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In a broad sense, most sinners came into their hellish gifts in one of two ways: with a slow, trickling stream, or in a devastating strike of lightning. Alastor’s mad scramble up the hill had been the latter, years spent shaking on the grimy floors of his shitty rental apartments and laughing through choking mouthfuls of static as unchecked power surged through his limbs like an overloaded battery, struggling to expand his frail human mind beyond its natural limits and then further.
The sheer noise of existing, a thousand frequencies raking his selfhood over hot coals until he was little more than one long, wretched scream crammed into a repellent sack of meat—ah. It didn’t bear dwelling on. After all, the first time he dragged an overlord into an abandoned radio tower at the outskirts of the city and shredded their voice through the electrified grills of his teeth, everything had gone marvelously quiet, and that was that!
And once he’d gotten a taste for it—calm, that was, though meat as well—there was no looking back.
It was fun, of course, those years he spent stripping Pentagram City’s stability to its bones, and necessary too—he was hardly going to waste the opportunity he’d been given to make disrespect little more than a distant and unpleasant memory, shaking off the melancholic dregs of his earthly life like dust from his tailcoat. Enough thrummed through him like a carillonneur at his keys, a righteous song to sanctify his seizure of a second chance, and he should be double-damned if he didn’t embrace it with a brilliant smile.
No one questioned him now. Still, his strength was contingent on his control. It was easier to bear now with the innumerable favors, souls, and debts owed winding around the raw, untamed animal of his power in a criss-crossing lash of chains. Fenrir bound and a sword thrust between his jaws, lest he turn his fangs on himself.
All this delicate poetry to say that Alastor’s arrival in hell had been a challenging and physically brutal one, mitigated more easily now with an iron-clad control made possible through, well. Networking. A living system of connections to those unlucky souls under his thumb that kept him grounded, cleared the wailing static and let him think. Though not without careful focus.
In that way, he and Vox were rather alike. The both of them, world-shakers, strung up to hang by their own fickle natures.
But where instability in either direction spelled disaster for Alastor, who regrettably remained a fragile, unstable creature at heart, excess and stagnation were always opportunities for Vox’s ever-growing greed. Alastor loathed the needling envy he felt at the notion—that Vox could find freedom in the cacophony where Alastor had always drowned. The man was a maelstrom of invention, flitting so fast from one idea to the next that it occasionally made Alastor’s corpseheart quicken with excitement and dread. L’appel du vide.
It was ironic, then, that the manifestation of Vox’s abilities seemed to be taking the scenic route.
They were seated across from one another on the man’s living room carpet, cross-legged like schoolchildren in the dim, comfortable glow of warm orange lamps. Alastor had given those to him after he’d accidentally fried his own in an overzealous attempt to jumpstart the breakers with his powers after an outage, missing the mark on ‘small boost’ and landing somewhere in the realm of ‘EMP’, much to Alastor’s amusement.
Now, though: Vox was staring at him narrowly, leaning forward in concentration just enough for Alastor to feel the static electricity radiating from his convex screen in a constant, pleasant tingle. His eyes were red and round and very bright.
They were not, however, doing what they were supposed to be doing. Unless Vox had changed his objective and was now attempting crash-course telepathy.
An interesting experiment. Perhaps another time.
“May I ask what you’re trying to make me do?” Alastor inquired politely.
“Sing ‘Yankee Doodle’,” Vox said, not breaking eye contact. “Evidently it isn’t working.”
“Oh, I think I almost felt something.”
“Really?”
Alastor blinked a few times, a little enamored with the burning afterimages of Vox’s glowing features impressed onto the backs of his eyelids. “Never mind. Just a bit of a headache from how long this exercise has been dragging on.”
Vox frowned. He shuffled a bit closer, brushing his knees against Alastor’s. Any closer and he’d wind up in Alastor’s lap, like an overeager puppy. “What about now?”
The technicolor warmth of Vox’s undivided attention was a heady thing. Alastor didn’t feel like he was being hypnotized, but one could argue he was sufficiently entranced by the curious slivers of Vox’s cyan pupils, which, at this distance, quivered finely like water droplets against a sea of flat, harsh red. Truly, Vox’s unique and arresting anatomy ought to bewitch sinners of its own merit, but there was no accounting for taste down here.
Alastor stared for a few more seconds, searching his body and mind for signs of external influence, before shrugging. “Perhaps you’re doing it wrong. How did you say you managed to make it work the first time?”
Groaning, Vox abruptly leaned back on his palms, bringing some breathing room between them—not that Alastor had particularly minded the closeness, but this was alright too—and finally looked away, irritably shunting his gaze somewhere to the left. “I don’t know. It’s not proper mind control, as far as I can tell, just very potent persuasion. But I’ve only ever done it by accident, this is the first time I’ve tried to make it happen.”
“You know, I’ve heard a bit of performance anxiety is nothing to be ashamed of, especially in aging men such as—”
Vox flung a pillow at him, making him burst into laughter. “Oh I’m aging, huh? You have twenty years on me, old man.”
“Only in every way that matters.”
“You’re insufferable. Want to take a break for a bit? My back is killing me.” Vox pointed a claw at him in warning. “Don’t.”
Alastor grinned innocently.
He let Vox pull him to his feet, then took to sprawling out along the length of the couch while Vox bumbled around the kitchen, searching for nonexistent refreshments. The sad state of Vox’s cabinets, which Alastor had initially mistaken for terrible poverty, had eventually revealed itself to be a lifestyle, and a choice to boot; Vox rarely cooked full meals for himself, opting instead to make constant use of the horribly ugly and bafflingly expensive microwave oven that lived in lieu of a spice rack on his granite countertops. This had been a point of contention between them since they met and one they’d yet to resolve.
Someday, Alastor would be here without Vox’s supervision, and he would handle that electric monstrosity with all the finesse and care with which it handled the defenseless frozen TV dinners cruelly sacrificed to its steel maw.
Anyway, Vox knew better than to try and irradiate anything with Alastor in the vicinity. He returned a few minutes later with a tin of chocolates in one hand and a platter of deviled eggs in the other.
“I don’t know what possesses you to bring me these nauseating combinations,” Alastor said. “Are you trying to star on my broadcast?”
“Relax, princess, it’s all I had in the fridge. The eggs are leftovers from the ‘we survived’ party the company threw after the last extermination, and these are from Cannibal Town, thank you very much.” Vox shook the chocolates condescendingly in front of Alastor’s face, seemingly unconcerned about the very real and rapidly increasing possibility of losing both the tin and all his fingers to razor-sharp teeth. “Since you keep saying the processed stuff is revolting.”
Magnanimously, Alastor took the tin without also biting off Vox’s hand wholesale. He shoved himself backward, wedging his body into the crook of the couch and tugging his knees up to make room for Vox, who immediately sank down onto the cushions and kicked out his heels, splaying his legs open ridiculously far like the obnoxious little twat he was.
Alastor ran his claws along the seam of the tin and popped the lid. These were some of the few sweets he tolerated, salted dark chocolate around a savory core of putrid meat. He chewed on one thoughtfully as he observed, “You know, if it is suggestion rather than control, perhaps simply wanting something to happen won’t work.”
“What, like a verbal component?”
“Quite. My abilities are a matter of willpower alone, but you’ve compared your electricity to a phantom limb in the past, yes? A more direct, physical approach may be in order.”
Vox’s mouth twisted as he considered this. He shifted sideways, one arm draped over the back of the couch as he moved to face Alastor more fully. Alastor popped another chocolate in his mouth, smiling placidly.
“Can I…” Vox hesitated, claws drumming on his knee. For all his impudent, brash behavior and mouthiness that had gotten his screen punched in on more than one occasion, Vox could be rather shy when they were alone. That was appropriate, of course—Alastor was his mentor, it was only natural that Vox should defer to him. With careful intention, respect could be synonymous with submission.
But Alastor didn’t waste his time and expertise on any project he didn’t also consider a friend. And he did not befriend cowards.
“Whatever you want to do, just do it,” Alastor said. He slipped one leg down to nudge Vox’s thigh with the toe of his hoof, raising his eyebrows. “I don’t have all night.” Not strictly true, but Vox didn’t need to know that.
Vox flushed, pixels tinting pink—a fascinating reaction that Alastor always liked to provoke—but recovered quickly enough. He took a breath, seemed to steel himself, and then reached out carefully to take Alastor’s face in his hands.
A jittery pop of surprised static made Alastor’s ear flick back, embarrassed. His smile remained, close-lipped and sharp, even as something tightened traitorously in his chest at the unexpected gesture.
Vox looked at him for a long, quiet moment. His fingers were very warm where they pressed along the jutting line of Alastor’s jaw, claws dipping to rest lightly in the tender places beneath his chin, his cheeks; Alastor hadn’t fully registered how large Vox’s hands were until this moment, far broader and longer than Alastor’s own, and he found himself feeling oddly encompassed as he permitted Vox to angle his head back, to better lock their gazes.
It—was not quite looming, what Vox was doing, but it sent some instinctual shiver whispering down Alastor’s spine regardless. A distant echo of a prey animal with the low ground.
“Okay. Let’s try this,” Vox muttered to himself, absently petting over the corner of Alastor’s mouth. His grip on Alastor’s face firmed until there was nowhere for him to go, nowhere to look except for into Vox’s eyes. “Look at me.”
A strange, polyphonic reverb swelled under Vox’s voice. At the same time, Vox’s left eye… it rippled, his pupil collapsing into an erratic flicker of lightning. Dark rings began to undulate gently from the center, concentric waves of black and red emanating outwards like a mass of writhing snakes.
Alastor’s breath caught in his throat.
Oh. That was… new.
“That’s it,” Vox murmured. His tone, gone low and coaxing, stroked over the fractures and sharp edges of Alastor’s mind in a soothing erosion, quelling the noise and nonsense until it was little more than a soft, discordant hum. “Just keep looking at me. There’s no one here but us. You’re always so pinned up, all proper and gentlemanly unless you’re tearing some lowlife apart… but as long as you’re looking at me, you can relax for a little bit, let some of that go. It’s quiet, isn’t it?”
And Alastor was stunned to realize that it was. There was nothing but Vox’s voice, Vox’s hands holding him in place, Vox’s pulsing eye swallowing up his field of vision until there were no distractions, no pressing concerns except for what Vox would say next. But it didn’t feel like a subsumption of his agency. Vox had been honest when he claimed it wasn’t mind control. It just felt…
Like being held, really. A novelty he’d almost forgotten.
There remained a not-insignificant part of Alastor that wanted to snarl and struggle against being coddled like this, a part he often resented as much as he valued—but the clinging residue of that agitation instantly melted away when Vox gave a delighted giggle, squishing Alastor’s cheeks between his palms.
“Holy shit, you were tense,” Vox laughed, the sound thudding warmly through Alastor’s body. His ears slowly went limp with helpless contentment. “Feels good to relax, doesn’t it?”
Alastor nodded as much as he could with Vox still cradling his face so securely. Everything had narrowed down to those points of contact, anchors effortlessly keeping Alastor tethered to his body. For once, his attentions were not scattered to the wind or buried under six layers of sardonic irony, but honed to a fine point under the magnifying glass of Vox’s hypnosis, rendered down into manageable components that Vox held full control over, gently easing the responsibility out of Alastor’s hands. It was a relief.
“I can’t believe you’re letting me do this,” Vox was saying. “You, um… is this okay?”
A slow blink. Alastor leaned forward, pressing into Vox’s hands, and dredged up a lazy smirk. “Oh, yes. I’d have already disemboweled you if it wasn’t.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Vox chuckled, stroking his thumb over Alastor’s cheekbone. His eye swirled in consistent intervals, keeping Alastor grounded in the here and now. “Am I allowed to call you cute, or is that grounds for disemboweling?”
“I find myself rather agreeable at the moment, if you feel like pushing your luck.”
“Don’t I always.” Vox grinned, electric-blue and jagged. Emboldened, one of his hands left Alastor’s face and slipped around to the back of his neck, palm flattening over his nape and making him shudder at the inherently possessive gesture. An unseemly keen crawled up his throat when Vox began to lightly scratch the base of his skull. “Oh, god. You’re so cute. You love this.”
Maybe it was meant to be a question, but it settled over Alastor’s shoulders as a command—his eyes fluttered shut as he melted into the contact, practically collapsing on top of Vox in his efforts to get closer even as Vox made a surprised noise and jolted to catch him before he tumbled off the couch. He loved it, and he could admit that he loved it because they were alone and Vox had given him permission to let go and if Vox tried to stop he would rip the man’s limbs off and eat them.
“Woah,” Vox laughed, careless and pleased, as he struggled to find a better position for them. Alastor made no attempts to help, only narrowing his eyes with an unhappy hiss of static when Vox grabbed his upper arms instead of continuing that heavenly head scratching. “Slow down, bambi. You want to be patient for me, yeah?” He paused, letting the suggestion sink in until Alastor stopped trying so insistently to push his head back into Vox’s hands, and then carefully added, “Good boy.”
The feeling that flared in Alastor’s chest at that little remark was dizzying and entirely unique. It took him a long second to realize that the crooning purr thrumming through the airwaves was coming from him, and even then he failed to summon up the will to cut it out.
With Alastor near-boneless in Vox’s grip, maneuvering them into a slightly more comfortable position took a few false starts and failed attempts, but at last they ended up horizontal on the couch, Alastor tugged down to curl atop Vox’s broad chest as Vox beamed down at him. Ever the poor poker face.
“You could at least try to seem less blatantly proud of yourself,” Alastor hummed, shutting his eyes when Vox’s clever fingers began combing through his hair again. Every inch of him felt warm and dazed and contained, enveloped wholly by Vox’s overwhelming presence. Perhaps in another situation, he’d feel threatened by this, but right now he could only feel what Vox wanted him to feel, and Vox wanted him to enjoy it. “I assumed you would’ve had me doing something ridiculous by now.”
“I’m still thinking about it,” Vox admitted.
His petting brushed the fine hairs of Alastor’s ear, and Alastor couldn’t help the way he gave a full-body shudder at the unexpectedly intense sensation, shoulders hiking up with sudden tension. Vox paused. When Alastor stayed frozen, taken aback by his own reaction, the hand cautiously returned, beginning to rub firm circles into the base of his left ear as Vox gauged it safe to continue.
Oh, dear. That was almost too much. Alastor had never been touched like this before, not by anyone who’d kept their fingers or their life afterward; it danced on the edge of overstimulating, hot and distracting, made worse when Vox brought his other hand up to fiddle with the tufted tips, and Alastor pressed his face into Vox’s canary sweater, trembling.
For a terrible moment, Alastor worried that the blazing heat caressing his ears and skittering down his spine would shatter the immersion, splitting his attention in too many places at once for the thready, pleasant calm Vox had imposed on him to endure—and that would genuinely be disappointing, because it had been remarkably nice up until this point.
“Aw,” Vox said, faux-pitying, and there was the bastard Alastor knew, even if his more pathetic side tended to overrule it when they were alone. “That’s new, huh? Do you want me to keep going?”
He did. He did, but it was a confusing slurry of contradicting desires, wanting to escape from the overwhelming touch as much he wanted it to push harder. “Vox,” he gasped when Vox tweaked both ear tips meanly, winding his claws into the soft fibers underneath him. The resultant condescending laughter rattled through his chest.
Alastor gave a staticky whine as Vox’s ministrations grazed his antlers, sending another wave of bad-good-strange sensations rolling through him. He struggled with the dissonance, his mind associating the touches with nauseating discomfort but his body fully under the thrall of Vox’s influence, lighting up his nervous system with bright, involuntary sparks of foreign pleasure. He hated it as much as he never wanted it to end.
Vox seemed to neither notice nor care about Alastor’s inner turmoil. His claws traced burning lines up and down the shells of Alastor’s ears, maddening in how incessant but slow their paths were, deliberately staying gentle and denying Alastor any resolution.
“You’re so sensitive,” Vox marveled. Alastor squirmed, flicking one eye open to glare pleadingly, but as he did so, he was helpless to resist the way his muscles somehow loosened further according to Vox’s commands to relax, in effect so long as their gazes were locked. Damn. It was difficult to summon up any effective amount of ire under the soothing repetition of you love it you love it you love it that pulsed in the back of Alastor’s mind, giving him something concrete to cling to while Vox’s hands took him apart. “The big, scary radio demon, literally purring in my lap after some ear scratches. Fucking amazing. God, you’re adorable, I really hope you don’t kill me after this. Do you…”
Vox’s nonsensical rambling trailed off, his hands stilling atop Alastor’s head. Alastor made a frustrated, needy sound and tried to nuzzle closer, unable to understand why Vox had stopped, but then Vox’s hypnotic eye flickered, faltering.
“Hey, um,” Vox said, sounding abruptly uncertain. As his power dimmed, some of Alastor’s common sense began to filter back in through the psychic soundproofing, and with it came the sudden and shocking realization that he was hard.
Hard and, horrifyingly, had been fucking rutting against Vox’s leg like some kind of wanton creature, utterly making a fool of himself over a bit of chaste petting.
The pleased hum of his frequency flattened into something thin and hostile, a whirring, grinding crunch of noise that made Vox grimace as Alastor fumbled to shove himself upward, face hot with humiliation. The male body being what it was, he could hardly be surprised that it had decided to betray him, especially with the mind-altering effects of Vox’s powers making him more susceptible to such a reaction, but it still left a sour taste in his mouth—Vox would certainly misinterpret this, would think Alastor was interested in the shameless indulgence of sexual pleasure, or worse, that he was interested in Vox.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Alastor said, stiff. The last, stubborn traces of Vox’s hypnosis made him unsteady, preventing him from fleeing as efficiently as he would’ve liked. “I’ve been terribly rude, my apologies! I wouldn’t dream of overstaying my welcome, as it were; in any case, it’s getting rather late, and I should—”
“Alastor, woah, hold on a second.” Vox followed him, sitting up and grabbing his wrists. Alastor snarled, static prickling threateningly, but he was dizzy and easily manhandled as Vox insisted, “Wait, Jesus. It’s fine, Al. I’m not—offended, or anything.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Alastor smiled perilously wide, leaning in so that Vox was forced to rear back if he wanted to avoid a collision of antlers and glass. “I simply wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. It was your influence that—affected me so, nothing else.”
“Okay? I mean, I figured that was probably it. I was kind of flooding your brain with endorphins there for a hot minute.”
Alastor narrowed his eyes. Vox smiled at him crookedly, a picture of innocence. His stupid boxy head made him seem more trustworthy than he actually was, an impression he frequently manipulated to his advantage, but Alastor had seen him sweet-talk employees and potential investors alike enough times at this point that he hesitated, now, to assign guile where there might be none. He did endeavor to not be uncharitable to his friends.
And what motive did Vox have to lie, anyhow? If anything, he was handing Alastor plausible deniability on a silver platter. It was far more generous than Alastor would have been, if their positions were reversed.
But that was Vox for you. He was benevolent until he wasn’t.
“It’s fine,” Vox repeated, a little softer, when Alastor was silent for too long. “Trust me. I know you’re not into me like that.”
“Good,” Alastor sniffed, chagrined.
Vox huffed a wry laugh and squeezed his wrists. “Listen, uh… we can stop if you want. But I thought we were having a good time.” Maybe so, but Alastor was hardly going to agree whilst sober. “We could just go back to the ear thing and ignore your little situation, if that’d make you feel better.”
“They’re not… unrelated.”
Vox’s smile twisted curiously at the corners. A certain hunger had entered his expression, and it made Alastor feel exasperated as much as hunted. “Oh?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Alastor warned, but he was beginning to suspect he’d already lost this battle. He’d stopped trying to wrench himself out of Vox’s grasp with any seriousness. “I’ve been told I am astonishingly indifferent to such matters. You’re not going to convince me that it’s anything more than a waste of time, and disgusting to boot.”
“That sounds like a challenge.”
“It’s a statement.”
“How about this,” Vox said, infuriatingly undeterred. “I put you back under, we have a good time, and if you just so happen to get off along the way, that’s neither here nor there.” He smirked. “And I bet I could make you like it.”
“You’re awfully cocky for someone who’s only managed to use his powers on purpose once.” Actually, that was probably exactly why he was so cocky.
“All I’m hearing is ‘I’m afraid of losing a bet to Vox.’”
“Your audio receptors are faulty.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Vox wheedled. “And if it’s not, if you really don’t enjoy yourself, you can blame it on the hypnotism or rip my head off or whatever.”
“Oh? Are we making a deal, then?”
“No! No, no. Let’s just use the honor system this time.”
Vox’s voice had pitched with healthy anxiety at the prospect, which flattered Alastor enough that he let himself ease back into a tentatively playful mood again, the hot edge of his humiliation dulling into a mild sheepishness. Not anything approaching remorse, but perhaps… chastened, just a tad.
He still wasn’t going to make it easy for Vox, though. Why, imagine the tongues that would wag should anyone discover that the radio demon was an easy lay!
“Oh, alright,” he sighed, “since I doubt you’re going to let this go.”
“Nope,” Vox said cheerfully. “I’ll be bringing it up for weeks otherwise.”
Alastor rolled his eyes. “Someday, this dogged persistence of yours will end very badly, and I’m not always going to be there to fish you out by your collar. Also, this still doesn’t mean I want to have sex with you,” he added, both of them well aware that he was just being petulant for its own sake at this point, and Vox’s eye flashed with fond aggravation as he groaned, “Holy shit, Alastor, shut up.”
Alastor’s teeth came together with a sharp click. They stared at each other for a beat, equally startled.
Then Vox’s grin brightened. A smear of red pixels trailed down from the corner of his mouth, greedy, and Alastor could only glare mutely as Vox cooed and tapped him on the nose, like an ornery child. “Aw. You didn’t think this through, did you? Don’t worry, I’ll be nice.”
Doubtful, Alastor thought, chest tightening with anticipation, but he couldn’t deny that—
Well, he was rather thrilled by Vox’s twisted understanding of nice.
“Now,” Vox said, low, as he took Alastor by the chin. His eye swirled, steadier than before, his normally passive frequencies now wriggling inexorably into the cracks in Alastor’s psychic defenses and prying him apart; a fish stranded ashore and gutted, innards festering in the open air. Alastor twitched, but there was nowhere to go. “We’re going to have some fun.”
What happened next was… well, fun wasn’t the first descriptor Alastor would’ve chosen, accurate as it might’ve been for Vox’s side of things.
Oh, it was exciting, certainly, as much a violation as it was a rare and indulgent luxury. Helplessness was not wholly foreign to him, but he’d never been in the position of consenting to such a thing, of allowing someone else to take the lead in an area he was so woefully unfamiliar with. He had never considered before how it might feel to loosen his white-knuckled grip on himself and not immediately suffer for it. But he wouldn’t say it was fun, exactly—it wasn’t a spot of recreational slaughter or an evening at the theater, but it was delightful in its own way, even if its impact was undermined by Vox’s dreadfully limited imagination.
Vox had directed him to settle on the floor this time. Caged between Vox’s spread knees and leaned back against the couch, Alastor was of two minds: firstly, that he was developing a renewed distaste for this minimalist apartment and its hard, unforgiving linoleum flooring, and secondly, Vox was going to lose that silly wager of his posthaste if he kept up like this.
Predictably uncreative, his go-to had been to return to molesting Alastor’s ears. With some of his coherence returned to him as Vox refined his technique for round two, Alastor could admit that it was a delicious kind of torture: the slow, staticky drag of Vox’s claws sinking into sleek fur, massaging around the bases, occasionally sliding down to comb through his hair and stroke along the nape of his neck—it was all very intense and not entirely pleasant. One small mercy was that this position avoided full-frontal contact with Vox, making it easier to ignore the warm, disconcerting arousal pooling at the base of his spine.
He hadn’t been bluffing, before. He was usually quite apathetic towards his body and its physical needs. Arousal was inconvenient, tiresome, and altogether not worth the effort it took to resolve in the conventional way, so he hardly ever bothered. But the promise of being made to actively like it—well, that was rather intriguing. Alastor never could turn down the prospect of novel entertainment.
Now if only Vox would actually do something about it.
“How do you feel?” Vox asked, tugging gently on one ear. Alastor realized his eyes had begun fluttering shut from the rhythmic caress of Vox’s claws in his hair and blinked them back open.
“Bored,” Alastor said honestly. “But it feels nice enough, I suppose. Are you going to get on with the fun part any time soon?”
“Fuck you, it’s called building anticipation.”
“I think you overestimated yourself and now have no way of following through.”
“I was trying to be considerate, asshole,” Vox said, yanking on Alastor’s ear and twisting his head harshly to the side to lock their gazes. Static buzzed, Alastor’s stomach swooping with excitement at the rough treatment, and he squinted into Vox’s screen with a grin so wide it bordered on feral. Vox sighed. “I should’ve guessed you’d be a freak about this too. Alright, then. This was what was getting you off before, wasn’t it?”
He squeezed the ear still trapped in his hand meaningfully, a dull ache blooming at the base where he was pulling just a little too hard. Alastor tried to nod but managed only a pained flinch.
“You were being so good for me earlier, huh? Squirming and gasping in my lap, so overwhelmed that you kept trying to hide from how good it felt—but you couldn’t. You still can’t. I can see it in those cute doe eyes—you want me to touch you so bad, it burns. And what kind of friend would I be if I denied you? If I just decided to…” Vox’s eye swirled, cruel, hungry, as he trailed a claw delicately down Alastor’s jawline. “Leave you unsatisfied?”
Alastor shuddered, some disgustingly plaintive noise crawling up his throat at the idea. He shifted restlessly in place, flushed with warmth; he needed more than these maddening, teasing touches that Vox had been inflicting on him, needed a firmer hand than the one pinching his ear at the moment, and he couldn’t help the way he shivered violently when Vox’s knees squeezed around his shoulders in a silent threat.
Vox chuckled darkly. “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t do that. I have to keep my promise, right?”
“Yes,” Alastor managed, claws digging into his own thighs, “yes, it’s hardly—fair to go back on one’s word, you know. Not very sporting.”
“Your first mistake was assuming I care about fair, princess.”
Vox finally released his ear, but Alastor didn’t even get a moment to feel grateful before broad hands were encircling his throat to wrench his head even farther back—a move that might have paralyzed anyone else with the force involved, but that barely twinged his cervical spine—and then Vox was right there, inches from his face, leaning in so close that Alastor could almost taste the electricity coursing through his veins, vision swallowed up by searing light. Vox’s presence eclipsed all else.
“Don’t look away from me,” he said, voice reverberating through Alastor’s mind like waves washing away sand, and Alastor couldn’t—couldn’t resist, his body heavy and useless and only responsive to Vox. “I’m the only person that matters to you right now. It’s all you can focus on: the sound of my voice, the things I’m making you feel. And you’re feeling so much.”
Alastor’s breath caught as the words rolled over him, settling into his skin as a nauseating, burning itch. He stifled a whine as Vox thumbed over his esophagus, levering just enough pressure against the sides of his throat to make his head swim. Everywhere Vox was touching him burned.
“It’s intense. More intense than anything you’ve felt before. It gets under the skin, eats you up from the inside out, makes you want—well. Makes you want. And you want it bad, don’t you? You want me to give you what you’ve never been able to give yourself.”
Clumsily, he reached up to cling to Vox, a kind of compulsive grab for stability; his claws bit into Vox’s wrists, blood welling up under his nails.
Vox didn’t seem to care. His smile was halfway to manic, clipping off the edges of his screen. “What do you need, Alastor?”
More. Less. He didn’t—he couldn’t think, he didn’t know what he needed, only that Vox held the cards and whatever happened next would be because he wanted it, not because Alastor did, and something about that knowledge was wonderfully liberating. The only thing that mattered was what Vox wanted. There would be no equivocating or ironic detachment, all obligations subsumed under the fire in his veins and the indomitable suggestions Vox had planted in his psyche like invasive weeds.
Alastor had no job here besides to obey.
He gripped Vox’s wrists tighter. Vox made a sympathetic noise, easing up on the pressure around his throat and letting him suck down a reedy gasp of air, and then moving one hand back up to the top of his head, petting over where his ears were pinned flat against his skull.
Vox’s tone warmed, mocking. “Overwhelmed? Does the radio demon really need a break so soon? I’ve barely done anything yet.”
Humiliation soured in Alastor’s gut, but it did nothing to temper the bothersome need that was coursing through him, driving him to complain, “No, no, I don’t need to stop. I… I want—” He dragged in a harsh breath, trailing off into a frustrated groan as he squirmed in place, unable to find a comfortable way to sit that alleviated the growing tightness in his slacks.
Of course Vox noticed. He laughed, high and delighted, keeping up that slow, gentle petting over Alastor’s ears even as he teasingly squeezed his throat again. “Oh, I get it now. Someone’s feeling a little hot and bothered, hm? I thought you were astonishingly indifferent to raging boners, but maybe you were just embarrassed about how easy it is to get you all worked up.” His expression melted into something smug and cruel. “Ask me nicely, and I’ll think about helping you with your little… problem. Unless you still don’t think I can make it feel good.”
Alastor wasn’t going to beg. He wasn’t. He—
He scrabbled at Vox’s wrists, unable to look away from the screen no matter how viciously his eyes burned from the prolonged contact. Held fast by Vox’s grip on his throat and trapped between Vox’s knees, Alastor swallowed down his pride and a mouthful of gritty static and choked out, “P̵̜̾l̵̟͑e̴͔͠a̴̡̾s̸̬̓e̷̙͝ ̵̮̂t̵̃͜o̸͍͠u̴̳̾c̵͖͠h̸̩̓ ̶͕͑m̷̘̐e̸͈͑.”
Vox laughed. Distantly, Alastor wanted to kill him. “Fuck, Al. You make it really hard to want to deny you. Hey, hey, calm down, I didn’t say I wouldn’t.” His claws scratched incessantly around Alastor’s antlers, making his breath stutter. “You’re okay. I’ll take care of you.”
Calm down. You’re okay. Probably unintentional on Vox’s part, but the new commands took the edge off of the hot, dizzying headspace Alastor had slipped into, a cool relief that left him trembling and subdued but no longer totally incoherent. A rabbit gone limp in the jaws of a wolf, resigned to its fate. He tried to steady his breathing with the sliver of his attention that wasn’t riveted on the lazy thrum of Vox’s mesmerizing gaze, boring into him with relentless fervor.
“Spread your legs,” Vox said, and Alastor’s limbs moved without his conscious input, legs untucking themselves from beneath him and sliding apart. Vox shuffled forward, hooking his heels over Alastor’s knees to press them wider, wider, and then instructing him to hold them there, wanton and exposed even though he was technically still clothed. At least he couldn’t see himself and register what he looked like; in that sense, the forced eye contact was a mercy.
On the other hand, this new position had brought his head down to rest in Vox’s lap at a crooked, unnatural angle, vertebrae magically accommodating the way his neck had been twisted almost all the way around to sate Vox’s attention-seeking perversions. The bulge in Vox’s pants, pressed against his cheek, was unmistakable.
Thankfully, Vox didn’t seem interested in making Alastor acknowledge it, because Alastor still had negative sexual interest in Vox or his delicate parts, and things might have become very awkward very fast had any attention been brought to the man’s obvious arousal.
This did mean, however, that all of Vox’s interest was in Alastor’s obvious arousal, and that—
Alastor’s voice broke over a truly embarrassing squeak when Vox pressed the heel of his shoe to his crotch.
He jolted, unable to decide whether he wanted to rock into the contact or escape it, but Vox didn’t give him a choice: his long, slim calves had folded themselves around Alastor’s torso while Alastor’s notice was elsewhere, pulling him flush against the couch, and now the intimate position offered ample leverage for Vox to rub his sleek leather shoe in a slow, torturous grind against Alastor’s trapped cock.
“Ngk,” Alastor said, intelligently, a strangled little noise that only made Vox chuckle. It was—uncomfortable, insanity-inducing, wires crossing in his brain with the bewildering concoction of pain and pleasure as Vox dangled him over the edge of what he’d once taken for only a crack but now knew was a plunging ravine.
His vision blurred, lucidity dissolving into a smear of color and serrated light that might have been a smile at one point but now resembled little more than a hungry slash of fangs across Vox’s screen. Vox’s hand in his hair, around his throat, Vox’s knees squeezing his ribs and that constant, frustrating pressure between his legs—his thoughts scrubbed clean of their usual whimsical tumult, purified and reduced to obsessive fixation, all the stress and plague of his self-control wrenched firmly out of his hands. He loved it—he hated it—his every opinion scattered to the wind except for the ones that pertained to Vox, right now, all washed away under a sea of throbbing red.
“Oh, fuck,” Vox breathed, compulsively tightening his grip on Alastor’s ear and then easing up when Alastor gave a protesting whimper. “You have no idea how hot you look right now. Shit.”
“Vox,” Alastor whined, mindlessly rocking his hips up into Vox’s shoe. Vox pressed down harder, sparking a dull lance of pain in such a sensitive area that had Alastor crying out, claws gouging deep furrows into Vox’s wrist. Acrid blood slicked his palms. “Ah—Vox, please—”
“Not so high and mighty now, huh? Kinda hard to condescend to me when you’re so—well, ha.”
Alastor wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, to hide from the haughtiness in Vox’s voice and at least deprive one of his overloaded senses of input, but he couldn’t look away. He trembled, a fly caught in a spiderweb; the hand around his throat turned into a teasing caress, petting down over his chest, knuckles brushing his adam’s apple, stroking the bridge of his nose, tenderly sweeping his bangs out of his face so nothing could even incidentally obstruct their eye contact. Vox’s flavor of sadism could be very violent indeed, but more often than not it was horrifically kind.
But even Vox couldn’t tease forever, and finally the fingers dancing lightly over his rictus grin retreated, followed by the gentle clink of Vox unbuckling his belt. Alastor writhed and moaned as Vox dragged his foot higher, angling it so the leather midsole rubbed firmly over his aching shaft with every deliberate, taunting pass.
Vox’s eye flared. The scraps of focus Alastor had begun fruitlessly piecing together instantly dissolved into ringing white noise. He might’ve been crying, a little—it was difficult to tell, what with the way his skin felt like it was sloughing off his bones.
Something slippery and blunt brushed Alastor’s cheek. He must have made some kind of sound, because Vox hastily hushed him, readjusting slightly so there were no longer any unwanted—appendages—anywhere near his mouth.
“Sorry, sorry,” Vox muttered, petting soothingly over his pinned ears. Alastor’s jaw was clenched so hard he was in danger of cracking a tooth. “I’m not going to make you get me off. Just keep looking at me, focus on how I’m making you feel—it’s nice, isn’t it? To let someone else do all the boring, tedious work so you can have fun?” Alastor shuddered. Nodded. Vox laughed. “You’re such a pillow princess. Hey, I’m not complaining.”
Radio static whizzed around them, spitting out Alastor’s filtered voice from the aether, as it seemed his physical vocal cords were rather failing to produce any meaningful sounds at the moment. “Do you ever—zzk—stop t-t-aa-alking—you yammering idiot box—”
“Ah-ah!” Vox said, pinching one of Alastor’s ears and making him yelp. “I’m running the show, and you may save your constructive criticism for the denouement. You know what I liked earlier? When you said please.”
Alastor dragged in a breath through his nose, squinting blurrily into Vox’s screen; out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Vox was molesting himself inches from Alastor’s face, but so long as he didn’t make it Alastor’s direct business, it could be tolerated.
Where he was molesting Alastor, however, was becoming of increasingly pressing concern, mostly as it pertained to Alastor’s dignity, because—
His hips stuttered, rutting uselessly against the bottom of Vox’s shoe. Heat spiraled up his spine, billowing through his nervous system and making his voice crack wetly on a keening wail as Vox buried his fingers in his hair, scratching and tugging and dragging raw, humiliating noises out of him that was very rapidly devolving into senseless pleading.
What had Vox reduced him to? This needy, yowling creature, brought to the surface by little more than a rough hand and some vapid dirty talk—it was preposterous. And yet here they were.
Plausible deniability, he thought, near hysterical. Benevolent Vox indeed.
He couldn’t take any more of this. It was too much, it was—
“How do you feel?” Vox asked, and the weight of the compulsion punched the truth out of Alastor like a dam breaking.
“Good,” he burst out, half-sobbing, too overstimulated to even be ashamed anymore, “good, it’s—too much, Vox, please—please—oh!”
Vox’s tone was warping, gone tinny and hollow as he worked his hand faster, jerking himself off and grinding his heel against Alastor’s dick in a hard, unforgiving rhythm that had Alastor shaking and whining in desperate overwhelm as he clung to Vox’s thighs, seams popping under his claws. “Come on,” Vox panted, voice vibrating through Alastor’s skull, “come on, let me see you… you’re so fucking cute. Fuck, it’s really unfair—you’re so pretty when you’re fucked out and crying for me, it feels exactly the same as watching you pull someone’s spine out through their mouth—you’re fucking gorgeous, babe, shit, if you kill me afterward it’ll have been totally worth it just to see—”
Alastor’s entire body seized as he abruptly came with frantic, pitchy cry, half human and half through the airwaves, claws shearing through the soft meat of Vox’s thighs like butter—which sent Vox over the edge moments later as his legs tightened around Alastor, doubling over with a wrenching mechanical groan.
Orgasm had always been a short and underwhelming thing for Alastor. Something he only did to satisfy a rare craving, hardly anything he took active pleasure in, often just as resentful of the need as he was dismissive of the whole affair.
This… was not that.
It wracked through him, a roiling wave of sensation that made his back arch as tingling sparks swept up his spine, briefly stealing the breath from his lungs and blowing any semblance of clarity out of his mind like a spindrift off the sea. Helpless to hide from the deluge of feelings Vox was forcing him to endure with his full attention, he could do nothing but gasp raggedly and clutch at Vox’s thighs as his body quivered uncontrollably, tension slowly leaking out of him as he came down from the peak.
The aftershocks fluttered in his pelvis, nauseating. For a long moment, the only sound was the loud hum of Vox’s fans shunting hot air in and out, striving to cool him down, and the faint ringing in Alastor’s ears that he suspected would linger for a while yet.
Vox’s eye flickered, the flashing hypnosis fading back into his normal gaze, releasing Alastor from its thrall. He seemed self-satisfied, yes, and superior, but—oh, dear. There was that familiar anxiety.
It steadied Alastor somewhat as Vox’s influence subsided, retreating carefully from his mind like a child guiltily retracting their hand from the cookie jar. To his mild surprise, the pleasant, hazy feeling warming his chest didn’t fade with it. That was quite nice, actually. Although he maintained that he could’ve done without the discomfiting stickiness in his pants.
Alastor closed his eyes for a moment, blinking away the involuntary tears from basking so long in that vivid digital glow. He didn’t bother freeing himself from Vox’s twining legs, though he did stretch out his own in front of him, enjoying the delicious burn of strained muscles. Prying his claws out of Vox’s thighs, he brought a hand to his mouth and thoughtfully lapped up the tacky blood drying on his palm, delighted by the strangled noise Vox made watching him.
“A̴h̵,̴ w̸e̴l̷l̶,” he started, then coughed to clear his throat of the residual static. “Apologies. I’d say we can consider this experiment a success, unless you object.”
Vox blinked at him. Then his mouth wiggled, twisting into a little mischievous grin as he realized Alastor wasn’t reacting negatively to all of his gratuitous violation of all common decency. “I don’t know. We might have to test it a few more times. Between five and seven, at minimum.”
“Goodness, I hadn’t realized I’d taken on such a slow pupil. It only took me three tries to figure out my tentacles.”
“Not all of us can be nuclear powerhouse prodigies.”
“That’s no excuse to get lazy.”
“Uh-huh.” Vox’s thumb traced over the shell of Alastor’s ear, featherlight, and Alastor found he liked that well enough. His teasing had dwindled into something more cautious. “Hey, um… was that okay? I kind of sprung all of that on you without warning, so if you need to—I don’t know, go home and decompress, that’s fine. You don’t have to stay if you’re done for the night.”
Alastor considered it. A scouring bath, a snack, and his most comfortable robe did sound heavenly at the moment, but…
Perhaps it was just his twitchy hindbrain free-associating without his input, but he found he didn’t quite want to be returned to the strain of managing himself just yet. The warm support of Vox’s legs around him, Vox’s free hand still making soothing overtures as it combed through his hair… all rare delicacies deserved proper appreciation, and for all his repressed tendencies, Alastor never was in the habit of denying himself luxury.
There was, he could admit, something to be said for letting go.
“Whyever would I do that?” Alastor finally asked, airy and coy. “I assume you have functional plumbing?”
“I—yeah, of course I do. But—”
“Excellent!” Alastor clapped his bloodied hands together, dissolving into the shadows and reconstituting behind the couch. Vox flinched and cursed as Alastor leaned down to twang his rabbit ears playfully, watching the balls bounce back and forth. “Order us some food, won’t you? I’m not cooking with that abominable microwave contraption in my five mile radius, and you’ve only sated one appetite tonight, ha-ha!”
“Motherfucker—” Vox whirled, trying to catch him, but he was already sauntering off down the hall, wholeheartedly ignoring the hitch in his step so as to avoid giving Vox the satisfaction. Evidently he failed, because Vox jeered, “I’d be careful if I were you—things might still be a little bit sensitive.”
Alastor’s shadow hissed petulantly at him. “I’ll be sure to take that into account, thank you!”
Vox continued, dripping smarm, “Pajamas are on the third shelf down!”
“Thank you, Vox.”
“You’re welcome! I’m ordering Italian!”
Hmph. Alastor rolled his eyes, slipping into the ensuite and shutting the door. Bothersome man.
But he took the pajamas anyhow.