Archive of Our Own

“Well that’s an interesting state of undress,” Alastor says, promptly dissolving into staticky snickers at how his abrupt entrance makes Vox jolt. His personal radio is a little irregular in the heart of Vox’s domain, surrounded by the blue-red glow of countless monitors and the beady eyes of distant sharks, but the way that Vox clearly isn’t paying enough attention to his surroundings to realize said domain had been infiltrated makes up for it.

“I knew you were a voyeur,” Alastor goes on, propping an elbow up on the back of Vox’s gaudy computer chair, “so I probably should have guessed that you spent your time in here molesting yourself!”

A joke, thankfully. But an apt one!

“A-A-Alazzstor?” comes the glitchy vocalization, before a frustrated blare of harsh electronic noise sounds—akin to someone clearing their throat if that someone’s consciousness was currently fifty-percent computer system, Alastor imagines—and Vox’s face flickers back onto the main screen that serves as his face, blinking rapidly. “What—how did you get in here?”

Alastor smiles, tipping his head to the side innocently as he folds his hands over his microphone. “Velvette let me in.”

“What?”

“She said something about, oh…” Alastor pretends to ponder, admiring the way the monitors surrounding them both flicker with Vox’s indignation. “Antisocial shut-ins and their man caves, if I recall correctly.”

“I’m not a shut-in, I’m—”

“Plugged in?” Alastor jokes, grinning wider. “To the public opinion, I’m certain.”

“Ha, ha,” Vox says, and sags in his seat. “She’s more plugged in than I am, she’s just pissed I left her alone to deal with Val earlier. Like it’s my fault he dumped me and now she’s sick of getting uninterrupted pissbaby quality time. What does she want me to do, piss gasoline on the fire?”

Alastor isn’t interested in commenting on that. Especially not when Vox is, indeed, literally plugged into his set-up! Alastor finishes rounding the rather overdramatically framed chair and faces Vox more directly, leaning casually back against the unnecessarily complicated computer console that forms a U-shape around the both of them. Vox’s current state was visible from the moment Alastor walked into the room, but this angle lends a little bit more insight into what he seems to be trying to do.

The back of his head has several lengthy wires running into it, which trail off into various directions in the large—and largely empty—chamber. In front of Vox, however, the side of his seat has pulled out into a worktable on which lie a number of things: a series of small cameras, tiny lenses reflecting the lights of Vox’s screens; a circuit board of some sort; a number of colorful wires, twisted in on each other; what looks like a manual, opened to a page showcasing Vox himself; and an absolute bevy of tools, including clippers, a small soldering iron, and glue.

His jacket is also off, tie undone and shirt unbuttoned. He hasn’t opened any access panels yet, but it’s hardly a mystery what he intends to do, and the realization makes Alastor’s teeth grow sharper in his mouth.

“Craft project?” Alastor says, nearly choking on the forced casualness of the tone. Steady, steady. It is important to approach one’s prey gently and with an open hand, lest it startle too early.

Much better to let it struggle helplessly once it’s already been caught.

“Self-improvement,” Vox shoots back. “Not that you’re familiar with the concept of upgrading, old man.”

“Why, Vox! Hasn’t anyone told you that you look pretty just as you are?”

“Thanks, it’s all the plastic surgery,” Vox says, rapping his knuckles against the side of his screen, though the words utterly fail to hide the way his other hand squeezes the seat of his chair when he processes that Alastor just called him pretty, even if for the sake of a jibe. His legs kick slightly against his seat, giving away the genuineness of his amused grin.

Alastor allows himself a laugh and steps close, leaving his microphone leaning on the console so that he can trace a faux-curious finger over the disconnected wires laid out on the table. There’s nothing inherently…suggestive about the motion, but sensory memory holds strong, and he watches out of the corner of his eye as Vox’s throat bobs.

“Need a hand?” Alastor asks, all sugar.

“Um.” Vox looks down at where Alastor is winding a claw around one of the wires. “I usually…do it myself.”

“And how long that must take, even with an experienced hand.”

He’s laying it on a bit thick as he lays the bait out, but Vox seems to more or less take it for granted that half of what comes out of Alastor’s mouth is sarcastic.

“Do you really—I mean, I wouldn’t trust Val with this shit, he doesn’t know a transistor from a capacitor, and Vel only knows the basics...”

“Oh, I’m a dab hand with electronics,” Alastor says breezily, which is quite the understatement considering that he can see the entire layout of Vox’s electrical system once he gets his hands on it. Probably not with as much detail as Vox, and he can’t manipulate any part of it except himself, but... “Used to put together my own radios when I was young! And I’m sure this little booklet you have here is quite the thorough manual for all the newfangled bits I haven’t seen before, don’t you think?”

Vox’s eyes are large on his face, growing greedy. He hasn’t stopped watching Alastor’s hand. Alastor stops twirling, seemingly absentminded, and gently scrapes the edge of a single claw along one blue wire. Sweetening the lure.

“Yeah,” Vox breathes to himself. “Yeah, I do, actually. Fuck. Sure, let’s go.”

And thus the snare tightens.

“Splendid!” Alastor declares, and shoves Vox roughly back into his seat by the shoulder.

“Wha—!”

“Now,” Alastor says, walking behind the chair just to drag his hands along the thick cables plugging into the back of Vox’s skull as he takes the long way to peer at the manual. “Be a dear and open yourself up for me while I take a look at this!”

It’s a testament to Vox’s readiness to lay himself at Alastor’s whim and mercy on a dime that he just blinks rapidly a couple of times, sprawled against the back of the chair, and then obeys.

The first time that Alastor had dug his claws into Vox and pried open his vulnerable insides, he had only accessed the abdominal panel set into his lower belly. Now, Vox drags his claws over invisible seams and the panels that click and slide open with a quiet hum bare his entire torso, from his sternum to where his waistband sits right above his pelvis. After some additional finagling, he even carefully levers open a smaller panel on the front of his throat, leaving Alastor with full access to not only his lovely, pulsing blood vessels but also his wiring, which shivers with the whistling hum of his half-mechanical trachea.

It’s fascinating. Almost as enticing as the realization of what, precisely, Vox is upgrading.

“Now that’s interesting,” Alastor says, pressing a finger against the page. “You were planning on doing this by yourself? How, exactly, were you going to pull that off?”

“What do you mean?” Vox asks, settling back into his seat more comfortably. He lays his hands on the arm rests, tapping his claws against them as he watches Alastor.

Or, rather, as his cameras watch Alastor, and the psychosomatic code built into his skull animates his eyes to showcase that.

Alastor tsks, raising an eyebrow. “You can spin any yarn you like, Vox, but you’re not going to convince me that you know yourself well enough to work on your own hardware literally blind when you’ve got a manual laid out on the table in front of you.”

“Oh!” Vox perks up, grinning. “You’re not the only one who can be in two places at once, you dick!” Is that what Vox thinks his shadow is? How embarrassing. “That’s why I’m plugged in—I just watch from the other cameras!”

He gestures broadly around the room, and the various displays around them flicker over to camera feeds, all centered on Vox and Alastor in the middle of the room. They’re blurry, now, unable to focus properly through the static of Alastor’s presence as it distorts a significant portion of any footage they manage to capture. The additional eyes on him make his skin itch, the fact that he’s showing up on displays niggling under his skin like a splinter in a way that Vox’s plain regard never does.

Not that he can’t tell when Vox is looking, but it’s not quite this irritating. Still, he can put up with it…this once. Mostly because he thinks the result will be very rewarding.

“Hm,” Alastor hums, unimpressed. “If the resolution was good enough to do an adequate job, you wouldn’t be upgrading. It’s a swell thing I came along, chum, or you might’ve gotten yourself into some real trouble!”

“Are you saying you’re not real trouble?” Vox mutters, half to himself.

Alastor’s grin stretches wide as he steps between Vox’s legs, kicking his knees apart so that he can lean over and get a proper view of the man’s convoluted biomechanical organ system.

“Oh,” he says through the hungry crackle of the radio, “you have no idea.”

Vox swallows, and Alastor watches his esophagus undulate in real time. “Oh, that’s the spooky eyes coming out, Bambi. Do, uh. Are you trying to sound like you’re about to eat me?”

“That depends,” Alastor says, reaching over to pull on the pair of gloves that Vox had prepared for himself. They’re thin, elastic—and the tips are strategically thickened in places, made to account for sharp claws bound for delicate, tender places. “Do you want to be eaten?”

Vox shifts in place, then freezes when Alastor puts a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Literally or metaphorically?”

Alastor laughs out loud at that, and doesn’t answer.

The larger part of Vox’s chest cavity is all wiring. He has organs and blood vessels aplenty, certainly—all of the usual ones, at least—but they’re sectioned off, isolated and insulated apart from his electronic parts, though the fascinating material protecting them is thin enough that Alastor can watch the pumping of Vox’s heart. Can watch the way that it throbs, faster and faster, as Alastor finally dips his hand into Vox’s chest.

“Now,” Alastor says, cheerful. “I assume that you remember to hold still during all of this! Do let me know if you need some help again!”

“I don’t think I could handle the tentacles right now, to be honest,” Vox rasps.

“Then it’s a good thing I wasn’t offering them!”

Vox’s end goal is to upgrade his visual system—he’s prepared new cameras, new connections, and what some skimming through the manual informs Alastor is a new graphics processing unit—presumably a parallel for Vox’s lack of a real occipital lobe, though Alastor isn’t sure if he also has one of those, too, somewhere.

Alastor fully intends to help him achieve this goal, but not without having a little fun along the way. In pursuit of that, the first thing he does when he reaches into Vox is to wrap his claws around the frantically pulsing pump that’s keeping his blood flowing.

“There you are,” Alastor says, cradling it gently. He won’t squeeze, and he won’t cut it on his claws, either. But he will cradle it, like a frantic little bird beating its wings against the cage of his fingers. “Now we’re even, I suppose.”

Vox’s next breath comes unevenly, and the metal of his chair creaks underneath his claws. Alastor glances up at him, eyes lidded.

“Don’t look so worried, my dear,” he says, petting a thumb over Vox’s aortic outflow. “Don’t you trust me to take care of you?”

It’s a fun question to ask. Any reasonable person would answer ‘no,’ but Vox’s reason as far as Alastor is concerned has been surely and irreparably eroded by his so-called love—or his lust, or his greed, or even his fear. It’s hard to tell, really, which of the forces is strongest.

The great, vented things that Vox has in the place of lungs—and, oh, they’re uncanny to behold now that he’s north of the diaphragm, the mechanical pumping of them integral to his cooling system and taking up a good deal less space than real lungs should—shiver as Vox stares down at himself, able to watch Alastor’s ministrations for the first time.

“I, uh.” Alastor raises an eyebrow as Vox stutters, tracing the pads of his fingers down his aorta until it’s parallel to Vox’s spine, pretending ignorant at the reason that Vox voice hitches, pitchy, at that exact moment. “Oh, god.”

Alastor hums, chuckling. “Too late to pray, I’m afraid.”

Vox’s eyes are large on his face, whatever code responsible for his expressiveness dedicated to portraying genuine, wide-eyed vulnerability.

He clears his throat, diaphragm fluttering even though the noise only makes it out through a speaker. “So, um. The—it’s the—you have to take the, um, the system—offline, first—oh my god, can you p-please stop that for just—two seconds? Please?”

“Stop what?” Alastor says, smiling placidly. It’s an inspiring amount of begging to have prompted so early on. His claws dip between Vox’s aorta and superior vena cava, parting the two great blood vessels neatly with a slick noise. They’re both warm against his fingers, one firmer, the other giving way easily underneath his hand.

Vox makes a ragged sound, shivering against the chair. His arms are tense, claws digging into the arm rests so aggressively that he’s in danger of gouging through the metal.

“Th-that,” he says, voice faint.

“Mm. Alright, I suppose. Since you’re getting distracted.”

Alastor withdraws his hand slowly, taking a step back, and Vox goes limp with a relieved sigh—right up until he manages to tear his eyes away from his own chest cavity to watch Alastor dip a finger into his own mouth, humming curiously.

“Oh, fuck on a stick,” Vox says, the way his chest seizes at that coming out as very nearly a hiccup. “Look, it’s not—I’m not—fuck me, it is distracting! You’re fondling my insides the way most people fondle—I don’t even know. I can’t even feel it or anything, but even watching it is a fucking trip! I’m pretty sure this is what Victorian maidens felt like right before swooning.”

Alastor grins. “I’m just familiarizing myself with the anatomy! You’re rather non-standard, after all!”

“And you’re a shitty liar when you’re smug,” Vox says, his laugh half-hysterical. “But hey, what did I expect? Uh—look, just.” He stares up at Alastor, that same vulnerable expression. If Vox has a machine hiding behind his rib cage, then Alastor has a ravenous beast, and Vox looking like that is meat dangling over its maw, just out of reach. But there. A promise.

Alastor’s back is to the monitors, the main light source in the room, and he casts a shadow across Vox’s face. It is this, mostly, that makes Alastor aware of the way that his antlers begin to fork apart, slowly growing larger.

“You’re going to have to disable visuals entirely,” Vox says, scuffing at his shin with a heel. “Doesn’t matter if you start with the cameras or the GPU first. So.”

“Nervous?” Alastor asks, unable to help himself. From another mouth, the question might sound reassuring. From his…well, the chance that he’s stopped himself from just sounding hungry isn’t zero.

The thing is, the actual process required for this upgrade isn’t particularly complicated for anyone with a basic knowledge of circuitry. Vox has managed to make himself very effectively swappable over the years. The GPU in particular is just a matter of ensuring the proper connections, and the cameras aren’t much more complicated except for being much smaller and requiring some manual wiring rather than being pluggable.

Suffice to say, Vox’s general apprehension is unlikely to be on the subject of Alastor getting it wrong. And, oh, that just makes it all the more delicious.

Vox squirms in place, squeezing his knees together. “Not even a little! Go—” He wheezes. “Go hog wild, Bambi! Why not!”

“Very well!” Alastor says, and waits, smiling pleasantly with his hands tucked behind his back.

Vox stares at him, pupils wide—and then blinks, waiting. And waiting. He bites his lip. “What are you…?”

Alastor lets one side of his smile quirk up, lopsided. “You need to spread your legs for me, my dear.”

“—oh.” That one lands exactly where Alastor was aiming it. Vox’s screen floods with pink. He slowly slides his legs apart, giving Alastor space to step up between his knees once more.

“You’re quite beautiful like this, you know,” Alastor says, picking up a pair of needle-nose pliers.

“I—I am?” Vox’s voice is confused, hopeful.

“Mhm.” He dips his fingers into Vox again, shifting his liver away from the first connection that the maintenance guide indicates he will need to disengage. “I’ve carved open a great many people, and none were quite so well-organized! Now, of course, you don’t bleed as easily—” He closes the thin tips of the pliers against the relevant connector, and snaps it out of place. “—but there is so much to be said for pliability.”

Vox gasps, his whole body shuddering. His screen goes blank. Alastor is fairly certain that’s entirely psychosomatic—he’s rendered Vox blind, but there shouldn’t be anything wrong with his display, not yet, though his eyes wouldn’t be able to sync to any sightline…and yet.

And yet.

Alastor decides he likes it.

Half of the screens surrounding them flicker away from the fuzzy, multi-angle camera feeds to become Vox, instead: fully dressed, bowtie perky, pressing his palms against the proverbial fourth wall as he leans in to try to peer at what Alastor is doing as his own third party. His eye, wide and swirling, takes up almost the entirety of the screens for a moment, before he leans back slightly, claws curling against the nonexistent screen separating him from the real world.

“Oh, fuck,” Vox realizes. “I can’t fucking see what you’re doing.”

Alastor smiles, wide and pleased, though he’s now the only one who can see it. “Oh, my. What a lack of foresight on your part.”

Vox swallows, both on the screen and in person. “What—what are you doing?”

Alastor straightens from where he’s been leaning over Vox’s torso, turning his head toward the nearest camera. Vox won’t be able to make out much, but Alastor knows there’s little in the world that will hide his own wicked smile.

He waves the pliers at the camera, a fuzzy nothingness on the monitors.

“Just following instructions,” he says. “Is something wrong?’

“No.” Vox’s digital eyes dart from side to side as he cycles through the cameras, only to realize that there’s not a single one of the dozen-some that will offer him an unobstructed view of his own body. “No, um—can you move over? A bit?”

Alastor leans back over Vox, adjusting his monocle as he peers inside. He presses the pliers in again. “No, Vox, not really. This is kind of delicate work.”

“Oh.” Vox’s voice is quieter, the hands of his real body clenched on the armrests again. “O—um—okay.”

Alastor snaps another connection, prompting a little shiver, and then a third. To get to the fourth, he has to go deeper, and he puts the pliers aside to slide his hand neatly around Vox’s esophagus and cradle his cervical spine.

“Oh!” It seems to be the word of the day for Vox, who shudders violently at the touch. “It’s—god. It’s like you're taking parts of me away, but then—what are you—what are you touching?”

“Your spine, my dear,” Alastor says, petting over the vertebrae. There are plugs in the back, one of which is what he’s looking for and another one of which will serve him well soon. “Around your neck.”

“It feels like you got big,” Vox says, faintly dreamy, “and wrapped your hand around my whole body.”

Alastor disconnects the first plug, fully isolating Vox’s visual processing system. Vox flinches again, and the fine tremble that wracks his body afterward remains this time. There’s a small sound, and the remaining tinge of backlighting that was keeping his screen alive blips out.

“Now,” Alastor says, not yet unwrapping his hand from around Vox’s neck, “the next bits are more sensitive. Given your behavior last time I did this, I’m not sure I trust you to hold properly still.”

“Hey, hold on—” Vox starts, and cuts himself off with an awkward hitch when Alastor runs his thumb over Vox’s trachea. Not enough to compress—the tubing of it is less sturdy than the typical human cartilage that protects this region, though Vox still has a hyoid with a thin-stretched, queer parallel to the normal associated muscular and connective tissue. Frankly, the man’s musculoskeletal system must run entirely off of hellish magic, because while Alastor can clearly see the bit of scarring across his iliopsoas where he’d taken a chunk out for Alastor’s dinner the other week, there is starkly little in the way of abdominal muscles to impede his current endeavors—to say nothing of everything else that should make the inside of a human torso thoroughly inaccessible.

At any rate, he’s not strangling Vox. Just reminding him that Alastor is there.

The virtual Vox’s shoulders are hitched, and he’s clutching his throat, all wide-eyed surprise. “What did—what was—?”

“No need to worry,” Alastor reassures him, smile threading through his tone. “I’m just going to take a simple precaution!”

“Wait—”

Alastor disconnects the second plug. At the same exact second, Vox’s entire body goes limp.

“Oh, fuck!”

Hollow static vibrates through the room, and Alastor catches Vox’s body before it can slump to the side. He kicks around underneath the over-engineered monstrosity that Vox calls a chair until he finds the right lever, and tips the whole thing back at a slight angle, laying Vox out in a more convenient arrangement.

Then he runs his hands down Vox’s legs, stopping at his knees. “How are you doing, my dear?”

“I can’t!” More static. The Vox on-screen walks in a quick circle, tugging at his own sleeves. The vocals aren’t coming from Vox’s physical body anymore, instead projecting through the room’s speakers. “I—I—I—can’t move! I can’t—see! But—you’re touching me!” He squeezes his arms around himself in a hug for a second, before darting back to the front of the screen—and flickering into the camera feeds, tugging fruitlessly on the arm of Alastor’s staticky form. Nothing, of course, actually happens in reality. “You’re touching me,” Vox repeats, all frazzled relief.

Alastor squeezes Vox’s knees, watching his real body’s fans kick up a notch. His heart is rabbiting in his chest, visibly panicked. “That I am!”

The Vox in the video feeds drapes himself over Alastor’s half-visible back, clutching his torso in a hug and peering fruitlessly over his shoulder. “I can’t see what you’re doing!”

“And you won’t,” Alastor says, rubbing circles into the insides of Vox’s knees with his thumbs.

This puts a stop to Vox’s frantic stammering. His form fizzles for a moment on the screens, confused and wide-eyed, and then he clutches at the virtual Alastor even harder.

“Okay,” Vox says, pressing his face into Alastor’s back on the wrong side of reality. “Okay, just. Don’t stop touching me.”

Alastor smiles, and lets his voice go low and warm. “Darling,” he says, smoothing his hands up Vox’s sides, “I can’t keep my hands off of you.”

He punctuates this statement by letting tendrils of shadow crawl out from beneath his feet. Not too many—not enough to draw Vox’s attention. But enough to maneuver Vox onto his knees in the chair, providing the angle and support that Alastor is looking for. When the tendrils disappear, his shadow stays, keeping its hands on Vox’s shoulders to stop him from slumping over.

Vox’s staticky sigh through the speakers is stuttered, ostensibly puffing against the back of Alastor’s neck. He can’t feel it, obviously, but the buzzing of Vox’s digital regard redoubles, a panicked itch undercutting it.

Alastor can, however, feel the fine tremble of Vox’s body, the warm puff of air as it vents out his sides, the frantic thump-thump-thump of his heart in his chest. He’s terrified. It’s all very endearing. Especially since fear is clearly not the only thing that’s getting his blood pumping.

Alastor huffs a short laugh through his nose, ignoring the confused noise that it prompts from Vox, who is apparently horny as ever when Alastor gets his hands on him. He’s not interested in any of Vox’s outsides when he has such a delectable selection of insides, but it’s still amusing to see him struggle on the tightrope stretched between fear and arousal. For all of his restless anxiety, he’s still tenting his pants.

“You’re very nervous,” Alastor says, reaching back inside of Vox’s chest cavity. The graphics processing unit is disconnected now, but that’s not his current target. “Why? I’ve done worse to you, haven’t I? I’m not even hurting you.”

He knows the answer, just about. But he would like for Vox to say it out loud.

“Well, I’m not—” Vox stutters, pupils fizzing out for a moment as he continues craning his head on the largest screen. “That is—oh, fuck, that’s my—um, I wasn’t blind last time! Or paralyzed! Or—shit, this is a really weird sensory overload. Are you touching my side?”

“No,” Alastor says, and pulls out a loop of wire. Vox’s nervous system is a bundle of brightly-colored wiring, with naked little branches splitting off at various points in a pattern that is not quite human and not quite machine. They’re insulated well enough apart from the sensory tendrils, and Alastor can’t actually stimulate them without putting a bit of spark into his touch, but…the same doesn’t go for Vox. He’s a constant bundle of electrical currents that generate an ambient field around him—usually weak, but enough to power his own nervous system.

Like the diametric opposite of a shark’s electroreception, apparently. At least according to Vox’s rambling pillow talk.

The key thing, Alastor thinks, is that he suspects that Vox’s spiking distress is going to be rather effective at stimulating his own wires. He has so many—some senselessly long, some easy to disconnect from the afferent inputs where they belong. It only takes a few moments to take advantage of Vox’s shoddy cable management before Alastor has what he needs.

He also takes his other hand off of Vox’s side, petting his flank, instead, like he’s gentling a horse.

“You are!” Vox exclaims, like he’s discovered a secret. “Oh, fuck, of course you’re ly-ly-lying about it. You’re such an asshole! Wait, are you moving me?”

Alastor snickers, tugging more wires out of place. Vox gasps, shivery, on the speakers. “You should stop worrying about it and enjoy the ride,” Alastor says as his shadow pulls Vox’s arms behind his back. Alastor follows, looping wire over wire over wire. Blue and red stand out starkly against the crisp white of Vox’s dress shirt, and press creases into the starchy fabric as they wind from shoulder to wrist.

“Or don’t! It’s more fun for me that way. You haven’t answered my question, by the way.”

“Wha—a—at?”

“Why you’re afraid this time,” Alastor says, running his hands up Vox’s arms. His claws flick off of loop after loop of wire as he trails them from Vox’s wrist to his elbow, to where bondage shifts into mere decoration at Vox’s upper arms and shoulders. Vox flinches with every single one, a breathless hitch of air.

“I’m not—af-fraid! Why are you—moving me?”

“Aren’t you?” Alastor says, ignoring the question. “Because if I were you, I would be.”

“—Bambi?”

Pleading. Saliva fills Alastor’s mouth like blood, and he has to swallow before he can speak. “Of course, I couldn’t kill you like this,” Alastor muses, winding his fingers into the mess of wires in Vox’s abdomen. They part around his claws easily, and Vox’s whole body shudders senselessly. “Even though our little deal doesn’t apply at the moment. You’re in the wires, after all! All it would do is leave you without physical form. But, oh, the things that I could do…”

He drags out another fat loop of wire, his blurry form clearly moving on the screens but in no way that shows what he’s actually doing.

So Vox is left having to ask.

“Like—like what?”

Alastor drapes the thin cables over Vox’s own lap, laying them out as he mentally calculates how he wants to do this. He’s tied up plenty of people over the years, of course—it’s hard to render someone immobile through force without killing them in the process, so he’d become rather skilled with knots back in his living days—but none of it was with quite the same goal.

He gestures for his shadow to lift Vox slightly, and sets to winding cables around his thighs and legs.

“My—I can’t tell what you’re touching. My—my back? My—? Why are you—?”

“I’m just arranging you for a better angle, my dear,” Alastor says absentmindedly as he works. “Since you’re indisposed at the moment.”

“Indisposed—”

“And there are a number of things, of course,” Alastor interrupts. “Many of which you’d enjoy, I’m sure. I could touch you, of course.” He smooths his palms up the tops of Vox’s legs, pressing his thumbs into the creases of his thighs when he reaches their apex. Vox can’t press into the motion—and won’t be able to even when Alastor reconnects his motor function—but he groans, startled, through the room’s speakers.

“H-holy fuck—a little higher, Bambi—”

Alastor lets go, and reaches into Vox’s abdomen to curl his claws around Vox’s lumbar spine. “In all kinds of ways. Where do you feel it now?”

“You’re—my legs? You didn’t—I mean, you moved, but you didn’t move—”

Alastor chuckles, low. “You would be so lucky.”

He lets loose wires nudge against his knuckles as he searches for enough length to finish what he’s doing. He finds what he’s looking for nearly at Vox’s sacrum, right before the bundles of nerve endings leave the spinal column entirely. He pets a finger over the new bundle, and Vox shivers violently.

“F-fuck,” Vox stutters. “For a guy who’s not getting off on this, you’re kind of a tease.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Alastor says. “I’m just doing what you asked of me.”

“Your hands are all over me!”

“Are they?” Alastor asks, pulling the wires out. “Anyway, do you want to hear the worst thing I could do to you?”

There’s a moment of silence, long and heavy. Vox’s breath is ragged in his chest, and the Vox on the monitors is clutching Alastor’s shoulders. Clingy.

“Yeah,” Vox says, voice small.

Alastor smiles, and finishes wrapping the cables. The work isn’t very calculated, but it is beautiful: half of Vox’s nervous system, spilling out of his guts like a colorful, pseudo-gory mess, trailing over his limbs to bind them together. And Vox himself: shaky, panting, flushed in the places he can be. Still hard. It’s probably an erotic sight for some, or else a viscerally disturbing one. Alastor wants to dig his claws in and eat.

He presses a finger into Vox’s scarred psoas muscle, watching the way it trembles under his touch along with the rest of Vox’s body.

“I could leave you,” he suggests warmly. “Just like this. You don’t even know what I’ve done to you yet, even though you felt it all, but you will. You’re blind and paralyzed, Vox—you’re hardly going to be able to reconnect your systems on your own. You’ve put yourself entirely into my hands.”

Vox whimpers. Wherever the noise comes from, it must be involuntary, because it echoes from his throat just as much as the computer speakers.

“You’re lucky I’m a very considerate person! Oh, that was a reaction—do you want me to stop after all?” Alastor asks, grinning. As the adage goes: never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. He’s pretty sure that’s for court proceedings, but it applies well enough for tormenting Vox, too.

The Vox on the monitors nods against Alastor’s back, pressing his face between Alastor’s shoulder blades. “Please,” he says. “Please stop.”

“Then you know what to say,” Alastor murmurs.

Vox shivers. And stays silent. Alastor’s smile grows ever wider, stretching against the confines of his face.

“Very well,” he says quietly. “If you’re good for me, I suppose I can return control of your body to you.”

“I—really?” It’s hilarious the degree to which Vox sounds genuinely hopeful—like Alastor is doing him a favor. “I will! I’ll be so good—”

“Oh, I know.” Alastor reaches back into that small, dark space behind Vox’s cervical spine. “You’re hardly going to have a choice, my dear.”

Vox doesn’t have time to fully vocalize the what? before Alastor’s shadow is releasing Vox and Alastor is plugging the connection to his motor systems back in.

“FUCK!”

The fading screech of microphone feedback echoing in his ears, Alastor leans in one more time, plucking up the last wire he’s left dangling. It’s a particular one he’s saved—best for last and all—and the only one of the afferent pain fibers that he’s gently excavated this time. He dips a claw back into the lower section of Vox’s abdomen to unwind the other wire he had fun playing with last time they did all this, stretches the two taut, and drags them up to tie a neat little bow around Vox’s throat.

Then he steps back and finally lets Vox see what he’s done to him.

“What—what—I can’t—I can move, but—why does it feel—oh my god, what the fu-xxxk di-id you-u-u dzzzxo?!”

Vox’s head is lolled back, limp against the back of the chair—the only real comfortable posture he can have it in at the moment, Alastor suspects. The rest of Vox is wracked with minute trembles, tense now that his motor control is back online and he’s not being supported by Alastor—muscles tight, straining, trying desperately not to move. Alastor didn’t tie him up particularly tightly, so it’s mostly up to his own posture to hold up the uncomfortable position, lest he yank on something sensitive.

“Now you can tell Velvette you’re a little tied up at the moment if she asks!” Alastor chirps, grinning. He’s mostly out of the way of the cameras, but one screen’s camera seems focused on him rather incessantly, and the monitor fills with blurry red distortion and a wicked smile. And, oh—are his eyes glowing? Oops.

“What—what—”

“Still a little stuck, I see,” Alastor says, humming. He swipes a finger up the pair of wires he’s fastened to Vox’s neck—both as red as lifeblood, bright and shiny, hard to tell apart, practically twins—and plucks them, putting a bit of staticky power into his touch. Pain and pleasure, delightfully intertwined.

Vox’s whole body jolts, flinching violently—and then twitches, and freezes, as the cascade of consequences of such a movement makes itself so very, thoroughly known to his nervous system. He ends up straining himself to be still, knees spread and back arched to perfectly present the vulnerable, open chest cavity that Alastor has been taking advantage of, personal speaker stuttering back to life with nothing but frantic, cut-off little nonsense vocalizations.

Alastor hums, delight bleeding through his faux-sympathy as he steps closer to Vox again, cutting off his view of himself. “What a unique experience this must be, my dear! A nervous system so easily manipulatable—you’ll have to pardon my presumption. I needed you still, and I hardly have anything else to tie you up with!”

Vox is panting, machine lungs puffing up in his chest and running cooling air through his thoracic cavity at such a pace that it’s sending his shirt billowing slightly in the places where his bound arms haven’t pinned it down.

Vox’s voice is watery when he next speaks, wavering. “You’re a fucking bastard. Holy shit. It’s—everywhere.”

“Mostly just your arms and legs, actually. There wasn’t enough wiring left for much more.”

Vox shifts restlessly, and promptly produces a high-pitched machine whine, twitching. “I can’t—I can’t hold this.”

“There’s nothing making you,” Alastor says, patting his hip. “You can lean into the bindings, they’ll hold you up.”

“They’re my nervous system,” Vox cries out, voice buzzing with electricity halfway through. “It feels—it feels…” He trails off, lost in the overwhelming contrast of sensation.

“Yes, well,” Alastor says, low. “That’s rather the point, isn’t it? Now be a dear and stay still, won’t you?”

It’s with that vague warning that he finally reaches into Vox’s chest and pulls out the graphics processing unit that he has long since disconnected. It goes with a simple click, though it’s accompanied by a pained—or maybe pleasured—or maybe both—catch of Vox’s breath as Alastor’s wrist pushes aside the two intertwined wires on the way out.

“Oh god,” Vox says. “Oh god. Okay. I get it. Fuck.”

Alastor laughs and holds up the circuit board and its case to turn it over, admiring. It’s patterned with teal and blue, and has a fan built into the casing. The new one still lying on the side table that he’s going to be replacing it with has two fans. Presumably Vox’s eyes will glitch out less often when he’s feeling overwhelmed this way.

“Strange,” Alastor says. “I’ve long appreciated the simultaneous beauty and banality of viscera and meat, but I find myself quite captivated with your inorganic components as well! Perhaps the real thing worthy of admiration is their purpose rather than their physical form.”

“You think my guts are pretty?” Vox gasps, joking. His antennae flicker with static for a moment as he comes down from whatever nauseating mix of sensation Alastor induced in him with the wires he brushed, sparking, but settle down quickly enough.

“I suppose I do!” Alastor says, cheerful, and sets down the old GPU. “Lucky you! Now, let’s get to business, shall we?”

The process doesn’t take long, though Alastor would wager that it doesn’t feel that way for Vox. He can’t seem to stop shifting in place, gasping when he jostles his own wires, trembling with muscle tension when he holds the position Alastor has forced him into for too long, occasionally gathering himself enough to relax slightly and promptly flinching away from the buzzing shock it sends up his own nerves. It doesn’t make for the most stable workspace, truth be told, but the sheer entertainment factor more than makes up for it.

Besides, if Alastor minded, he wouldn’t be helping quite the way he is. Most of the wires trail out of Vox’s spine or a fully inorganic set of components in his lower-right abdomen below his diaphragm. None of those things are really in the way of the cameras that Alastor has to install, but that doesn’t stop him from casually nudging them aside as he clips and solders, or brushing against them with his sleeves or the edge of his coat as he slots Vox’s new hardware into place, humming softly as he works.

Vox’s quiet, choked-down intonations are practically part of the music. They certainly would make a beautiful broadcast, anyway, though Alastor finds that he’s a little too greedy to share this one with anyone else. It probably wouldn’t be appropriate for live air, anyway: it’s hard to tell apart Vox’s keening discomfort and his more wanton noises, especially when his hips keep flinching whenever Alastor happens to brush a hand against his lower belly. Alastor would be a little tempted to touch, just to see what would happen, but he doesn’t actually want Vox to tear something vital.

He takes the actual hardware upgrades Vox needs done seriously enough, of course. None of the mechanics are entirely new to Alastor, and the manual that Vox set aside for himself is effective at filling in the blanks. He’s not sure it would be easy to parse for the average demon, but for all that Alastor is more monster than man at this point, he’s also hardly one of the fully organic entities wandering the pits of hell.

All too soon, however, he is done. The last camera clicks into place, the last wire is soldered, the last bit of extra insulation is clipped. All that’s left is to reboot Vox’s visual system. And not a spot of blood spilled! Truly, Vox’s machine body is a marvel.

“You know, Vox,” Alastor says, trailing a finger over a nerve that—well, actually, he’s lost track of where that one leads! That’s part of the fun! It sends Vox gasping and shivering all the same. “I wouldn’t expect a sellout like you to understand…but this really is a very exquisite work of art. One of my best works yet, I’d say. There’s just things I can do to you that can’t be done to the average body.”

“Did I—did you like it?” Vox blurts, shivering incessantly, like he’s cold. His thighs are tense. There’s a visible spot of damp starting to leak through the front of his trousers, wretchedly telling despite his distress. “Did I do—was it good?”

Something in Alastor’s own chest claws against the inside of his ribs, a ravenous maw yawning open. He can feel the darkness seeping into his eyes, this time, the way the shadows of the room suddenly loom a little bit more.

“You miserable little creature,” Alastor rasps through static, swallowing the blood that pools in his mouth. “You’re lucky that I left you alive at all, and you’re worried about whether or not you entertained me?”

Vox shifts in place, muscles spasming with the discomfort. “I—yeah.” He swallows. “I am. Please?”

Alastor smiles, wide—wider, strictly, than he should be able to, and reality bends to accommodate. He strips his gloves off and reaches out, keeping the suddenly wicked points of his claws out of the way as he pets a hand over Vox’s side, like one would soothe a pet.

“You poor thing,” he says. “Rest assured that your suffering has always been and continues to be an unadulterated delight.”

Vox strains toward the point of contact, the first and only bit of skin-on-skin contact that he’s gotten since Alastor turned this experience into an ordeal, and audibly whines in the back of his throat at the strain this puts on the wiring binding him.

“Would you fuck me like this?” he asks, pitchy. “Alastor? Please?”

“Hm.” Alastor rubs his thumb in a soothing—or perhaps maddening—little circle against Vox’s vulnerable side. “Now why would I do a thing like that?”

Vox sobs, dry. “It’s the most you ever touch me!” he blurts. “Like this, it’s always like this—please—it doesn’t have to—you could just, inside—”

“Shh,” Alastor says, squeezing Vox’s side. “I can’t. I don’t actually want to break you, darling, and I don’t think you would enjoy it as much as you think you would.”

Vox groans, genuinely despondent, and Alastor brushes his other hand over an unbound portion of Vox’s knee. He might have bent the stick a little too far, here, so he keeps them as they are for a minute, until Vox’s breathing feels a little bit more under control.

And then he leans over the selection of tools on Vox’s little side table, pondering.

“There is something I can do, though,” he muses, picking up a screwdriver with a pointed head and holding it up to the light. “Cursive or print, dear?”

“Wh-what?”

Alastor peers into Vox’s abdominal cavity, searching, and—ah, there. One of the ribs nearly cradles his heart, underneath the hinge that draws Vox’s sternum open. There should be plenty of other things attached to it, ostensibly, but it’s one of the strange realities of Vox’s anatomy: some parts of it just withdraw when he slides his chest open.

“I’m leaving you a little present,” he says, pressing the tip of the screwdriver to the rib. “Signing my work, as they say—don’t move, Vox.”

Vox falls still from where he’d started, quivering in place. “Cursive!” he blurts from the computer speakers surrounding them. “Oh, fuck, oh fuck—where are you putting it? Can you—I want to see! You have nice handwriting, I always—are you really? On me? Can you show me?”

“You know I can’t,” Alastor says, laughing lightly, but he pets a thumb over the nerve connection that runs along the side of the rib, making Vox twitch with a wet little gasp. “But it’s here. On a rib by your heart, hm? Unless you have another preference.”

“No.” Vox’s eyes are filling up nearly the entirety of the screens he’s looking through, big and wondrous. “No, that’s—that’s perfect. That’s perfect.”

Alastor’s smile stretches wide, pleased. “Lovely.”

He sets to carving.

A screwdriver is hardly the best tool for this kind of work, but it’s the best he’s got, and he’s got to be meticulous about it thanks to the angle regardless. Print would have been easier, but he did offer Vox the choice, and he’s not going to back down from a challenge now. It takes several long minutes, half of which he spends wondering if he would have been better served by using one of his claws, but when he’s done—well.

It’s his name, scrawled in sprawling cursive along the inside of one of Vox’s ribs. Pressed right up against the beating organ keeping him alive, which hasn’t ceased thudding along at a pace best described as ‘overexcited’ for the entire time Alastor spent writing.

“There,” Alastor says, placing the screwdriver back down on the table. “Pretty as a picture. You can go looking for it yourself next time you perform your own maintenance.”

Vox whines in the back of his throat, clearly fighting not to wriggle. “I love it,” he says, pitchy. “Best present you’ve ever gotten me. Fuck. Thank you. I want to—ugh. I’m gonna open myself up again as soon as we’re done.”

“Well, I won’t say you’re not predictable. And how are you actually holding up, my dear?” Alastor asks, squeezing Vox’s knee with a smile.

“Fine,” Vox manages, though he still sounds profoundly peaky. “I’m fine, please—”

“I’m going to untie you,” Alastor tells him before he can get himself worked up again, “and when I’m done, I’ll let you see again.”

“Okay!” Vox agrees, quick, not quite frantic. His head twitches, like he’s about to nod, before he thinks better of it. “Okay!”

Putting Vox back together takes less time than taking him apart. Vox’s wires aren’t made to be stretched out and looped around him the way they are now—they return to their intended places easily and without resistance. Alastor leaves the ones he’s wrapped Vox’s neck in a pretty little bow in for last, tracing the pad of his finger up the knotted spiral that he knows sends rivulets of pleasure running down Vox’s spine, but not particularly considerate to avoid nicking the afferent pain fibers woven through.

Vox squirms throughout, biting back noises even as his knees squeeze tightly around Alastor’s hips, but something in him remains still and scared: he doesn’t move his hands out from behind his back, doesn’t alleviate the strained arch of his back, even once Alastor has wound all of his wires back into their rightful places.

(And perhaps organized the cables a little bit better. It really was a mess in there, before.)

“Oh,” Alastor says, because he’s pleased with the results, and because he likes watching what the words do to Vox. “Good boy.”

Vox’s shoulders jump, like they want to hike up around his shoulders, but then settle back into the posture Alastor’s machinations had demanded of him. The Vox on the screens, however, covers his face with his hands.

“Do you have to say it like that?” he asks weakly. “In that tone?”

Alastor turns his head, making eye contact with a camera that’s going to catch glowing red circles from him at best, and grins as he puts on the peppiest version of his hosting cadence. “A splendid showing, my good man, absolutely phenomenal! Inquiring minds want to know: just what is your secret?!” Ambient applause echoes around them, more distorted than usual in the den of Vox’s power.

“—ffft,” Vox manages, shaking. “Oh, fuck, don’t make me laugh when I’m this fucked up and horny. Point made, we can go back to the sexy voice.”

Alastor lets his voice drop, purring: “Wonderful.”

“Christ. I’m gonna die a second death of emotional whiplash.”

“And here I thought you’d prefer a littler death!” Alastor says, and runs his fingers one last time along the vertebrae of Vox’s spine. Up, up, up, around the nerves and organs and muscles and ribs, until he can tuck his hand around the back of his neck and pinch the last missing connection that will return Vox’s visual processing capabilities between two fingers. “Are you ready, my dear?”

Vox shivers. “Fuck, please.”

Alastor smiles to himself, and slides the connection back into its place.

First and most obviously, Vox’s screen flickers back to life. Alastor has seen Vox sleep before—his face is gone then, too, replaced by a screensaver to save power. This is the first time he’s seen it entirely off, and watching it come back online makes him realize that he missed the close-up view of Vox’s expressive face.

A split second and slightly less obviously, Vox’s new cameras come online. Alastor can pinpoint the moment it happens, when Vox’s eyes start mapping to what he’s actually looking at—which is also when they fixate on Alastor’s face, wide and red, pupils shivering in that queer way that they sometimes do when he’s overwhelmed.

“Holy shit,” Vox says. His gaze rakes down, from Alastor’s face to his body to where his arm is still stretching out to cup the back of Vox’s neck from the inside.

It ends up, inevitably, fixed back on Alastor’s face.

“...You’re really beautiful,” Vox blurts. “Like some monster out of a story. That wolf, from Little Red Riding Hood. Y’know. Big teeth.”

Alastor laughs for a long time at that. When he’s done, drawing his hand out of Vox’s open chest cavity and letting it slide closed with a little snick, he grasps the bottom of Vox’s screen instead, pulling him up higher onto his knees until he’s leaning forward off that gaudy chair of his.

“I see the new optics are fulfilling their purpose,” he says, and waits until Vox strains forward, eyes fixated on Alastor’s mouth. Then he nudges Vox just hard enough to send him tumbling out of the seat.

Vox goes sprawling onto the floor, swearing as the cables still plugged into the back of his head provide enough slack to send him to his knees, and Alastor throws himself into the seat instead with another laugh. His momentum sends him spinning, and he allows himself two full circles before he puts his legs down to bring himself to a stop, facing Vox.

Alastor leans his chin into one hand, elbow propped up on the arm of the chair as Vox slowly gathers himself. “You really do belong on your knees, my dear.”

“And you’re an asshole,” Vox says, but scoots forward anyway. His hands cup the backs of Alastor’s knees, and he presses close until he’s practically in Alastor’s lap. “A really pretty one, though. Fuck, I didn’t realize how red your hair was. Or—your eyes are black enough to fucking drown in.”

Alastor reaches over with his free hand to flick one of Vox’s antennae, sending it quivering. “You look like a dog begging for scraps at the table. Spit it out, Vox.”

Vox’s hands squeeze around Alastor’s legs for a split second, seemingly involuntary, and his mouth stretches into a greedy leer. “C’mon, Bambi. You’ve got me fucking panting for it. Don’t tell me you did all that just to leave me like this?”

Alastor stares down at him. Knees splayed, hands grasping, a plaintive tilt to his brows. In fact, Alastor has already decided what he’s done ‘all that’ for.

“It’s not my fault,” he says, stretching out a leg, “that you can’t control yourself during a simple parts upgrade.”

Vox whines obnoxiously, pressing closer to Alastor’s legs. “You don’t get it—I can—I can still feel your hands on me. Everywhere.”

“Did you record it?” Alastor asks, knowing.

Vox nods, flushing. “It’s—there weren’t visuals anyway. But. The tactile inputs. And audio.”

Alastor laughs, and presses down with his foot. Vox flinches, full-bodied, and then drops his head back and groans as the sole of Alastor’s boot grinds his cock back into his belly through his pants.

“Even here?” Alastor says, sweet.

Vox’s vocals fritz out into an electronic warble, and he nods his head frantically, pressing his hips up into the stimulating pressure.

Alastor lets him. Vox has to drop his hands from Alastor to keep going, leaning back onto them instead so that he has the leverage to more or less hump the bottom of Alastor’s shoe. Alastor doesn’t have to bother doing much—he just holds his leg still, watching Vox get off to a stimulation that Alastor himself barely feels. When he’s feeling particularly curious, he presses his boot down again, grinding the heel into the base of Vox’s cock, and listens to Vox’s voice crack with no small amount of glee.

“Fuck,” Vox cries. “Oh fuck, oh god, Bambi—ah, ah, finally—”

“Finally?” Alastor interrupts, raising an eyebrow. Vox doesn’t see it, eyes shuttered as he loses himself in bliss.

Vox whines in the back of his throat. “Yeah,” he admits. “Wanted this from the moment you got your hands on me, ah—I knew it, I knew you were gonna do something completely fucked, you’re always—but, fuck, I never know what. Oh!”

Alastor lifts his foot for a moment, watching Vox thrust up into nothing, and snickers, tapping the toe of his shoe back down a couple of times just to watch Vox jolt.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Alastor says as Vox winces and flinches, unable to match Alastor’s rhythm. He taps his fingertips against his cheek, amused. “Just having some fun. You were saying?”

Vox tries to say something again, but it just comes out as a low groan when he finds his angle again, hips stuttering.

“Fuck,” he swears, and electricity snaps in an arc between his antennae, punctuating his words with a bright flash that leaves the imprint of a heart burned into the backs of Alastor’s eyelids.

“...You get very uncreative with your exclamations sometimes,” Alastor notes, blinking rapidly. He’s a little bit more charmed by the heart than he would readily admit.

“Can you—harder?” Vox asks. His claws are digging into the floor behind him, and his vents are puffing air hot enough that Alastor can feel it brushing against his pant legs from here. “I just need—I’m almost…”

“Why, of course,” Alastor says. He presses harder, as requested, and watches Vox’s eyes practically roll back into his skull as his cock is pinned harshly between Alastor’s shoe and his own stomach. Vox grinds his hips into it, punishing, even as the whining computer tones that have been droning on in the background for the past five minutes rise into a crescendo pitch of—

Alastor raises his foot, drawing it back and crossing his legs. “On second thought, I was thinking…”

Vox’s half-garbled vocalization drowns out the rest of what he says, so Alastor hushes up and waits, shaking with silent laughter.

Vox’s hips kick up into nothing, the obvious dampness of lubricant on the front of his trousers now spread and faintly outlining the stiff contour of his cock. It looks uncomfortable. His teeth grit when Alastor leaves him hanging, and a hand immediately flies between his legs, groping for the button of his slacks—which Alastor kicks away, too, disapproving.

“Now, now!” Alastor says, sitting up properly in anticipation. “Pay attention, Vox, this is important!”

Vox just stares up at him, baleful and—oh, a tad bit wet in the eyes!

“You cannot,” he says, “be doing this to me again—”

“Well, that’s just what I was thinking of!” Alastor says, upbeat. “You were such a good sport about things the other time, and then you were so insistent on the difference between love and lust… Don’t move.”

Vox freezes. Alastor stretches his leg out again—drags the toe of his boot up Vox’s inner thigh and then steps on him, rubbing. Slow and steady, nothing that will cause a mess, though the first bit of contact drags a pathetic little sound out of Vox’s throat.

Vox stays perfectly still, claws digging into his own thighs with enough pressure that he’s honestly at risk of ruining his clothing.

Well. Ruining it more.

“So prove it,” Alastor says sweetly. “I didn’t come here to fuck you. You weren’t planning on it anyway. Maybe we just spent a lovely bit of time bonding.” He snickers at his own pun. “Nothing to come into your pants like an inexperienced teenager over.”

He gives Vox one last little rub, and flicks his foot up and off, leaving Vox trembling, hard and leaking into his own pants as Alastor smiles down at him, placid. The justification for his request is entirely farcical, of course. He doesn't really need...proof. But—mm.

Vox stares up at him in wide-eyed disbelief for several long seconds. Then his shoulders slump, and he tips forward, pressing himself against the fronts of Alastor’s legs.

“You’re a sadist who gets off on watching me suffer,” he decides.

“Well, I wouldn’t say I get off on it,” Alastor says, “but I’ve hardly been hiding my enjoyment, no.”

“Are you actually serious?” Vox whines.

“As a heart attack,” Alastor confirms, drawing a cheeky X over his own breastbone.

Vox squirms, breath coming unsteadily. “I—fuck. Can I at least—” He casts his eyes about, like he’s not even sure what to ask for. Eventually, his gaze returns to Alastor, quivering. “Can I at least suck your dick?” Vox blurts. “Please? I’ll get you off, I promise, it’ll be so fucking good—get you making the prettiest noises, bet you’d come down my throat so nice in my own fucking chair, Bambi, you’d love it—”

Alastor’s lips pull back over his gums slightly. “Absolutely not.”

Vox groans, pressing his face into Alastor’s knees. “Fuck. Fuck. Okay. I just—need a minute. Ugh.”

Alastor, magnanimous, gives him a minute. It takes closer to five, of Vox taking slow, tremulous breaths and shifting restlessly on his knees. He wraps his hands back around Alastor’s legs, forehead pressed against his knees, and, credit where credit is due, does not fucking touch himself. Even if it does take a while for him to stop trying to rock himself down every few seconds, a thin whine scraping out of his speakers every time he stops himself.

And Alastor watches, and waits, and grows hungrier.

Eventually, he puts a hand on Vox’s head, twirling his crooked antenna around his finger. “How are you doing, my dear?”

“Peachy,” Vox says, voice strong despite the way that it’s gone slightly wet. For all that Alastor is enjoying himself, the lack of spite or irritation in Vox's tone unravels a tension in Alastor's own shoulders. The trouble with playing at condescension, sometimes, is that Alastor isn't half bad at lying to himself, either, it seems.

Alastor smiles. “Shall we get you a change of clothes and go out for lunch, then? I find that I’m getting a little…peckish.”

Vox lifts his head, propping his chin up on Alastor’s knees. “Yeah,” he says, staring up at him. His eyes are still damp, but even when Alastor tips his head to the side, he refuses to look away. “Yeah, okay.”

Alastor blinks down at him, and pulls Vox to his feet. He’s unsteady, knees wobbling, but clutches Alastor’s arm very enthusiastically when he offers it. “Very well, then. Do you still like beignets, or was that something you said when you were still trailing after my heels because you found out they were popular in New Orleans?”

“Uh…”

Alastor huffs a laugh through his nose, patting Vox’s shoulder. “Alright. Show me to somewhere that serves food you actually enjoy.”

Vox does. They also serve very good coffee, which is somewhere that his and Vox’s tastes actually intersect, and Vox only tries to play footsie under the table twice. After the second time, Alastor rolls his eyes and just leans his ankle against Vox’s. He’s not sure the contact helps much with Vox’s ongoing problem, which seems to have him somewhat prone to alternating staring intently at Alastor any time his sleeve so much as slides back to bare the jutting bone of his wrist, but…

It’s distant enough to stop his skin from crawling, and it’s also enough to make Vox’s face go red. Not even that charming bit of embarrassment, however, hides the way he smiles into his custard tart.