the idea behind the deal you and Charlie made with Heaven, wasn’t it?”
“For all the good it did.” Another wave of his free hand to indicate the utter failure of the experiment and where it had led them.
“It did do good, Duckie,” she insisted. “You understand Sinners now. You don’t see them as villainous, murdering scumbags anymore.”
“Not all of them, just… most of them.” He cracked a smile at his own joke and she just raised an eyebrow.
“I think you even like some of them.” Lilith steepled her fingers under her chin. “Which is why tomorrow night, we’re going to go out with them.”
“Oh who? Rosie?” He paused. “Double date with Carmilla and Zestial? I bet they could class up a place.” He laughed nervously as Lilith continued to stare at him, both of them knowing exactly who she was talking about and just waiting for him to admit it.
Okay, playing dumb wasn’t working. He took another deep breath and just launched into his pitch… Or his counter-pitch, as it were. “Just because we’re in a secret cabal-“ he managed to make the words sound sparkly and important with only jazz hands, “-together doesn’t mean we need to hang out! There’s no need for us to spend more time than we already do with them. We pretty much live in their pockets as is! We just made them the first Sinners outside of Pride! That's kind of a big deal given they are not exactly the best examples of Sinnerkind here.”
“Mmhmm,” Lilith nodded, fingers still steepled, smile unhidden because nothing could hide something that radiant. All those clouds had passed and there was only his beautiful wife who was, admittedly, kind of a troll. “And you love it.”
“I do not! When have you ever seen the three of us being all… Chummy.” He blanched. Wait. Had they been chummy? Had something triggered this? Was he being obvious about… certain things he didn’t want to bring up in Envy where Levi’s bugs might pick it up and use it for blackmail fodder later? Was Purson turning up the heat in here? He tugged on his collar. “We fight all the time.”
“I know. It’s funny.” Lilith closed the tome and pushed it aside. She then proceeded to do the same to Lucifer’s. “The point is that we’ve been at this for weeks. We need a break and so do they. If we’re in this together, then we need to be in it together through it all- even the fun parts.”
“And this has nothing to do with you wanting Alastor to stop looking at you like you skinned his cat?” Lucifer raised a brow, quick to deflect, but Lilith only shrugged.
“Maybe a little.”
Well, that settled it. If this was something Lilith wanted, then she would have it, Lucifer’s own complex feelings be damned. Honestly, he was glad to be able to feel complex emotions that weren’t crippling depression or mania, and maybe that was all it was or maybe he was simply incapable of not associating ‘good feelings’ (again, complex though they may be) with some form of love. It was the angel in him. They were built to love in simple terms, but in Hell, the scope of human emotion ran the full gamut in spectrums that Heaven was terrified by. Sinners were a touchy subject, only recently becoming a topic he could finally start to be sympathetic to, but he based an entire circus around human vice given form and function as leaders of Hell, so to say he had always been iffy on the subject of humanity would be a lie. He did love humans. He had wanted them to have freedom, as naive as he was about the whole process and how many consequences had cropped up because of it. He married one and had a family with her he wanted to keep more than anything. It was everything else that got overwhelming and messy.
And now… Now he had these two fuckers who annoyed him and made him laugh and were, for their own purposes, helping him, but would probably betray him one day, and it was so exciting dancing around that possibility. Why not add more actual, literal dancing to it? Why not lean into the feeling and see where it takes them? Nowhere far, probably, but after barely venturing farther than his own palace for years, it was far enough.
“They do have their fingers on pulses that we don’t. It would help the, uh… out of touch parts.” He made a wobbly gesture with his hand. “What the heck? Given those two, they’ll probably have killed each other while we've been out anyway and it’s a moot point, right?”
♝
Nothing could dampen Vox’s mood.
Absolutely nothing.
Not the unease seeping from the jealous possessor and infestor demons swaggering down the illuminated blue streets between the floating platforms above Envy’s tumultuous sea that rocked like barely tethered ships, threatening to send someone without their sea legs spilling over the edge. Not the camera flashes turning him into the spectacle instead of the emcee as gossip rags captured his image to plaster across their web pages with strongly worded rants about Sinners outside of Pride. Definitely not the miserable, irritated ungulate demon balancing on the toes of his boots and leaning heavily on his cane to keep from being one of the idiots who ended up in the drink. Honestly, that last one was a perk. It was a rare thing indeed to catch Alastor in a state of anything other than perfect control, but here he was outside of his element. This place was for Vox and Vox alone.
You could tell, see, because it was all blue and sleek and shiny and ocean-themed- and, more importantly, high tech as fuck. He considered himself on top of things in Pride, but all of his dreams of getting to Envy and being revered as a god among fish people came to a screeching halt when he saw exactly what Leviathan had going here. ‘Something something there’s always a bigger fish’- which, incidentally, was the motto of Leviathan’s tech corporation that he ran out of a huge, sprawling building on the center platform that doubled as a palace. This should have gutted him and left him for scrap, but it only enticed him further, eager to prove his mettle. He’d found himself in a duel of wits against Leviathan’s firewalls and ripped them apart after an hour with a lot of clever tweaking, earning him the interest of the serpent, himself- without Lucifer needing to do the whole introduction song and dance first. After that, it had been smooth sailing to ride the twisting algorithms and networks to seek out what he was supposed to be looking for. That he’d found nothing at all hadn’t bothered him in the slightest. He’d gotten enough to shove into his own data banks like a chipmunk storing nuts for a long winter.
Conversely, Alastor had been living in the radio waves, desperately hunting for a signal that didn’t offend him and getting bombarded with noise on every level. Podcasts, advertisements, and a steady stream of dubstep and techno cluttered up his usual proving grounds and left him tripping his way towards absolutely nothing. By the time Vox came out of his trance, Alastor was sitting in an overstuffed chair in the Wi-Fi Lounge they had set up shop in to work with his ears pinned back and his teeth grinding together.
And Vox had been delighted by that half-hidden look of defeat in him. He’d smiled smugly, quipped “Jealous?” at him and no, not even the tentacle that whipped out of a patch of shadow and slapped him so hard that his entire head spun 360 degrees could have dampened his mood.
That brought them to now, walking back to the platform full of estate houses where the Goetia made their homes. His intent was to check in on Focalor to see if distance from the whole sordid party affair might make her more inclined to dish deets about the other two likely suspects for their missing third collaborator or else give herself away and then rejoin Lucifer at the Archive, but that all depended on Alastor not testing his seemingly impervious good mood by doing something wild and getting them thrown into the Hellevator and sent right back to Pride.
“Be cool,” he hissed as stepped onto one of the smaller platforms that acted as a rest area in between the larger ones, breaking up the monotony of the foot paths. It was full of open air kiosks for gaming and places for demons to sit and stream to their heart’s content. Nearly every single person was playing something out loud and without the benefit of headphones, turning the space into a torrent of meaningless noise. If Vox and Alastor wanted to, they could pick out each and every individual knot and untie it, making it sensible, if not palatable, but that was too much work for people just passing through.
“Deplorable conduct!” Alastor scoffed as he glowered at a young possessor demon glued to his phone screen, thumb rapidly flying over video after video on some Leviathan-branded app. “They could all at least be enjoying the same program! Develop a sense of community!”
“Right, yeah, I forgot.” Vox rolled his eyes. “The Radio Demon is a strong advocate for community.”
“You remember what it used to be like.” They stepped off the intermediary platform and back onto the footpath. Overhead, vehicles wound their way between islands on tangles of lengthy, curvy roads that looked like waterslides, trundling along with beeps and honks and adding more noise pollution to a space already saturated with it. “People gathering around the radio-“
“- or the TV,” Vox cut in, even if television hadn’t quite gotten to that point before his untimely death. If anything, the lack of a TV in every home at the time of his accident only proved Al’s point. He remembered when one of his buddies first got a set and he’d fallen in love with that black and white picture, eyes wide as he perched practically on the edge of the couch. When asked after the program if he wanted one of those puppies for himself, he’d laughed and said, “No, I wanna be on it.”
Yeah, those were good times. So maybe Alastor had a point. Broken clocks and whatever. He shoved his hands in his pocket and rolled his shoulders, working out the kinks from that impromptu Exorcist recreation courtesy of Alastor’s tentacles, and ceded his point.
Alastor was clearly not done with his rant, even with the silent agreement. “Now everyone is glued to those insipid devices at all hours! Look at them!” He tapped a possessor demon coming from the opposite direction- and currently so glued to her phone as she was walking that she was drooling a line of electric blue spittle onto her glitter-dusted bottom lip- on the head with his staff and watched her react with a vague swat about six seconds too late, as if she was merely buzzed by a fly and not actually struck by a metal object.
And Leviathan didn’t even use hypnotism. Envy was just like that. Vox had to fight not to start drooling himself. “Yeah, it’s great, huh? This place would be ripe for the taking.”
“Planning on challenging a Sin for his territory, are you?” Alastor spun his cane and began to walk faster, eager to get off the road and away from all the bright lights and noise if the fur around his ears puffing up was any indication. Hell, that was… Kinda cute, actually.
“Like I’d divulge my twelve-step plan to you,” Vox scoffed, pulling one hand out of his pocket to examine his silicon-capped talons. “Unlike you, I didn’t pin all my hopes and dreams on Princess C. Sparklestar and her pointless madness.”
“And yet you’re still here. Imagine that!”
“I am a disgraced Overlord, thanks to you fuckers,” he spat, only to collect himself and plaster on his best salesman smile. “I have plenty of reasons to be here.”
Revenge being one of them- a slowburn of epic proportions, but it would come to something, eventually. Until then, he benefited being in the Morningstars’ good graces. “You’re not under Eve’s thumb anymore, which I assume was why you were playing house in that shithole of a hotel anyway. Why'd you come back?”
The six months that Alastor was in Eve’s demesne remained a mystery to all but a few and none of them were talking to Vox about it, because clearly they valued their spines. Something had brought him back and something had followed him, apparently, demanding recompense for killing Eve and that was why they were in this situation without a damn solution. When pressed about it, he pointed out that discovering what Baal and Astaroth had meant by the Root was why they were on this wild goose chase to begin with and gave no further indication of whether or not he knew more than he let on.
There was some desperate part of him that wished to be the one that Alastor confided in about that shit- there was a time when he might have been, for all that he confided in anyone about anything. It was a little bit of delusion he allowed himself when looking back at where it all went wrong.
Honestly, looking at them now- Vox thriving in this techno cyberpunk nightmare and Alastor looking sickeningly out of place in his earth tones among all the cool neon- it was easy to guess why. Despite sharing a domain, radio waves, and a sordid, complicated history, they were from two different worlds.
And rather than answer the question, Alastor was back to muttering about how many people he had to side step to avoid being shoulder-checked off the footpath. That figured. The second the conversation turned useful, the flighty bastard was off on something else. “Do you even know how much like a boomer you sound right now?”
“On the contrary, Vox, you’re closer to being a boomer than I am!” Alastor sauntered forwards, leaving him to gape fish-like at the awareness of slang that always threw him off, preventing him from yelling that they were the same age, actually (you prick). Every time he convinced himself that Alastor was out of touch and out of date, he slid a bit of modern lingo past his sensors and then skipped off while he processed it. Another possessor demon nearly ran into him and this time the Radio Demon did something about it- specifically, he tripped him so he fell over the edge with a scream that Vox recorded for archival purposes. The subsequent splash was followed by even worse screams, like someone being eaten alive by ravenous fish. Vox archived those too and then rushed to catch up with Alastor, already crossing the threshold into Goetia territory.
“Let me take point on this,” he insisted, practically dogging Alastor’s heels like a needy puppy. The whine in his tone he could do without, sneaking in while he was too distracted and he quickly adjusted his audio filters to kill it.
“Take point on what?” Alastor tapped his chin, lips pursed coquettishly in a way that both did everything and nothing for Vox. That fine line between insufferable and hot, that was the fucking Radio Bitch. “Ah right! You’re still playing detective, aren’t you? Even after we’ve done nothing but trip on our own feet this whole time, you’re determined for it to not be a dud trip.”
“It’s not a dud. I got a lot out of this.” Just… unrelated stuff, which, to be fair, was the important stuff to him, but-
“Now that you know it was only me that was ever truly in danger, and the rest of it was merely collateral to cover a mistake, it must eat at you, hmm?”
Vox sputtered, thrown off his groove again by a well-placed verbal caltrop. “Can you for once in your fucking life speak in a sentence that isn’t cryptic bullshit?”
Alastor pivoted on a garden path lined with lush electric blue and green anemone-like plants and long, reaching tree-like structures that seemed to be solely made of coral. The whole space, right down to the neon blue gravel underfoot, gave Vox the impression of an aquarium. “You want the credit for saving me, of course! It kills you that Lucifer got there first.”
Vox lost visual for a few seconds as his screen simply overheated and stopped working. A quick slap to the side got the fan working enough for vision to come back and fits and starts, but the whirring was more of a shriek, like it was fighting against sixty years worth of dust build-up. “What? You think I wanted to save your life?”
“Obviously not for altruistic reasons.” Alastor flapped a hand dismissively. “But for the thrill of saying I rescued the Radio Demon. After all, has your ego ever really recovered from my tender mercy?”
The memory of a loose chain around his neck brought Vox’s hand to his neck. His fan puttered along, slowing down as his overheated systems began to slowly come down on their own as he willed his temper to a more manageable level- one less likely to cause catastrophic system failure. “And you think that’s why I’m involved in this?”
“Well, it’s certainly no longer about Velvette.” Alastor shrugged, as if the conversation that he started was starting to bore him, and kept walking down the path, stopping to take in the flora. Here, the noise was dulled- even the Goetia and various nobility here favored their specific aesthetic of regality, maintaining Leviathan’s ocean aesthetic without ever indulging most of his tech. It still wasn’t exactly Alastor’s speed but it went a long way to putting him on the correct foot, while Vox was left tripping over his oxfords.
“When was it ever about Velvette?” He snapped upon stumbling to catch up to Alastor on the path.
“Oh? You never figured that part out?” Alastor folded his arms behind his back, his staff tapping between his shoulder blades, just barely grazing the edge of his stupid fringe. He hummed a little. “You cornered me to ask me not to hurt her! You clearly care about her, especially given she’s overstayed her welcome in the hotel for weeks now and you’ve shut down everyone who has so much as mentioned it. So when the Goetia all converged on her, specifically, I knew you were the right one to coerce into investigating!”
Fucking Alastor, always thinking ten steps ahead. Once more his temper flared, the heat in his systems rose, and his fan let out a pitiful cough like an orphan in a fucking Oscar-bait movie about to breathe its last. The only thing that saved him from a forced shut-down was the little notification from his therapy AI that simply read deflection.
Oh. Oh ho ho ho. Fascinating. He bared his pixels in a sharp grin. “Funny. You’re out here acting like I can’t stand that Lucifer rescued you when it clearly bothers you that I put in all that effort for Velvette.”
“Ah! So you did involve yourself in our little cat and mouse game out of concern for her?”
Vox flailed a hand out. “No! Because if you had just left me alone, I would have just stayed in my room watching shitty TV while people were getting murdered. You were the one who dragged me out to look at the cameras. You were the one who was acting so fucking weird I had to figure out what was going on. You-“
“- are still the object of your utmost obsession,” Alastor finished for him.
Vox stopped so abruptly that he scattered bits of loose gravel in a halo around his shoes, an even bigger shit-eating grin overtaking the grim annoyance. Oh, you fucker. I’ve got you now. “So let me get this straight- you like that I’m obsessed with you? The idea that I might have stopped actually annoys you more than the obsession, itself?”
Alastor’s ears twitched- a little tell, but a tell, nonetheless. “Perish the thought! I just don’t want you to get boring and complacent. Why if this hotel actually got its claws in you, we’d lose a very interesting monster and there’s so few of those who are any fun around here.” He flashed his teeth in a warning. Don’t press. But Vox had never met a bruise he didn’t love to dig his fingers into.
He swaggered forwards, daring to prod Alastor in the chest with one finger, despite knowing there was a very real chance it might get bitten off. “I wonder what upsets you more, old buddy of mine. The fact that I might get over you completely or the fact that I’m just as much in the King of Hell’s pocket as you are- probably moreso.” He wheezed out a half-hysterical laugh. “I mean, I have fifteen notifications on my HUD just for his medications. I take my job very seriously.”
That was last part was a lie, but the banality of middle management after being an absolute beast of a CEO meant that it required absolutely zero thought to be a good flunkie. It left processing power aplenty for scheming. Alastor had his hands in too many pies because he wanted the opportunity to say he planned it when one of them actually turned out to have a fucking plum in it. Vox, on the other hand, put his eggs in one basket and stood very, very still. He could wait. Alastor needed to keep moving. It was a strange contradiction to the animals they resembled- a deer that couldn’t stop moving and a shark that knew how to wait.
Alastor grabbed the probing finger and wrenched it away with enough force to snap it if Vox didn’t jerk away at the last second. “Don’t oversell your importance just because I gave you a compliment, Vox. You always take so much more than is polite in everything, don’t you?” He cocked his head at an eerie angle. “Don’t forget that our previous dalliances fell apart because of you. And as for Lucifer, well, if you have to brag about being his assistant, I really have been doing you a favor in coaxing that spark back into you since your embarrassing defeat at my hands.” He flicked Vox’s antenna. It gave off a little shower of dancing sparks and made his screen glitch out, which allowed Alastor enough time to vanish into the shadows of the garden and retreat with the last word and a cackle of delight.
Well, apparently there was something that could ruin his fucking day.
Speak of the devil and he appeared, apparently. Just as Vox’s therapy assistant was instructing him to take deep healing breaths before its program crashed entirely, a familiar voice piped up on the path behind him. “This again? Really? You know, two people that much alike really should get along better.” A pause. “Wait… Maybe that’s not how that works. I haven’t, uhhhh… had a lot of a friendships, actually. Heh. And, come to think of it, I think I would hate a guy who was too much like me… Yeah, never mind.”
Vox spun to face the King of Hell, the bags under his eyes more pronounced than ever and bearing the cross-eyed look of a college freshman the morning of finals after pulling a desperate all-nighter. His wife was nowhere to be seen, which was a pity. Nothing satisfied Vox’s itch for control like flirting openly with Lilith in front of Lucifer, especially when he was being particularly himself.
“Did you find anything, sir?” He asked, ducking under the barbs and babble to focus on the task at hand, because God forbid he let Alastor actually prove that his trip to Envy could be ruined with enough applied force, even if that was technically true.
Lucifer rubbed his eyes and made a wheezing, exasperated sound. “No. Did you?”
“I was just on my way to check in on Focalor, see if maybe a surprise visit might knock something loose.”
“Don’t bother,” Lucifer pursed his lips to make a pbblt sound of dismay. “Lilith and I had the same idea. She hasn’t been seen since the party.”
Okay, well, that was suspicious and definitely either pegged her as a collaborator or someone who knew too much and got punted out of the way. Hard to tell with those blue-blooded freaks. It was a good bit of information, but ultimately a dead end, like everything else. If it weren’t for all of the boons he’d claimed from being tapped into Envy’s network and the stupid little tourist thrill of getting to see Envy in all of its glory, this would have been a phenomenal waste of time. Not that he'd ever tell Alastor he was right about it being technically a dud trip.
“So that’s it then,” Vox huffed. Silence fell between them, then, broken up by the occasional shuffle of a foot over gravel or the peals of laughter from a garden party at a McMansion a few yards away- at least physically. Vox’s network was still crawling with stimuli from the frequencies being given off by the other islands, a constant stream of data that was actually starting to get irritating, even for him. No wonder Alastor was moody. He was way more easily overstimulated.
“Soooo,” Lucifer drawled to break up the silence, rocking back on his heels. “Lily and I were talking and we were all… ‘Golly, we sure have been working our butts to the bone on this whole Root thing and also we’re not as hip to Sinner jive as we once were.’”
Vox was caught somewhere between wondering if Lucifer had ever been hip to anyone’s jive in his life and turning over the fact that Lucifer used the phrase ‘hip to Sinner jive’ without a trace of irony, which caused him to miss whatever inane point he was getting to. He sighed, did an instant replay of the babbling and found a nugget of gold in all the muck of unnecessary awkward filler words.
“You’re asking me on a date?” He balked. “With you and your wife?”
Lucifer’s eyes widened in such a way that it drew immediate attention to the stress lines that had been growing in the weeks since the party. “What? No! Noooo not… Not exactly? It doesn’t have to be a date. It’s, uh… More like, uh… A-a group hang!”
Vox’s mouth dropped to the corner of his screen in an agitated grimace. “Three people is not a group hang.” It was a troika, a triad, a trio. It was… incidentally the way Vox worked best and hadn’t he been sort of working on that since his fall? Becoming such a fixture of the royal couple’s lives that he had recreated what he was used to? This could be fun, actually.
And then the other shoe dropped.
“It would be four people. Technically.” Lucifer adjusted his cufflinks, casually. “We’re inviting Alastor too.”
Once more with the pathetic groaning of a desperately overworked fan, Vox felt that surge in his internal temperature skyrocket, a burning rage threatening full shutdown in the middle of the fucking street. And then, just as quickly as it came, it cooled, because somewhere in all that mess, there was a spark of something. A way to get back at Alastor for all his little digs and prove a point and, more importantly, piss him off.
Sometimes a little revenge was necessary. Anything to get him back for spoiling his day, his livelihood, their friendship…
Vox steepled his fingers. “I’m listening.”