Chapter Text
Later, when the hotel finally quiets and Velvette is stable, Vox is left alone with his thoughts. That is when she comes back to him. Not her face, not her body, not anything solid enough to grab onto. Just her voice, drifting in like a half remembered song. Warm. Inviting. The kind of voice that promises safety without ever actually saying the word. It curls around his mind and pulls at something loose, something badly anchored, and the memory does not arrive gently. It snaps into place.
A bar. He thinks. No, not recently. Longer ago than that. Decades, maybe. Thirty years, give or take, back when everything still felt provisional, unfinished, when he was still learning how to exist without immediately being consumed by it. The lighting is low but he cannot remember the colour. The air is thick with smoke and something sharper, ambition maybe, or desperation. He remembers sitting at the counter with a drink he did not really want, staring at his reflection in the glass like it might answer him back. He remembers that it was his first time being in a public place in years. He thinks it was.
There is a woman beside him. He is sure of that much. Dark hair, he thinks. A hat, maybe. The details slide when he reaches for them, like his mind refuses to render her properly. Her outline stays, though. The way she occupies space like she belongs there. Like the bar was built around her instead of the other way round. Like she has been waiting, specifically for him, even if he does not remember why that feels true.
She speaks like she knows him. “You don’t have to keep shrinking yourself,” she says, and the voice is smooth, intimate without being overt, the kind that slips past defences before you notice they were there. He remembers his shoulders easing without permission, remembers how his body reacted before his brain did.
“All of this,” she continues, gesturing vaguely. He cannot remember what she gestures at. The bar, maybe. Hell itself. The whole grinding mess of becoming something in a place that eats people alive. The concept stays even if the image does not. “It could be better. You could be better. You could be free.” The word hits harder than the rest. Free. It lands somewhere deep and quiet and dangerous.
“You wouldn’t have to hide anymore,” she tells him. “Not what you want. Not what you are.” He remembers turning toward her then, heart kicking hard in his chest, something hopeful and reckless blooming all at once. He remembers thinking that maybe this was it. Maybe this was the moment things stopped hurting quite so much. Maybe someone finally saw him.
And then the memory just ends. Like someone reached in and cleanly sliced away whatever came next, leaving only the shape of it behind.
Vox opens his eyes with a sharp breath, fingers digging into the fabric beneath him. His pulse is racing, static buzzing low and angry under his skin. The bar from the other week overlays the memory too neatly for comfort.
Alastor is in an excellent mood.
It is almost amusing, really, how neatly things have resolved themselves. A deal, at last. A proper one. Signed, sealed, binding in all the ways that actually matter. Vincent owes him. After decades of circling each other like ghosts in the same ruined house, after all the posturing and rivalry and stubborn refusal to name what they were doing, there is finally a structure again. A hierarchy. Alastor hums to himself, fingers laced together, smile fixed and effortless. This is how things are meant to work.
A favour is such a gentle word for it. So polite. So civilised. It is not control, he tells himself. It is not ownership. It is simply a restoration of balance. Vincent drifted. Vincent broke the pattern. Vincent forgot his place in the arrangement they once had, and now Alastor has been handed the perfect mechanism to correct that deviation without ever having to admit he wants anything at all. He does not want Vincent trapped. He just wants him close again. Attentive again. Looking at him the way he used to.
Because clearly this is what the problem has always been. Not that Vincent is changing, or fracturing, or losing pieces of himself. That is melodrama. The real issue is distance. Lack of grounding. Too much time alone in his own head, unobserved, unanchored. Alastor can fix that. Alastor has always been very good at fixing Vincent, in the ways that matter. All he has to do is step back into the role. Reassert presence. Give him something familiar to orbit.
So he does.
He appears in Vincent’s space without ceremony, because familiarity does not require theatrics. The room hums faintly with static, with unfinished thoughts, with the particular air that always seems to cling to Vincent when he is spiralling. Alastor smiles, warm and confident and entirely convinced of his own narrative. “I am here for my favour,” he says lightly. “I want us to start again.”
Vox turns slowly, like the motion has to travel through fog before it reaches his body. His eyes focus, unfocus, then settle on Alastor with a faint frown, as if Alastor is not a person so much as a visual artefact. “Start… what,” he asks, and his voice is flat in that distant, wrong way that has been happening more and more lately.
Alastor does not notice the wrongness for what it is. He hears hesitation and assumes resistance. He hears confusion and assumes denial. “Do not be coy, mon cher,” he replies smoothly, stepping closer, voice dropping into that old familiar register. “You know exactly what I mean. We had a dynamic once. A rather effective one, if I recall. I am merely… invoking it.”
Vox just stares at him. With that hollow, glassy focus of someone trying very hard to find an answer for what's in front of them. And Alastor, still smiling, still certain, still convinced this is just another phase of Vincent’s theatrics, decides that maybe control is best for Vincent. Perhaps he can survive without someone else pulling the strings.
“What, like… friends again?” Vox asks, and there is something tentative in it, not hopeful exactly, just uncertain, like he is testing a word he has not used in a long time.
Alastor’s smile widens at once, as he answers, “I suppose,” in that airy, dismissive tone that pretends this is all very casual, “I merely mean I want you by my side once more. It is what I want for my favour,” and he says it like a joke, like a whim, like it is not the most loaded sentence he could possibly have chosen.
Vox sneers despite himself, the expression sharp and automatic, because agreeing tastes wrong even if he knows he has no real choice, because rules are rules and deals are deals and he is the one who shook hands with the man. And even if he wants to pretend otherwise Alastor did help save Velvette, even if “help” in Alastor’s case meant siccing a thrall on the problem and calling it heroism.
So he exhales through his teeth and nods once, stiff and resentful, and Alastor’s eyes light up immediately as he says, far too cheerfully, “Wonderful, why don’t we start by taking a little trip. I am sure Rosie would love to see us next to each other once more!” and the name hits Vox a second too late, because Rosie was once close to him too, back when thirty years of the future was his to look forward to. However he decides it is not really his fault he did not keep that friendship alive if for him those years don’t count at all.
By the time they reach the door, the hotel is stirring again, quiet footsteps in the hall, the low hum of morning routines starting up. Charlie passes them on her way down the corridor, pauses when she clocks the tension in Vox’s posture and Alastor’s far too pleased smile. “Everything okay?” she asks gently, eyes flicking between them.
Vox straightens almost automatically, pastes on something that looks like a smile. “Yeah,” he says, a little too quick. “It’s fine. We just… decided to try being amicable again.” The word tastes strange in his mouth, but he says it anyway.
Alastor beams. “Indeed,” he adds smoothly, one hand folding behind his back. “Vincent decided it was best to attach himself to me once more, isn’t that right, darling.”
The endearment lands like a deliberate provocation, and before Vox can correct him or Charlie can question it, Alastor continues brightly, “In any case, we shall be taking a little trip. Do not wait up.” He tips an imaginary hat and guides Vox toward the exit like this is all perfectly normal.
The door shuts behind them with a soft click, and the noise of the hotel fades into something distant and unreal. They walk side by side, close enough that Vox can feel the static hum of Alastor’s presence brushing against his senses. All he can think about is how wrong this feels. How easily the dynamic has snapped back into something old and crooked.
It is unfair, he thinks, bitterly. Unfair that Alastor knows now. Knows about the feelings, the ones Vox barely remembers owning, the ones that still technically belong to him even if they feel like they happened to someone else. Unfair that a deal has turned something fragile into leverage.
He keeps his eyes forward, jaw tight, trying not to spiral into the familiar fog, when Alastor speaks again, tone casual in a way that makes Vox’s stomach drop. “You know,” he says lightly, “I have been meaning to ask you about that little drunken evening.” Vox’s steps falter for half a second. Alastor does not look at him. “The one where you so candidly confessed certain… sentiments.”
Vox laughs under his breath, humourless. “Jesus, you really don’t know when to leave things dead, do you.” His screen flickers faintly, static rippling along the edges. “It was nothing. I was drunk. I say a lot of shit when I’m drunk.” He tells himself he believes that. He almost does.
Alastor finally turns his head then, eyes glinting with something far too sharp to be curiosity. “Oh, I doubt that,” he replies softly. “You were quite specific, if I recall. Quite sincere. You spoke about loving me.” He says it like a neutral observation, like he is commenting on the weather. “Do you still feel that way, Vincent, or was that merely another performance?”
Vox stops walking.
The world feels briefly misaligned, like someone has shifted the camera angle on reality. He stares at the ground, at the empty street ahead, anywhere but Alastor, because there is no right answer to that question. Not when he cannot even tell where his own emotions begin or end anymore. The static at the edges of his vision thickens, reality blurring in that familiar, nauseating way, like he is watching his own life through the wrong screen.
“I don’t know,” he admits finally, voice low and strained, and then the words keep coming before he can stop them, bitter and sharp and too honest to take back. “I want to hate you. I really do. Yet I doubt I could ever fully move on.” His mouth twists into something close to a sneer. “That should mean something, right. Something poetic or tragic or whatever.”
He exhales hard, shoulders tense, like he is bracing for impact that never quite arrives. “It doesn’t matter anymore though. The feelings are just cracks in my life.”
He finally lifts his head just enough to glance at Alastor, eyes flickering with defiance. “And if I could choose, if I actually had a choice in any of this, If the heart did not want what it wanted. I would pick anyone else to fall in love with.”
The silence that follows is wrong. Alastor’s smile does not vanish, but something in it shifts, sharpens at the edges, like a blade being drawn slowly from a sheath.
“Oh, do not be like that, Vincent, I was good to you,” Alastor says lightly, the words almost indulgent, like he is humouring a sulk rather than responding to an accusation.
Vincent actually laughs at that, a short, incredulous sound that cracks out of him before he can stop it. “You are not good to anyone,” he replies, voice sharp with something that is half bitterness, half tired clarity. “You just like people who can entertain you. Lucky me that I fit the bill for so long.”
He shakes his head slowly, static rippling faintly across his screen. “But you can’t love, Alastor. You are incapable of it, and that is fine, honestly. It is who you are. I was never even mad about that part.” His smile twists, humourless. “What got me was how you acted. Not being able to reciprocate, whatever, that is one thing. But using me to entertain you. Keeping me around because I was interesting to you. That's cruel.”
“Well,” Alastor replies smoothly, tilting his head, smile never quite leaving his face, “it is Hell, darling.” The line lands like a punchline, like this is all just another moral exercise he has already solved, and Vincent’s shoulders sag a fraction at the sound of it.
“I know,” he says quietly. “That is why I blame myself more these days. It is a good reminder, really. Some things aren’t meant to be kind.”
Alastor’s eyes glint, something cold and defensive flickering beneath the charm. “I can love,” he says, voice low, almost offended. “Just not in the way the books insist on romanticising.” And the way he says it makes it clear he truly believes that, even as the space between them fills with all the ways his version of love has already done its damage.
They make it to Rosie’s before Vox can ask Alastor to elaborate on anything, the conversation cut cleanly by a shift in scenery and the sudden, overly cheerful warmth of Cannibal Town.
The air smells like sugar and iron and something floral layered over decay, and Rosie’s place looks exactly as it always does, unchanged in that way that makes Vox feel like time is a personal joke being played on him. They are ushered inside, seated neatly at a small table already set for tea, as if this meeting has been scheduled for years.
Rosie brightens the moment she sees them, hands clasping together with genuine delight before softening when her eyes settle on Vox properly.
“Oh, my dear,” she says gently, leaning in just a little, voice dropping. “I am so sorry about everything that has happened to you. Truly.”
“It’s okay,” he replies, quieter. “You had nothing to do with it.” He flicks his gaze sideways toward Alastor as he says it, sharp and pointed, a silent addendum to the sentence.
Rosie, either ignoring the look or choosing not to engage with it, pours the tea with careful grace. “Still,” she says warmly, “it is nice to see you two together in front of me again. It has been such a long time.” Her smile is soft, nostalgic, the kind reserved for memories you believe were happier than they actually were. Vox doesn’t return it. His hands rest around the teacup, unmoving.
“You know,” Rosie continues, voice lilting, “I always thought the two of you would be together forever. Side by side, till the day Hell itself freezes over.” Vox opens his mouth immediately, the word never already forming on his tongue.
“I know, dear,” Alastor cuts in smoothly, smiling at Rosie with something dangerously sincere. “And yet here we are, blessed with a second chance.” His eyes slide to Vox, gleaming. “I will not let anything stop us this time. Right, Vincent?”
Vox does not answer.
He stares down into his tea, watching the surface ripple faintly, distorted by static he cannot quite control, and lets the silence speak for him. Because whatever Alastor thinks this is, whatever narrative he is constructing around fate and second chances and eternal togetherness, Vox does not feel saved by it.
He feels cornered. And Alastor’s smile only widens, as if that quiet, aching absence of agreement is something he can simply talk over until it becomes irrelevant.
By the time they leave Rosie’s, Vincent has had enough. The polite smiles, the forced tea, the way Alastor spoke about second chances like they were a shared possession instead of something personal and fragile, it all sits wrong in his chest, building and building until it finally spills over into anger.
He stops in the street without warning, turns on Alastor so sharply the static around his screen crackles. “How dare you say we have a second chance,” he snaps. “This is my second chance. To live my afterlife. And I do not want you in it.”
Alastor barely blinks, still maddeningly calm. “Oh my, do not get so annoyed, dear.” The softness in his voice only makes it worse, like he is soothing a child instead of responding to something real, and Vincent’s hands curl into fists at his sides.
“No,” he fires back, voice rising. “You don’t get to do this. You do not get to enforce yourself back into my life and act like me loving you is just another thing we can avoid talking about.”
“I am not avoiding it,” Alastor replies smoothly, head tilting. “If anything, it would be better if you were wholly devoted to me. It would be like old times.” The words are spoken with unsettling sincerity, like this is a perfectly reasonable solution, and Vincent actually laughs, sharp and humourless.
“Fuck you, no,” he says. “I don’t want that. Never again. What do you even get out of it, huh. You had your chance. That partnership would have given you everything you wanted and you still said no.”
Something in Alastor’s expression hardens, the smile thinning at the edges. He steps closer, voice lowering into something far more dangerous. “Vincent, I get what I always want. You are everything I want.” His eyes lock onto Vox’s, unblinking. “You are mine. Mind, body, and soul. Do not tell me I don’t get another chance.”
The words hang between them, heavy and possessive and wrong in a way that makes Vox’s chest feel tight. Alastor’s smile returns, slow and sharp. “Now tell me, mon cher,” he adds softly, “who is the one being cruel.”
“You are.” Vox snaps, voice raw with it, “God, are you stupid. Is that what you want? The rest of our afterlives, one argument after another. I will never look at you the way I used to. I will never stop fighting you. I will never, ever give you me.” His screen flickers violently, static bleeding at the edges as he laughs, bitter and sharp. “You are selfish.”
Alastor’s smile twitches, just slightly, like the word has snagged on something under the surface. “Selfish,” he repeats, slowly, as if he is tasting it for the first time. The tone is light, almost amused, but his eyes stay fixed on Vox’s face, searching.
“That is a rather dramatic accusation, do you not think. Evil. Cruel. Those I can accept. But selfishness implies I am motivated by something personal.”
Vox stares at him, incredulous. “You are clearly motivated by me.”
Alastor lets out a soft hum, thoughtful. He does not deny it. Not outright. Instead he circles it, the way he always does with truths that might actually matter. “I wanted you,” he says eventually, and the words are quieter than usual, stripped of some of their theatrical polish. Not a confession, not quite. More like a controlled reveal. “In my life. Near me. Always.” He tilts his head, smile faint. “Is that truly so unforgivable?”
“Yes,” Vox says immediately, jaw tight. “Because you never wanted me. You wanted control. You wanted something that would not leave. Like I said before, a puppy.”
Alastor’s eyes narrow a fraction, something calculating flickering behind them. He could argue. He could charm. He could twist this into another game. Instead, he chooses a different move, one that feels riskier.
“I was afraid,” he says, carefully, like he is placing a piece on a board he does not fully understand. “That if I acknowledged what you were to me, if I named it, you would see it for what it was and leave. Permanently.”
The admission hangs there, incomplete, deliberately framed. Not I loved you. Not I needed you. Just enough truth to sound sincere, not enough to give Vox anything solid to hold. Alastor looks away slightly, more gesture than instinct, as if even simulated vulnerability is something that should not be sustained for too long. “So I chose silence. Distance. Superiority. Those things felt… safer.”
Vox exhales slowly, the anger draining into something heavier. “So you gutted me instead,” he says flatly, not shouting now. Just stating it.
Alastor’s smile returns, small and unreadable. “Yes,” he replies, after a beat. “I did.” But there is no flourish, no apology, no real repentance in it. Just a measured, strategic honesty, the kind that plants doubt instead of resolving it.
Because Alastor is not confessing to be absolved. He is confessing because he has realised that if he wants Vincent to stay, he cannot rely on control alone anymore. He has to make Vincent believe there was always something real underneath the cruelty, even if it is still, fundamentally, another move in the same old game.
“You know,” Vox says eventually, his voice low and steady in a way that feels more dangerous than shouting, “you do not get credit for hurting someone just because you were scared.”
The words are simple. Final like a boundary drawn too late but still drawn.
Alastor inclines his head in acknowledgment. “I am aware,” he replies smoothly, as if this is merely a point of etiquette they are clarifying.
What he does not say, what lingers thick and unspoken between them, is the other truth. The one Alastor himself has not fully untangled yet. That even now, even after admitting fragments of fear and vulnerability, there is something proprietary in the way he looks at Vox. As if love, once given, is not something that can be revoked. As if Vox’s devotion, once earned, remains his by right, regardless of what Vox wants now.
He does not voice it.
Vox does not need him to.
The problem is that this closeness, this sudden stretch of near honesty, is poisoned by that underlying belief. Alastor still thinks, deep down, that Vox’s love is something he owns. Not something Vox can take back, not something time can dissolve. A resource. A constant. A possession disguised as a memory. And Vox feels it, even if Alastor never says the words out loud.
Inside, something in Vincent twists painfully. A part of him wants to cling to the idea that Alastor is finally being truthful, that this is real, that the fear and the admissions mean something lasting. It would be easier if they did. Easier if all the damage could be reframed as tragic miscommunication instead of a pattern. He wants to believe the honesty. He almost does.
But outside, in the space where he actually has to live and breathe and make choices, he cannot accept it. Not from Alastor. Not when Alastor has never done anything without a reason, a strategy, a hidden angle. “Being honest now does not change things,” Vox says quietly. “Especially when our ‘friendship’ this time around started with a favour.”
Alastor’s smile tightens at the edges, barely perceptible. Because Vox is right, and they both know it. There is no clean slate here. No innocent restart. Every word Alastor offers, no matter how sincere it sounds, is still wrapped in leverage, in contracts and history and unbalanced power.
And that is the real cruelty of it, not that Alastor might be lying, but that even when he is telling the truth, it still feels like another move in a game Vox never agreed to keep playing.
“So what,” Alastor says, and the weight in his voice is new, unfamiliar, enough that it actually makes Vincent flinch, “we can never build something.” The words are not sharp. They are heavy, pressing down on the space between them like a hand on a throat.
Vincent swallows. “I am saying you could never build something real,” he replies, and it comes out steadier than he feels. “You only know how to keep things that you think belong to you.”
Alastor’s eyes narrow, just a fraction. “Then give me a chance,” he says quietly. “Just one.” For a split second, Vincent almost believes it. The idea of it aches in his chest, tempting and dangerous, and that is exactly why he shakes his head.
“I need to go,” he says, suddenly, urgently. “I cannot do this.” Alastor steps closer. “Go where. You have nowhere but the hotel.”
Vincent laughs under his breath, breathless and tired. “Whatever,” he mutters. “I just need to do something. Away from you.” And he turns before Alastor can say anything else, because if he stays another second he might actually give him that chance, and that is the one thing he knows would break him for good.
Vincent does the only thing he knows will make the noise stop. The only thing that still feels real when everything else slips through his fingers. He leaves the walkway, leaves Alastor’s voice echoing in his head, and lets instinct take over. Just movement and impulse and the need to do something, anything, that reminds him he is still dangerous, still in control of his own body, his own choices.
It is not pretty. It is messy and frantic and driven by a kind of hollow fury that has nowhere else to go. He tears through the streets, through sinners who barely register as people in his head anymore, through threats that dissolve the moment he touches them. There is no satisfaction in it, not really.
By the time it ends, he is sitting on the pavement, breath coming too fast, screen flickering, clothes soaked through with blood. The city hums around him like nothing happened. Like this is just another night in Hell. His hands are shaking, not from adrenaline, but from the sudden, crushing quiet inside his own head.
And for the first time since he left, he is not thinking about Alastor’s voice, or his smile, or his words. He is thinking about himself. About how empty it all felt. About how even this, even violence, even power, is starting to feel like a costume he puts on to remember who he is supposed to be.
And the worst part is realising that it worked, just enough to keep him alive, but not enough to make him feel whole.