Chapter Text
“You know what?” Vox gave a humorless laugh. “Fuck Hell, fuck Heaven, and fuck all of you! As long as I wipe that smile off Alastor’s fucking face, I don’t care what happens.”
Vox couldn’t remember any of what followed, but he was still alive, as far as he could tell. Had Carmilla been bluffing about the whole explosion thing? All he knew was that he was in a dark room in V Tower, he had a splitting headache, and he couldn’t feel his body.
After a few tries, he managed to connect to the nearest surveillance camera. The servers were still down, but he could still access it manually. From this angle, he could see that he had been laid out on one of his operating tables—not with much care, might he add, stripped down to his tattered dress shirt and pants—and that his head was, in fact, not attached to his body. That would explain the lack of feeling he was currently experiencing. Moreover, a web of cracks bloomed from the corner of his screen in a pattern that looked to be a result of impact, and his antennae were still fucked from his earlier skirmish with Alastor.
Alastor. The thought of the prick was enough to send sparks dancing across his screen. Some of them managed to reach a few of the jagged wires that branched out from his severed neck, sending electrical impulses throughout his body that made it twitch unnaturally (which, uh…no, thank you).
Right, he needed to get himself repaired. Usually, he’d get one of the other Vees or his assistant to help him with shit like this. But with how difficult it had been to merely connect to the surveillance camera, he wasn’t sure he wanted to risk getting lost in the electrical grid to search for them, right now. Luckily, he spotted an old prototype drone on a counter behind him, which he’d been developing for this very predicament—repairing himself without assistance, that is, not reattaching his whole goddamn head to his body, but it was worth a shot.
Once Vox finally took remote control of the repair drone, he got to work, beginning the tedious process of soldering the wires that made up his nervous system back together. His poor signal meant his actions were a little sloppier than he would’ve preferred. Each time he tugged a little too hard on a wire, he mentally thanked himself for having the foresight to keep his body’s pain receptors offline for this part.
Eventually, he got movement back in his upper body and switched to using his hands, though he still utilized the drone’s viewpoint.
He was somewhat grateful that the Tower’s cameras were down, for that meant no one would be able to see him in such a pathetic state. People would eat that shit up. He’d be lucky if it didn’t make the news.
Oh, fuck, the news.
With a snap of his fingers, the flat screen TV mounted to the wall in front of him blinked to life, casting a pale glow across the room. Vox continued to work as Katie Killjoy’s voice emanated through its tinny, built-in speakers, recapping an undoubtedly-sanitized version of the day’s events. Nevertheless, the facts were clear: His plan had failed; He had failed.
That, in itself, was enough to raise his internal temperature, a mixture of shame and fury intertwining alongside his biomechanical innards (he made a mental note to get his vents back online, next). But it wasn’t until he heard Val’s voice that he felt something in him break, something his amateur engineering abilities couldn’t fix.
“Do I know Vox? No. I’ve never heard of him.”
What?!
Vox quickly finished redoing the final connections to his lower half, ending his state of paralysis, then pushed his head back into its rightful place. He sat up as fast as his pounding, insecurely-attached head permitted him to and reoriented himself to his own field of view. It was noticeably shittier than that of either camera he’d just used, visual snow flickering throughout, and the cracks in his screen rendered his left eye nearly useless.
Whatever. He’d fix it later. As for now, he needed to figure out what the fuck was happening with his team.
He switched the TV to the current social feeds, frantically scrolling for any footage from when he’d blacked out. He stopped as he passed a thumbnail of himself standing upon The Might of Lilith, with Velvette’s heeled boot mere inches from impaling his stomach.
His first thought was that he needed 666 News to hire whoever had edited her into the frame because it looked so realistic. Then, it started autoplaying.
He watched with increasing dread as the Velvette in the video flew into him, hurling him off of the machine so that he fell in a crumpled heap at its base. The impact looked so realistic that he reflexively brought his hands to his middle, covering where Vel’s heel would have struck.
Wait— Why was there—?
Before now, he hadn’t questioned the two oddly-small rips in his shirt, chalking it up to shrapnel from his earlier fight. He lifted his shirt to reveal two heel-shaped puncture wounds, one precisely where Velvette’s heel would’ve been and one higher up, closer to his sternum. The surrounding flesh was dark purple, a contusion covering much of his chest and stomach, which dropped—hard—as realization hit him.
The video kept going, and Vox watched in horror as Valentino pulled him up by the front of his shirt until their faces were inches apart. Whoever was filming was too far away for the mic to pick up what the moth was saying, but Val’s body language said enough: He was fucking pissed.
Seconds later, Val had the sides of Vox’s head grasped between two of his hands, and he yanked. Vox was no longer confused as to how his head came off his body, nor where the other puncture wound had come from.