Chapter Text
"Vincent! For the love of God, the maps! The pressure front isn't going to draw itself!"
The body moved before the mind had fully settled into it. It was a reflex, a phantom limb sensation of muscle memory that belonged to a life dead and buried for decades. Fingers scrambled across the cluttered surface of a drafting table, snatching up a roll of vellum and a piece of charcoal. The sensation was revoltingly tactile. There was no hum of electricity beneath the skin, no reassuring buzz of a digital network feeding information directly into his cortex. There was only the dry, scratching friction of paper against skin and the overwhelming, suffocating scent of stale cigarette smoke and floor wax.
Vox blinked.
He stood in the center of a bustling newsroom that felt less like a place of business and more like a tomb for ambition. Men in suspenders and shirtsleeves moved around, shouting over the clatter of typewriters that sounded like heavy rain on a tin roof. He looked down at his own chest. He was wearing a suit of cheap, itchy wool.
"Vincent! Are you deaf or just stupid today?"
The voice belonged to a short, spherical man with a complexion dangerously close to uncooked ham. Mr. Sterling. The name slowly surfaced from the dredge of Vox’s recovered memories. The Station Manager. A man who, in a fair world, would never have been entrusted with any authority.
“I have the maps, Mr. Sterling,” Vox said, his voice tinged with a hesitant charm, smooth yet automatic. “The pressure front… I’ve got it.”
"Then get it to the board!" Sterling barked, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief that had seen better days. "We go live in five, and if you’re staring into space like a lobotomized pigeon when the red light goes on, you’ll be forecasting the weather from the unemployment line. Move!"
Vox moved. It was like operating a machine with the calibration knocked loose. His balance was off, his steps landed too hard, as if the floor were tugging at him.
Navigating the maze of desks, a wave of vertigo washed over him so sharply he almost caught himself on the edge of a typist’s table. Yesterday, or what felt like mere moments ago, he had been in Hell.
Last thing he remembered was the white light. The searing, blinding indifference of High Heaven.
Something beyond the Seraphim. Something so vast that anger would have been far too personal an emotion. What he had felt was nothing like anything he had ever known.
“Live the life you squandered,” the voice had thrummed, cold and absolute. “Correct the path. Prove the soul is malleable.”
He had been reformatted. Rebooted. Shoved back into the casing of Vincent Whittman, a junior meteorologist and glorified errand boy for this dingy television station.
He reached the large corkboard map of the tri-state area and pinned the vellum up with practiced, steady motion. The studio lights overhead were tungsten. Hot, yellow, and buzzing at a frequency that made his teeth ache. He remembered how much he’d always hated them. He’d hated all of it: the primitive technology, the massive cameras that looked like industrial ovens and the tangles of rubber coated wires that sprawled across the floor like dead snakes. It was the stone age of broadcasting.
"Straighten your tie, Whittman, you look like a drunk," a cameraman muttered as he squeezed past, wrestling a tripod.
Vox didn't respond. He smoothed the cheap fabric of the tie, staring at his reflection in the curve of a camera lens. A pale, unremarkable face stared back. Brown hair, combed neatly to the side, and mismatched eyes that looked sharp but held no real power.
I am going to burn this entire building to the ground, he thought, the sentiment bubbling up with a comforting familiarity. In a few years, some of these people would be dead anyway. The rest forgotten. None of them would leave a mark.
Only he ever had.
The thought was soothing, a familiar anchor in a sea of disorientation. He did not act on it, not yet. He was too unsteady, too busy concentrating on the simple task of keeping this meatsack upright. He did not realize he was gripping the chalk rail of the map board until his knuckles turned white. The typists, the runners, the chainsmoking scriptwriters glanced at him with mild confusion, but nothing more.
To them, he wasn't a fallen Overlord dealing with the metaphysical horror of reincarnation. He was just Vincent, who was acting a little twitchy today. Perhaps he hadn’t had his morning coffee. Perhaps he was hungover.
"Thirty seconds to air!" someone shouted from the booth.
Vox stepped back into the shadows, his role for the moment complete. His job was to prepare the board, fetch the coffee, and disappear until the forecast segment, where he would be allowed to point at clouds for ninety seconds. The indignity of it burned in his stomach like swallowed acid. He, who had commanded the living and the dead, who had held millions’ attention in the palm of his hand, was now reduced to waiting for permission to speak about the probability of drizzle.
He watched the red "ON AIR" light flicker to life above the sound booth door. It was the only thing in the room that held any beauty. That crimson glow was a universal constant, the one bridge between the hellscape he ruled and this purgatory he inhabited. It meant live. It meant eyes were watching. Even here, in this smoky, beige nightmare, the power of the broadcast remained.
A sudden exhaustion crashed over him, spiritual and absolute. He was tasked with redemption, with "doing it right." They expected him to learn humility. They expected him to find value in the quiet, honest labor of a human life.
Vox adjusted his cuffs, feeling the ghost of static prick beneath his skin. He watched Mr. Sterling scream silently at a production assistant through the glass of the control booth, his face turning a deeper shade of violet.
Humility. Right.
Who did they think they were, imagining he could be reduced to a background character? The sheer audacity of it was almost funny.
He was not going to learn humility. He was going to conquer this decade. He would tear this primitive industry apart and rebuild it in his image, copper wire by copper wire. If they wanted him to live this life again, he would. But he would not live it small. He would play the game, climb the ladder, and squeeze this entire era until it gave him what he was owed.
And if anyone had a problem with that, they could send him back to Hell. He’d do the same thing there. Again.
He paused, the thought tangling in his mind. They would send him back to hell, right? Where else could they possibly send him? Super hell?
He looked around the studio and let out a long, wry sigh. Maybe they already had.
“Vincent!” Sterling’s voice spilled out of the booth as the door swung open during the commercial break. “Coffee! Black! And if it’s cold, you’re drinking it off the floor!”
Vox turned, a polite, rehearsed smile stretching across his face. He told himself it probably looked natural. Probably.
"Right away, sir," he said, his voice steady. "Hot and black. Just how you like it."
He walked toward the breakroom, the sound of his cheap shoes clicking against the linoleum. He was trapped in a cage of flesh, surrounded by idiots, and armed with nothing but a map of a low-pressure system moving in from the coast.
It was going to be a very long lifetime.