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[ ——— ✦ · 18+ WARNING · ✦ ——— ]
THIS ONE-SHOT CONTAINS EXPLICIT SEXUAL CONTENT, GORE,
BODY HORROR, DESECRATION, MACABRE EROTICISM, AND NECROPHILIA.
READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
( And yes, I know I have a guaranteed ticket straight to Hell (?) )
[ ——— ✦ · ✦ ——— ]
[ ——— ✦ · ✦ ——— ]
“As long as I can wipe that fucking smile off Alastor’s face…”
Vox was crying when he said it.
“I don’t care what happens.”
Alastor thought about those words later, when he found the body among the remains of the battle.
And something about all of it seemed absolutely amusing to him.
Not the rage. Not the tears. Not the threat of taking half the city with him just to wipe that smile off his face…
The irony!
Vox had already lost his head long before someone tore it off~
After that, once Vox’s head had been ripped off and everyone eventually left, only his body remained there, lying in the middle of the disaster.
With no one else around except Alastor, watching it closely.
Still warm.
Mutilated…
At last, he was silent.
That was the first thing Alastor noticed.
Not the blood. Not the cut. Not the absurd shape of the body lying among the wreckage.
The silence.
Vox had always been exaggeratedly loud.
Even when he was not speaking, he seemed to occupy the air with that need of his to exist far too loudly. Screens, advertisements, static, orders, threats, fake laughter; all that cheap noise that turned any room into an extension of his ego.
And now he said nothing.
For once.
The most unpleasant thing was that the silence did not make him any less strange.
On the contrary…
Without the voice, without the screen turned on, without that unbearable insistence on turning everything into a broadcast, Vox’s body became even more absurd. More obvious. More badly made. As if someone had ripped away the noise and left exposed the aberration that had always been underneath.
To begin with, he had a screen instead of a head.
A real screen. Glass, light, hard edges, blue glow; all that shit. An absurd thing capable of speaking, biting, smiling, bleeding, eating, and recording, as if glass had any right to behave like flesh.
Vox could emit signals, invade frequencies, and project himself onto other screens, along with an entire collection of cheap little tricks that, put together, were still nothing but noise.
If one head burned out or broke, as had happened dozens of times when Alastor had had the pleasure of destroying them again and again during those wars they had sustained for more than seventy years, Vox simply moved to another screen. He transferred his memory like someone moving a file too stubborn to die inside a single device.
Vox had always been a badly assembled creature of flesh, electricity, and vanity. Half shark, half machine, half signal saturated with so many complexes they kept his soul in shreds.
He breathed through those grotesque gills between his ribs. He bled through a layer of glass. He bit with a mouth that should not exist.
He had teeth.
A tongue.
Saliva.
Alastor did not know how.
Probably not even Vox himself knew how the fuck that aberration worked.
He recorded memories the way one keeps tapes, files, and backups. He kept too much, perhaps. Images, voices, defeats, humiliations. Everything archived, everything ready to be played over and over again, because Vox had never known how to let anything die in silence.
It made no sense.
It never had.
And separated from his head, it made even less.
Alastor would have expected to find a motionless body, a badly powered-down remnant, a warm carcass stinking of hot plastic and spent flesh. Something closer to a corpse. Something simple.
But the body was still giving off small residual discharges.
There were poor sparks born from the open cut, dying against the soaked fabric, pulling small contractions from the flesh. Like a finger barely bending, a leg tensing without purpose, or the torso shuddering as if it were still waiting for instructions from a head that was no longer there…
He was not alive in any way that mattered.
He was not dead in any useful way.
He was Vox, even like this.
How unpleasant.
The head had gone with Valentino, who surely believed the head was where Vox ended and began.
Alastor knew it was not.
Any idiot could keep a mouth…
The body was something else.
Alastor tilted his head, hands resting on his newly repaired cane, and observed the open neck with quiet attention.
There was something almost offensive about seeing him like this.
Vox had been noise, order, image, insistence…
He had turned his voice into a plague.
Alastor knew that better than anyone.
A voice could lie.
A smile could be rehearsed.
A screen could pretend brightness, authority, charm, dominance.
But a body never lied.
A body had weight. It bled. It opened like ripe fruit and kept warmth where there should no longer be any, surrendering secrets the mouth would have preferred to sell as spectacle.
That was what the living never understood.
No one had understood the beauty Alastor found in corpses.
Flesh told the truth.
So did blood.
He appreciated the way tendons contracted. He admired the weight of the body when it stopped fighting. He understood heat leaving slowly, skin opening beneath the blade with an addictive obedience.
There were no speeches there.
No masks.
No lies.
Only body.
Brutal.
Honest.
Alastor felt pleasure in killing. In mutilating. In tasting afterward what was left. It was a deep, dark, cannibal pleasure; a joy born in him when he cut, when he sank his teeth into what had once been arrogance and was now only tender, open, honest flesh.
The hungry fascination of separating the lie layer by layer until reaching the bone.
There were those who loved faces. Those who chased names, promises, or moans.
But Alastor distrusted all of that.
He preferred the damp silence of freshly opened flesh, the metallic taste of life escaping between his fingers, that exact moment when the body stopped pretending and became, at last, absolute truth.
There was power there.
There was beauty there.
Besides, what a vulgar need people had to fill the air with explanations, truly~
Other people’s words, inside his head, were almost always lies. Fanfare. Pantomime with teeth. Just another elegant way to hide hunger, fear, desire, or stupidity behind moans, promises, and well-spoken shit.
The only voice he tolerated was his own.
The others contaminated the air.
His gave orders~
Now the mouth was far away.
The screen too.
And the decapitated body, turned into simple silence, said what Vox would never have allowed out of his mouth.
Blood poured from the severed neck, red at first, dark almost immediately. Vox’s body had never been only flesh, but neither was it clean machine. It was something in between, a heavy mass of demonic tissue, living metal, and fluids too dense, almost hydraulic. That was why it oxidized so quickly when it touched the air. That was why it blackened, viscous and bright, slipping beneath the torn shirt like something that still had not finished deciding whether it wanted to clot or burn.
Alastor watched it without blinking.
And felt hunger.
True hunger.
Hunger to lick that oxidized filth that smelled of old iron and dead electricity. To sink his tongue into the open wound of the neck and suck out what was still warm. To bite that body that could no longer defend itself or feign superiority.
He remembered Vox’s taste. He had tasted him many times: in savage bites during those fights that always ended with both of them panting on the floor, teeth sunk in deep enough to tear skin, tongues licking open wounds like animals in heat. Dirty moments where Vox opened under his teeth and growled, furious and hard at the same time, allowing Alastor to suck that metallic heat from him while their bodies rubbed against each other with rage and something darker.
Dense, metallic, with that bitter aftertaste of burned circuits and dried semen. A taste that had stayed stuck to the back of his tongue for years.
And Vox always stayed.
Bleeding, cursing him under his breath, struggling to breathe… as if every bite were a twisted way of surrendering without having to say it.
Back then, they were still something~
Not something pretty.
Not something either of them would have admitted without turning it into a mockery or a threat.
But something real.
Something twisted, hungry, and addictive.
To Alastor, Vox had been a wound that never fully scarred over.
To Vox, Alastor had been the perfect excuse to let himself be destroyed a little more.
What an unpleasant sensation…
His mind remembered him clearly.
His body missed him with hunger.
He wanted to taste him again.
He wanted to sink his teeth into that flesh once more, lick the sweat and that oxidized taste mixed together, feel Vox tense beneath him while trying to pretend he did not need it that badly. He wanted to know if, beneath all the dead electricity and ruin, that impossible, warm, filthy taste that only Vox had still existed. Something that could not be faked, edited, or transmitted.
The thought made his tongue wet.
Alastor widened his smile, slow and sharp.
Even decapitated, even thrown like garbage on the floor, the body still kept that insolent arrogance of something that demanded attention.
“Just look at you…” he murmured.
There was no answer, of course.
Vox’s head was somewhere else, probably screaming, insulting, or begging. The thought brought him a low satisfaction, almost sexual. Because here, at his feet, was what the voice could not defend: the body. The flesh. The real thing.
Alastor took a step and gently pushed the edge of the dark suit with the tip of his shoe, opening it a little more. The torn shirt revealed the stained chest, the dark mixture that had dried between his pectorals, sticky, greasy, as if someone had come all over him and then left him there to rot.
There was still heat there.
An obstinate, demonic heat that refused to die completely. A remnant of current pulsing under the cold skin.
“How careless, mon cher~” he whispered, almost fondly.
From the cut down to the collarbone, the fluid had thickened into a dark trail, almost clotted, with that dirty shine that was not entirely organic or entirely mechanical. It was almost a viscous, corrupt liquor, dragging itself over the skin and slipping beneath the torn shirt.
Alastor crouched down without hurry, settling beside the body, too close to seem casual and too calm to seem surprised.
He did not look like a man helping someone wounded.
Nor did he look like a man before a corpse.
He looked like a man reuniting with something that had never stopped belonging to him.
He stretched out a hand.
He did not search for a pulse. There was no point. That was no longer Vox. It was a remnant. A warm, bleeding piece torn away from him. The head was still alive somewhere else.
The body, on the other hand, could be his.
He dragged two fingers through the trail gathered at the collarbone. The mixture clung to his skin with force. He rubbed it slowly between fingertip and fingertip, feeling its sticky texture.
The smell reached him first, dense, intimate, repugnant.
Rancid fluid.
Burned plastic.
Old grease.
Something demonic trapped inside a machine that had believed itself flesh.
He brought his fingers to his mouth.
The first lick was slow, deliberate, almost reverent. His tongue gathered up that filth with sick devotion. The taste flooded his mouth, heavy and dirty in texture. Almost smoky, with that sweet metallic aftertaste only Vox had.
Exactly the same.
He tasted exactly the way Alastor remembered.
Alastor closed his eyes as his ears flattened back, releasing a faint sigh.
How unpleasant.
How perfect.
How miserably addictive.
He had eaten animals. Men. Sinners. Demons. Monsters. He had sunk his teeth into living flesh and dead flesh. He had tasted agony, fear, and pleading.
But nothing tasted like Vox.
Nothing.
Disgusting in a way so entirely his own, so intimate. Greasy. Electric. Artificial. As if even his body were trying to sell a more expensive version of rot.
The bastard did not stop obsessing him even dead.
Alastor smiled with his teeth stained dark.
He smeared his fingers again, this time closer to the open cut of the neck, where the wound still held the barest trace of residual heat. He leaned in. Sank his fingers inside and pulled them out dripping. He put them in his mouth with more urgency, sucking them greedily, letting the taste cover his whole tongue, his palate, and his throat.
He stayed there, savoring, breathing over the open flesh.
Sometimes he wondered whether his true sin had not always been Gluttony, because he had that sick need to understand everything with his mouth. Bite first. Devour after. Tear answers out of skin when words only served to lie.
And the taste of that filthy blood pleased him at once, with a low, indecent, animal clarity.
He liked it because that body could no longer fight back. It couldn’t growl at him, couldn’t curse him, couldn’t pretend it didn’t get aroused when Alastor marked it as his. It could only remain there, still warm, stained, leaking, allowing itself to be used.
It was a body that could not pull away from him.
Exactly like old times.
Alastor let out a small laugh, low, almost domestic.
Affectionate, in a horrible way.
Far away, something exploded inside the V Tower. The red lights flickered over the broken plaza like a heart refusing to die. The screams continued, distant, irrelevant.
Alastor only had eyes for the body lying at his feet.
Vox had a disgusting habit.
Every time someone failed, every time someone irritated him, every time someone dared to stand above him for even one fucking second, he spat the same venomous sentence: “End yourself.”
He did it to Sir Pentious.
He did it to Charlie.
He did it to anyone unlucky enough to become the target of the moment.
It was not just cheap cruelty.
It was a tic.
A rotten reflex.
As if, inside that sick head of his, shame could only be washed away one way: by pushing someone else into the void so they would burst open in public.
As if watching someone else break, bleed, or beg could cover, for a moment, the crack he carried inside.
Vox humiliated others by verbally hurling them toward the abyss, with that blue-toothed smile and distorted voice, as if witnessing their fall gave him back, for a few seconds, the illusion that he was still whole, clean, superior.
But to Alastor, it had always seemed more like a confession than an insult.
Every “kill yourself” that came out of Vox’s mouth was Vox himself screaming from the bottom of his own pit, projecting the only exit his broken mind could imagine when humiliation became unbearable.
Alastor knew that pattern of Vox’s far too well.
Always disguised as ambition, strategy, and shiny branding… but underneath there was only a hungry crack, a pathological need to take everything to the very end.
Because to Vox, the End sanctified everything.
Because the End justified the means.
The End turned any atrocity into something epic. The End erased shame. The End made pain stop being small.
As if reaching the absolute close were enough to justify anything.
Vox had once said, with that affected, theatrical voice of his, back when he was newly fallen into Hell, that he would be the “Omega.”
The biblical Omega, of course.
The end of everything. The final name. The great, magnificent closing act of a story where only he deserved to be the protagonist.
A very fucking stupid bit of nonsense, yes.
And yet…
He had nearly achieved it.
He had almost made it real.
To have the final event.
To be the ultimate spectacle.
The total blaze where everything —the city, the Vees, and Hell itself— would burn just so his own fall could have meaning, weight, and grandeur.
He had nearly dragged half of Pentagram City into the void, crying with rage underneath the fury, screaming that nothing mattered to him anymore as long as he could, at least, wipe that fucking smile off his face.
How broken does a soul have to be to think: enough, let’s end everything?
Because that smile was much more than an expression.
To Vox, that smile was living proof that Alastor still owned him.
It was mockery, rejection, and superiority. It was the constant reminder that he had never managed to be enough, that he had never managed to make Alastor truly look at him, that even after everything —fights, dirty sex, betrayals, and years— he was still the one who broke first. That smile was humiliation made flesh, unrequited desire, rotten dependency, and the oldest, most shameful wound he had. He could not edit it. He could not broadcast it. He could not turn it into propaganda or victory. It was simply there, fixed, bright, indelible. The one thing in all of Hell that Vox could not control.
No strategy.
No calculation.
Only naked obsession. An old, ugly, private wound turned into a public apocalypse.
Because if he had to break, then everything should break with him.
Let the End redeem him.
Let his pain stop being humiliation and become legend.
How pathetic.
How transparent.
How miserable and absolutely Vox.
Alastor felt no compassion.
Compassion would have been far too clean an insult for something so filthy and honest.
What he felt was a low understanding, intimate in its obscenity.
Because in the end, Vox had not wanted to win.
Not even that anymore.
He had only wanted to end.
To end everything already.
For something to explode loudly enough that his pain would stop being a shameful secret and become a collective catastrophe. For the entire world to witness the wound he had never been able to admit without turning it into war.
Alastor leaned over him.
He brushed two claws along the edge of the open neck, almost tenderly. The dark liquid slid slowly down his finger, dense, oxidized, carrying that filthy smell of old iron and dead current. His gaze lowered along the irregular cut, over the exposed cables, over the skin that still refused to cool completely because of the residual discharges.
“You always wanted someone to break for you…” he murmured with poisonous sweetness, “when the only broken one here was always you, mon cher. How rude of you to start without me.”
The body did not answer.
Of course it did not.
“Although I must admit,” he added, almost proudly, “this time you did do an admirable job~”
Alastor’s smile widened, teeth showing.
“You almost made me proud of you.”
He let out a low little laugh, cruel, almost domestic.
“Almost~”
He lifted the body from the ground with a delicacy that had nothing merciful about it. One hand beneath the broken back, the other holding the dead weight of the legs. The torso pressed against him, heavy, warm, indecorous. The severed neck tilted toward his shoulder, spilling a slow, hot trail over the red sleeve. The stain spread like a personal signature, soaking into the fabric.
Alastor lowered his gaze toward it.
“Rude until the very end,” he whispered, almost affectionately.
He pressed the body a little closer against his own. The weight was real. The flesh was real. The heat that still remained, the cables sparking weakly, the metallic, rancid smell coming from the wound… all of it was repulsively intimate.
Ridiculous.
Charming.
Completely his.
The shadow opened beneath his feet like a hungry mouth and began to climb up his legs, wrapping around Vox’s mutilated body as well, swallowing them both.
The plaza disappeared.
An instant later, they were in his room.
Everything was in order.
Too much in order. Too calm after the ruined plaza, the screams, the alarms, and the broken lights. In the back stood the made bed. To one side, on a nightstand, rested a lamp, a book, and one of the many radios that usually accompanied his nightly reading with low music.
On the other side, the room opened toward the Louisiana swamp.
Real Louisiana.
Literally Louisiana.
It was not an infernal imitation. It was not a pretty memory. It was not a landscape manufactured to please him. It was real black water, real cypresses, roots sunk into real mud, and a blue humidity that breathed with the same old patience as the swamps where he had once walked when he still had a pulse.
It was not a set piece.
It was an impossible connection. An infernal room, somewhere inside a hotel, opened toward the human world and aimed directly at a lost stretch of swamp near Lost Lake, between New Orleans and Delacroix. A fucked-up, deep, almost inaccessible part of it, where the world remained alive without knowing that Alastor could come and go whenever he pleased.
And he did.
Sometimes he went for food. Sometimes for coffee beans. Sometimes for real bottles of whiskey, because Hell did not produce them and the miserable imitations offered in that place tasted like stagnant pipe water. Other times he crossed over for objects, favors, small things he preferred to obtain and traffic illegally on his own, without explaining too much.
After all, he could take on a human form when it suited him, allowing him to walk among them as if he had not just stepped out of a room in Hell.
He had always known how to blend into his surroundings.
He walked freely through that other world because the swamp was still his in a way Hell had never managed to replace.
Not to mention how useful it had proved during those seven years of absence, when Rosie had him carrying out her damned and endless errands…
But if anyone from the hotel had ever had the bold, stupid, and forbidden idea of venturing into that place, if they had survived the water, the insects, the eyes shining between the trees, and everything Alastor preferred not to explain, they would have ended up coming out on the other side.
Into the human world.
It was a rarity even for Hell.
Something almost no one had, but that Alastor had obtained under extraordinarily specific circumstances, when he recovered the old radio that had belonged to him in life, back when he still breathed and New Orleans knew his name for far less charming reasons.
Back when they still called him the Cannibal of New Orleans.
But that was a long anecdote.
It was not the place to tell it.
Perhaps another time.
Perhaps in another story~
For now, it was enough to say that it was a very old radio.
It was not one of the many radios he had scattered around the room, nor throughout his domains in general. Nor was it the one murmuring soft music beside the book and the lamp on his bedside table.
That old radio was an invaluable relic that had been his before Hell. The same one with which he had made a pact with a demon for the first time.
That was the anchor that opened that impossible breach.
The fixed point that allowed space between both worlds to be torn open, so long as Alastor gave it enough power to sustain it. Because owning it was one thing, and understanding how to force it to connect Hell with Louisiana without the trick breaking, closing, or spitting him out somewhere else entirely was another matter.
Learning had not been easy, incidentally.
But in time, he mastered it.
Everything was easy when one knew how.
The difficult part was learning how.
As long as that radio remained there and Alastor knew how to feed it, Hell and Louisiana continued touching at one impossible point.
Entirely illegal, surely worthy of trial, and, of course, something Alastor already had escape plans for~
The swamp had real fauna.
Real life.
Insects, birds, reptiles, and fish moved through the dark depths, although almost nothing came too close to the edge of his room. Something about Alastor kept them away. A pressure in the air. An old, animal warning that wildlife understood better than men.
Even so, when he felt like it, he made use of it.
He had always been an avid hunter. He had been one when he breathed, and he remained one now. He liked following tracks, listening to branches break, reading fear in the way a creature learned too late that it was being hunted.
He liked male deer, young, strong, still in their prime. Alligator meat as well, of course. He had grown up with those flavors. With that toughness. With that fat. With that rough memory of food ripped from the swamp and not served with good manners.
Alastor made use of what was essential.
He made use of what he remembered.
And Louisiana, impossible or not, kept giving it to him.
That room had been made for that.
For his routines. His tastes. His silences. His small illegalities. His damp returns from the swamp, with mud on his shoes and dark remains beneath his nails.
It was not made for visitors.
Much less for Vox.
It was a room prepared for no one except Alastor himself. That was why he tolerated no interruptions, no unexpected entrances, no foreign presences invading his territory without consent. It was a lack of respect. An unforgivable rudeness.
A room that never would have received Vox if Vox had been able to enter on his own two feet.
But now Alastor crossed the threshold without letting him go.
He had brought him.
The body left a drop on the floor.
Then another.
Then a third, until the stain began to spread.
Alastor adjusted the weight more securely against his chest, enough for the open neck to soil his shirt.
His teeth showed in a slow smile.
“Welcome~” he said, almost politely.
Alastor advanced toward the bed without hurry.
He held him against his chest a few seconds longer, letting the dead weight finish settling in his arms and the hot trail keep soaking into the fabric.
The long, unbalanced body felt strangely correct there, pressed against him.
The canopy bed was made, immaculate, closed in on itself like a secret that had never been meant to be shared. Alastor stopped beside its edge and contemplated the body with a low, almost curious attention.
There was something fitting about bringing him there…
As if he had not rescued him from the plaza, but claimed him from the rubble to occupy a place more worthy of his indecency.
He bent forward and laid him on the sheets with care. The mattress gave beneath the weight with a soft whisper. The torn jacket opened a little more. The damp shirt clung to his chest. The severed neck immediately stained the clean sheets with a thick, dark red.
Vox took up too much space even without a head.
Alastor found that unforgivable, but also beautiful in a way that did not deserve the word.
The blood spread over the sheets in a slow, lazy stain. The smell of old wood and swamp dampness gave way to metal, oil, and open flesh. The order was still there, but it was no longer the same. Something stolen had entered, and the room, instead of rejecting it, began to close around it as if it recognized him.
Before touching him again, Alastor turned his head toward the nightstand.
Beside the lamp and a closed book, a small, discreet radio rested. One of many in the room.
It was not the relic that kept the impossible breath of Louisiana open at the back of the room.
This one was normal.
Just a radio.
Alastor reached out and turned the dial ever so slightly. He was not looking for a real station, but for the exact point where static stopped being noise and began to feel like company. Then an old, quiet melody filled the room with a low murmur, distant, broken at the edges.
He liked that.
He sat on the edge of the bed. One leg stayed on the floor while the other rose onto the mattress, bent beside the body. From there he could see him better: the crooked tie, the open jacket, the shirt clinging to his chest, the brutal absence where the head should have been…
For a moment, he only looked.
And Alastor, with a calm that brushed against joy, understood that he would not want to give him back.
He ran his fingers along the edge of the torn shirt and opened it a little more. The fabric gave beneath his nails, and his hand continued toward the open neck.
Slowly.
There was no urgency. No need to pretend care. He touched the edge of the wound first, barely with his claws, following the irregular line where demonic flesh tangled with cables and remnants of hot metal. The texture was repugnant. Soft in places. Fibrous in others. Too wet. Too warm. Too Vox.
His fingers sank a little deeper into the flesh.
Enough for the blood to soak his fingers and a small portion of tissue to give beneath his claws with a thick docility, almost like ground meat.
Alastor watched it with quiet attention, fascinated by the vulgarity of the detail. It was not elegant. It was not clean.
But it was beautiful.
That was enough.
And again came that strange hunger.
A small laugh, almost broken, brushed his throat.
He wanted to taste him… and at the same time hated having that need to do it.
He slowly dragged his tongue along the base of his own fingers, gathering the blood along with that piece of flesh that still carried Vox’s name. He licked carefully beneath one nail, almost reverently, until nothing remained. He closed his eyes for an instant and held his breath while he chewed.
The taste burst in his mouth: greasy, electric, bitter. Disgusting. Familiar.
Painfully recognizable.
When he finally breathed, the air came out hot and trembling.
Alastor smiled with stained lips, but the smile did not reach his eyes.
So much time… and he still tasted the same.
“Bastard…” he murmured, his voice lower than he had intended.
He took Vox’s hand and opened his fingers one by one with delicacy. It was an elegant hand even dead. Long, cold at the tips, still warm in the palm. The cyan claws stained black.
He held it for a moment, simply feeling its weight.
There was something unbearable about that hand. Not because of the blood or the death, but because of how much he remembered it. Because of how exactly it fit into his own, despite the difference in size; Alastor’s palm fit perfectly against his, covering it completely.
But the worst part was having the treacherous memory of that same palm against his cheek, against his waist, or against his neck in another time. A hand that had once touched him with desire, with rage, and sometimes with something neither of them had dared to name, letting the idea rot with time.
Slowly, almost against his own will, he brought Vox’s hand toward his face.
He stopped it halfway, wondering what the hell he was doing.
The long fingers, cold at the tips, remained suspended a few centimeters from his cheek, open over the air as if they could still close suddenly. Scratch him. Hit him. Push him away. Hurt him in a way the body no longer had any right to attempt.
Alastor swallowed faintly.
His hand trembled slightly.
A small movement, irritating, impossible to ignore.
Then he brought it a little closer, carefully, almost as if it were going to burn him.
The palm finally touched his cheek, cold and dirty. It covered his face with cruel exactness, too familiar, too perfect. Vox’s fingers brushed his temple, his jaw, the edge of his mouth. They covered him almost completely.
Alastor closed his eyes.
And only then did he realize he had been holding his breath.
He let it out all at once, low, broken, almost against the palm. His ears lowered completely, surrendered, and for a few seconds only that contact existed: cold skin against his own, the dark stain marking his face as if it could still claim him, his breath a little uneven against a hand that could no longer close over him.
It was ridiculous.
Pathetic.
And yet he could not pull away.
Because that was not just any hand.
It was the hand of someone Alastor had loved.
An ugly, uncomfortable word, one he would never say out loud, but one that weighed more than any corpse. More than any wound. More than any resentment.
And that made everything much sadder.
Tenderness, in that moment, seemed to him the cruelest thing in Hell. More obscene than the decapitation, dirtier than the blood.
Because blood could be explained.
Hunger could be justified; besides, he loved eating corpses. He had opened them, eaten them, dismembered them, and turned them into part of himself with almost sacred devotion. To Alastor, cannibalism was the purest form of possession: an eternal intimacy where flesh finally stopped lying and became completely his. Control disguised as love. Permanence through the teeth.
But this…
This matter of 'tenderness’…
This had no defense.
This only hurt.
This only hurt.
And Alastor needed to understand what the hell he was looking for there.
Comfort?
No.
The word disgusted him before it even finished forming.
Habit, then? Possession? The old satisfaction of having something of Vox beneath his hand, quiet at last, without that glowing screen to turn everything into war?
If Vox had been whole, they would already be fighting.
Again.
He would have found the perfect phrase to drive him mad, or the exact look to make Alastor feel uncomfortable in his presence. Vox would have found a way to make himself intolerable.
Mockery, provocations, and offenses.
The usual.
Again and again.
The room would have ended up broken, the bed destroyed, the music drowned in static, and the two of them ruining everything as always.
Alastor would have had to defeat him again, so he could learn his damned place when dealing with him.
Perhaps he would have ended up tearing his head off himself, instead of Valentino.
Now, instead, there was no one to fight in the first place.
There was only a body.
There was only a hand.
There was only that miserable possibility of touching without being discovered, missing a fucking wretch.
“…”
Alastor remained still for a few seconds longer.
Then, slowly, he straightened his back.
He did not pull Vox’s hand away immediately. He only sat himself better, more upright on the edge of the bed, with the palm still against his face and his lips barely parted from the cold skin. His ears rose little by little, enough to return something resembling composure to him.
He looked ahead, toward the small radio that continued filling the room with that old, broken melody.
Perhaps…
Perhaps that was why…
The idea fit.
Not well.
Never well.
But it fit enough to hold him together.
“…”
Alastor turned his gaze back to Vox.
To the body lying in his bed. To the hand he himself kept pressed against his face. To the absence where the head should have been, the voice, the unbearable smile, all his fucking noise, to that thing that would have turned the smallest gesture into a war.
“…”
Yes…
It was very possible.
He could touch him now because Vox could no longer defend himself from tenderness.
And, worse still, because Alastor no longer had to defend himself from Vox seeing him asking for it in such a pathetic way.
That miserable possibility of touching without being discovered…
That tenderness arriving too late, rotten, deformed by absence…
Alastor pressing his cheek harder against the palm, searching for a warmth that no longer existed…
His shoulders sank slightly, a small gesture, almost imperceptible, of defeat.
“Look at you…” he whispered against the cold skin, his voice hoarse. “Even in that state, you manage to do this to me…”
It was not a reproach, but a tired confession.
He barely moved his head so his cheek drew a little away from the palm, leaving his lips there instead, resting against the dark shark skin.
He kissed it.
A small kiss.
Silent.
Then he kissed it again.
And again.
And again.
Until he lost count.
Small kisses, badly placed, too close together, almost lost in the dark mixture staining his mouth. Alastor breathed against Vox’s palm, eyes closed, letting each exhale tremble faintly over that cold skin that no longer resisted him in any stupid fight.
And for an instant, unwillingly, he wondered whether Vox, wherever his head was at that moment, might have felt something. Whether he might have felt that same old, miserable pang Alastor carried on him, that horrible familiarity of a dead hand touching his face as if it could still recognize him.
Alastor smiled against the palm, but the smile came out wrong.
Some echo?
Some interference?
Some kind of phantom sensation?
An impossible pressure against a hand he no longer had?
He hoped not.
Of course he hoped not. It would be ridiculous to want otherwise. Cruel, even. Alastor lowered his gaze to the long fingers, dirty against his mouth, and his smile twisted slightly.
But even so… something low inside him wanted Vox to feel it.
Wherever he was.
However he could still feel it.
The thought remained one second too long.
He released the hand slowly, as if letting go of it could erase what he had just done.
Tenderness was unbearable.
Hunger, on the other hand, he could understand. Hunger was clean. Hunger had rules. He could devour, chew, and swallow someone without having to admit he was looking for an answer in something that could no longer give it to him. Without having to recognize how pathetic it was to beg affection from a dead hand.
But the impulse he felt now was not only hunger.
He looked again at the body lying in his bed, completely silent.
He wanted more.
He wanted to desecrate him.
But he had never crossed that line.
He had never fucked a corpse.
The mere possibility that the thought had crossed his mind made him a little mad.
He was a damned cannibal!
Not a fucking necrophile!
He had never used a dead body to satisfy that other hunger, the lowest and most animal one.
Fuck! He did not even use the bodies of the living for that!
Until he had the misfortune of meeting Vox.
It always had to be Vox.
That damned, loud, insufferable Vox, who had managed to rot even the most ordered and coldest parts of his mind. The only one who had managed to turn desire into a physical humiliation. A filthy, specific, carnal need, impossible to confuse with anything else.
Alastor clicked his tongue, thoughtful.
He kept staring at the open chest, the oxidized trail, the skin already cold except for some residual current that still refused to go out…
And for a moment he was invaded by a long, suffocating list of reasons NOT to do it:
Because it was an unnecessary degradation.
Because it turned his noble, ancient hunger into something pathetic, vulgar, and clumsy.
Because he was about to use a body that could no longer consent, or resist, or even insult him.
Because that would lower him to the level of any lustful, uncontrolled demon.
Because once he crossed that line with Vox, there would be no going back. He would not know how to look at his screen without remembering that vile, miserable act.
And there was a minimal possibility, absurd, almost impossible, that Vox could feel it somehow. An interference. A wireless echo. Some residual connection between the head and the body, some remnant of signal that had not yet been cut off completely.
Just thinking about it churned something inside him.
If Vox were to feel it, if a single part of him were to know, Alastor would not be able to meet his own gaze. He would break Vox’s screen in two before living with that shame.
Because part of him knew that this was not only desire.
It was revenge.
It was rotten love.
It was sick dependence.
It was a horrifying way of asking something from a body that could no longer answer.
And because he was about to cross a line that not even he, with all his hunger, with all his cruelty, with his entire history of opened corpses and devoured flesh, had ever crossed before.
That should be enough.
All of that should be enough.
And yet…
There was only one reason that mattered.
One single reason.
A miserable, ridiculous, unbearable reason… that made him consider truly doing it:
Because it was Vox.
“………………………”
That was all.
Because it was him.
Because Vox had always been the only one capable of breaking his control.
Because even like this, half-dead, separated from his own voice, he remained the exception to all of Alastor’s rules.
And because Alastor’s body missed him with a filthy, desperate violence, bordering on madness.
“…Damn it…” Alastor murmured, his voice almost defeated.
He lowered Vox’s hand carefully. He left it resting on the bed and, for an instant, kept his gaze fixed on that palm as if he had just left something worse than a dead man there.
Then he brought both hands to his face.
He covered his face and breathed against his own palms, his fingers dirty and that impossible taste still clinging to his mouth. His shoulders rose faintly with an inhale that was too deep. Then they lowered, slow, as he let the air out.
The old music kept filling the room.
Alastor remained like that for a few more seconds.
Still.
Silent.
As if silence could give him back some judgment.
But the judgment was still there. That was the problem. He was not beside himself. He was not blind. He was not lost in some animal urgency he could later blame with elegance. He understood perfectly what he was thinking. He understood the disgust, the line, the baseness of that idea. He understood that there were things even he had kept far from his hands for a reason.
And still, he kept looking at him.
Not at the dead man.
At Vox.
Alastor had lived perfectly well without that kind of carnal urgency. He had despised it for decades with sincere ease.
Bodies could be opened, eaten, dismembered, turned into clean possession through hunger. That had order. It had ceremony. It had rules.
But that other kind of urgency was something much lower and clumsier. Closer to a vulgar need he did not want to recognize as his own.
Something crawling.
Something pathetic.
Something that should not have power over him.
It enraged him to feel it.
Not a great, theatrical rage, not even a useful one. But a dry rage, lodged beneath the skin, aimed at himself. At his mouth. At his hands. At that body of his that still remembered Vox with humiliating precision. At the physical memory of having him close, warm, alive, resisting, insulting, coming back anyway.
And worse still, at the memories where Vox was not this yet.
Where he had not yet become that broken creature, starving for control, incapable of touching anything without turning it into possession or war. There had been a time, at the beginning, when Vox was different. Not good. Not innocent. Never that. But more open. More attentive. More capable of staying close without having to prove he was in command.
Vox above him, heavy and warm, with a delicacy that now seemed almost offensive to remember. A hand in his hair, not to hold him down or make him be quiet, but to stroke it with a clumsy, careful attention, as if he truly wanted to learn him. The screen tilted toward him. The voice lower. The whole body breathing against his without hurry, without spectacle, without the immediate need to win.
There had been many nights like that.
More than Alastor wanted to count.
For years.
Nearly an entire decade, from the moment Vox appeared in his life until everything began to twist enough to become irreparable. And in Hell, where time already had the bad habit of stretching until it rotted any waiting, a decade was no small thing. It felt long. Dense. Almost endless.
Enough time to get used to a voice, to a weight, to a specific way of touching him…
To nights when Vox held him with real affection, even though neither of them had the courage to call it that. Not with that clean tenderness of decent living people, of course. There was rage underneath, pride, hunger, fear. But also care. Also a way of looking and touching that did not ask for blood first.
And Alastor, against all logic, against all good taste, against every defense he had built for himself, had felt good.
Alastor had felt happy.
Happy simply to be with him.
To live with him.
To share with him.
To listen to him.
And, worse still, to see him happy too.
To see Vox comfortable at his side, talking too much to him, laughing with that insolent confidence, his awkwardness, his tenderness, his thousands of attentions toward Alastor’s person, occupying space as if the world had finally given him a place to stay. To feel that, in some twisted way, he also gave Vox something. Something Vox wanted. Something Vox sought. Something Vox chose to take again, night after night, without pretending anything.
He had been happy in a way real enough to become dangerous.
Not in a way that could save anyone. Not in a clean way. But long enough to stay inside him, lodged somewhere deep, rotting slowly, still contaminating him.
Even now.
Even in front of that cold, mutilated remnant that could no longer give him anything back.
Even like this, Alastor had him inside.
Not as forgiveness.
Not as clean tenderness.
As an old infection.
As a memory that remained alive where nothing should have been left.
That was what was unforgivable.
Not the death.
Not the body.
Not the ruin on his bed.
But the memory.
The fucking damned nostalgia.
The miserable fact that his body recognized him even like this. Broken. Cold. Silent. Without a voice to mock him. Without eyes to look at him with that unbearable arrogance. Without anything that could justify that need except everything he had been before.
Alastor opened his eyes behind his fingers.
He looked ahead, as if he needed to find one last reason to stop in some empty point of the room.
There were many.
He knew them all.
He could name them one by one.
And none of them was enough, because…
Because it was him.
Because it was Vox.
“…”
The smile returned first to his mouth. Small. Twisted. Badly placed.
Almost a grimace.
“… I understand…” he murmured.
The word came out low, bitter, as if he had just granted something to a part of himself he hated.
He lowered his hands slowly.
The body was still there, lying on his bed, too silent to be Vox and too Vox to be only a corpse.
Alastor looked at him with filthy calm.
And he felt, with unbearable clarity, that he was not losing control because he did not understand what he was doing.
He was losing it because he understood it far too well.
Then he slowly lowered his hands.
He turned himself more fully toward the body, the bed creaking softly beneath his weight.
No excuses.
No pretexts.
No defense.
There was only something darker.
Lower.
Dirtier.
Alastor’s claws brushed against Vox’s damp shirt with an almost mocking delicacy. Then they pressed down. The fabric gave way with a wet, obscene sound, fiber by fiber, parting beneath his fingers like something that had grown tired of pretending to be decent. Slowly, Alastor tore it open from the severed neck down to the sternum, exposing the stained chest, revealing the dark skin soaked in oily blood.
The resolve with which he did it was nowhere near normal.
He laid his open palm over the chest.
The body didn’t react.
Only that insulting stillness remained, that mute surrender Vox would never have given him in life.
Alastor lowered his face.
The first contact was a filthy kiss, lips pressed against open flesh. Then he opened his mouth and licked slowly, tongue flat, gathering the thick, metallic, rancid flavor rising from within.
He closed his eyes and pressed harder, letting his teeth graze the skin. He didn’t bite. Not yet. He only threatened. He only savored the possibility of truly sinking in, of tearing, of fucking that flesh with his teeth while it still held some lingering warmth—warmth that was slowly fading.
He smiled against the sternum, lips stained black and red.
“How low I’ve fallen for you…” he whispered against the skin, with a sick tenderness that embarrassed him.
His hand slid lower, brushing over the tense abdomen, pausing for a moment at the waistband of the pants.
He stopped.
Alastor blinked slowly, frowning. The doubt lasted barely a second, a single heartbeat of sanity that was quickly drowned.
Then he continued.
His open palm descended shamelessly over the fabric, stroking the crotch with deliberate pressure. He felt the bulge of dead flesh beneath his fingers, still carrying some residual heat, still obscenely present.
He squeezed it unhurriedly, kneading that inert meat with an open hand, tracing its shape, its weight, its ridiculous vulnerability now that it could no longer harden or respond. He rubbed it with slow, possessive cruelty, as if claiming a territory that had always been denied to him in life.
The body didn’t react.
Of course it didn’t.
And somehow, that excited him even more.
Alastor took possession of the body little by little, like someone marking territory with saliva. He moved his hand back up and tore the rest of the shirt with a brutal tug, destroying the fabric without mercy.
The torso was now completely exposed: that bluish skin marked by dark trails that gleamed like wet metal, the long, angular chest, the tense pectorals beneath an anatomy too stylized to look human. The sternum sank in the center, the waist narrowed toward a defined abdomen, and the whole body held that artificial elegance of something designed to look flawless even in ruin.
He placed his open palm on the chest again. Beneath it, a pathetic, dying vibration, agonizing electricity trapped inside a stubbornly persistent corpse.
Alastor lowered his face once more.
This time it wasn’t a kiss.
He opened his mouth and sucked hard on the coagulated blood, pulling a low growl from the back of his throat. His tongue licked with filthy hunger, drawing slow, long lines from the center of the chest outward, collecting every bitter, unique flavor that was Vox.
He moved lower, licking with obscene devotion around the exposed circuits, nibbling the cold flesh just enough to feel it yield under his teeth.
He moved back up, then down again. His mouth wandered without order, hungry and possessive, leaving shiny trails of saliva over the dead skin.
He licked, sucked, bit gently and licked again, as if he wanted to erase every trace of who Vox had been and replace it with nothing but his own mark.
“How indecent you are…” he murmured against the skin, his voice hoarse and broken. “Even dead, you still make me want you like this.”
A body separated from its owner, unable to correct him, unable to protest, unable to turn this into yet another one of their filthy wars. Just meat. Just silence. Just a warm canvas that Alastor could desecrate however he pleased. And as always, Alastor allowed himself to be completely selfish.
His hand slid toward the gills.
Three delicate, almost elegant lines on both sides of the lower ribs. Even in death they retained that brighter, slightly iridescent tone, as if the flesh itself still remembered having been sensitive.
In life, Vox went crazy when they were touched. He would arch, growl, curse Alastor’s name through gritted teeth while trying to pretend he wasn’t about to come just from that. They were his weakest point. His most shameful secret. His Achilles’ heel.
‘Alastor--! Wait, you bastard, not there--!’
Vox’s voice would cut off in a shameful moan, almost an electric sob.
‘Ah--! Damn you…!’
Alastor could imagine that voice perfectly. He built Vox himself inside his own head: excited, vulnerable, and exposed, far too sensitive to sustain the dignity he pretended to have.
On the bed now, there was only cold, still flesh stained with blood and oil.
But in his head, Vox was still alive. He was still shuddering under his hands, furious at how much he felt, at how obvious it became, at being unable to hide his pleasure as his whole body folded in half.
He leaned further over the body and slowly dragged his tongue along the left gill. The taste was stronger there, almost salty, strangely organic. He opened his mouth and sucked hard, pulling at the soft flesh with his lips while his claws dug mercilessly into the edges.
In his mind, Vox arched his back violently.
‘Alastor…! Fuck, Alastor!’ Vox moaned, voice distorted and broken with pleasure.
Alastor smiled against the gill, submerged in memory, and sank his claws deeper, lightly tearing the dead flesh. There was no pain to restrain his movements now, unlike in the past. He could be as brutal as he wanted. He pushed two fingers into the opening, feeling the soft, viscous interior, while his mouth sucked with obscene hunger, pulling and biting the sensitive skin.
In his head, Vox was falling apart.
He writhed beneath him, claws digging into the sheets, hips bucking uncontrollably as he moaned Alastor’s name like a broken plea.
‘More…! God…! God! Alastor!’
The voice fractured, the screen full of static, the gills swollen and trembling under his tongue.
Alastor growled against the flesh and moved to the other side, more aggressive. He bit down hard, tugging at the gill as if he wanted to rip it off. The texture gave way under his mouth with a very particular fragility, like touching thin, wet, slippery sheets stuck together like raw flesh petals. They weren’t firm muscle or ordinary skin. They were something more delicate, more internal—a living membrane made to breathe water, not to withstand teeth.
His claws tore the flesh open further, ripping and exploring without any delicacy areas he himself had never known. The gills rubbed against his fingers with a fibrous, almost slimy softness, leaving a thick wetness under his nails. Every fold seemed too fragile, too sensitive, too easy to ruin.
That made it fascinating.
He sucked harder.
Bit.
Licked.
Pulled the skin with his teeth.
In his mind, Vox gasped, begging with a broken voice, body convulsing, completely surrendered.
Alastor lifted his gaze for a moment, lips and chin stained red and black, staring at the headless thing before him.
“You were so loud before…” he murmured, his voice hoarse, almost affectionate.
He lowered his mouth to the gills again, hungrier than before. He licked, sucked, and bit with a savage brutality he would never have allowed himself while Vox was alive.
Because now he could.
Because now Vox couldn’t run, couldn’t insult him… couldn’t twist and writhe beneath him.
The laugh that escaped his throat was low and dark, but there was something bitter in it. It caught against the open wound, never quite sounding whole.
It wasn’t just desire.
It was something dirtier and more painful.
It was the need to fill with his own imagination the silence Vox had left behind.
Alastor squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his mouth against the severed edge of the neck, sucking greedily at the blood. The strong, greasy, rancid taste scraped his tongue and sent a sickly shiver through him.
Then he moved lower.
His mouth found the gills once more. He sucked them with brutal force, tugging at the soft, slimy flesh, thrusting his tongue deep while his claws tore at the edges without mercy. In his mind, Vox was writhing violently beneath him, moaning his name in that distorted, broken voice he missed so much:
‘Alastor… you son of a bitch…!’ he panted, gills trembling, body convulsing with pleasure against its will.
But reality was cruel: the body beneath him remained completely inert.
Alastor growled against the corpse, equal parts frustrated and aroused, and kept moving downward, leaving a wet, dark trail across the cold skin.
His mouth stopped at the dark nipples. He licked them with cruel slowness, circling them, sucking hard until the dead skin wrinkled under the pressure. Then he bit down with hunger, tugging one between his teeth while his hand squeezed and twisted the other.
In his head, Vox arched his back with a choked moan, cursing him and begging at the same time.
‘Alastor…!’
That imagined sound burned in his ears, heating his blood.
From there he continued lower, almost feverish now, his movements growing harsher and more violent.
His mouth left a filthy, wet path down the sternum and abdomen. The smell of oxidized fluid mixed with hot plastic and cold skin filled his nose. The taste grew thicker, more intimate.
Alastor opened his mouth and sank his teeth into the belly, just below the ribs. He bit down hard. The flesh gave way with that rubbery, strange texture, almost like shark mixed with hot plastic. He tore off a small piece and chewed it slowly, savoring the disgust, the victory, and that characteristic rotten sweetness of Vox.
He swallowed.
The piece of flesh slid heavy and warm down his throat, leaving a thick, earthy trail that filled his mouth with a deeply animal taste. Alastor closed his eyes for a second, savoring the very act of chewing, of crushing, of turning part of Vox into something his, taking it inside his own body. His chest grew warm. A real, feverish blush rose up his neck and darkened his gray cheeks.
He felt alive.
He felt powerful.
And at the same time, rage burned in the pit of his stomach because the body beneath him stayed motionless. There were no convulsions. No broken curses. No Vox arching and hating him for making him feel so good.
Unable to hold back, he sank his teeth lower, deeper, ripping out another chunk of flesh from the belly. He chewed slowly, deliberately, letting his fangs tear and crush. Every swallow sent a shiver down his spine.
This was him being exactly what he had always been: a cannibal from New Orleans who could finally allow himself to be completely sick.
Still chewing the flesh in his mouth, he slid his fingers along the torn inside of the thigh and pushed his hand into what remained of the pants. He closed his knuckles around the heavy, flaccid cock. He squeezed it with possessive strength, feeling Vox’s manhood perfectly against his fingers, catching faint sparks that tickled his palm. He began to stroke with slow but brutal movements, no delicacy at all, just raw hunger for dominance.
His other hand remained buried in the open abdomen, claws sunk deep, keeping the wound open while his mouth continued working, sucking the ruined gills, biting the chest, licking and swallowing small pieces of skin and tissue.
The more he chewed, the faster his breathing became.
The blush deepened.
He felt his own arousal throbbing uncomfortably against his clothes, hard and pulsing, triggered directly by the act of eating, of destroying, of taking in such a sinful way.
Every bite, every swallow, every lick of that oxidized taste sank a low pleasure into his gut and kept descending, heavy and inevitable.
He didn’t need Vox to get hard. He didn’t need him to moan. He only needed the flesh yielding between his teeth, the weight sliding down his throat, and a body that would never deny him again.
Or so he thought.
He chewed another smaller piece, closer to the ribs, and swallowed with a wet, satisfied sound. Even like this, Vox was still capable of arousing a man whose pleasures had always been different from everyone else’s.
From time to time a useless electric spasm ran through the cock, and Alastor squeezed harder, jerking him with a blood-slick hand, filling the room with that very characteristic wet sound.
Alastor breathed heavily, almost shaking, cheeks flushed and eyes half-lidded.
It wasn’t clean desire.
It was something viscous, twisted, and deeply deranged.
“Even in this, you’re still the exception, Vox…” Alastor moaned.
He straightened up slowly over the body, still straddling the open abdomen, staring at the mess he had made.
The stained bed. The torn flesh. The saliva and remains gleaming under the dim lamplight…The hollow where the head should have been.
And with a cold, arousing clarity, he understood what the next act he wanted to consummate was.
Alastor smiled with all his teeth, a slow, dark, triumphant smile.
“Oh! Wait! Don’t worry, dear…” he murmured in a hoarse, almost tender voice as his claws traced the dirty line of Vox’s pants.
He tilted his head to the side while kneeling in front of the body, sliding two fingers under the belt.
He unbuckled it with deliberate slowness, savoring the metallic click as it gave way.
In that distant past, it had always been Vox who dominated. The one who pinned him against the nearest surface, the one who set the pace with that electric, arrogant urgency. Vox on top, Vox demanding, Vox turning every encounter into a war that ended with Alastor smiling while letting him believe he had won.
But now…
“Now it’s my turn, mon cher~”
He yanked the belt off in one smooth motion and let it fall to the floor. Then he hooked his claws into the waistband of the pants and pulled them down with calculated care, sliding them over the narrow hips and long thighs until they were completely off.
The torn fabric resisted for a second before surrendering. The cool air of the room brushed against Vox’s exposed skin, and Alastor felt a shiver of his own at seeing him fully naked beneath him.
He took a moment just to look.
To feel.
The weight of the inert body, the temperature still warm in some places, the strange texture of that skin that had always been half flesh, half machine. He ran his open palms along the thighs, moving upward slowly, savoring the cold smoothness of the inner surface, the slight roughness where cables showed beneath the skin. His fingers trembled slightly when they brushed against the groin.
Alastor leaned forward, bracing one bloodied hand beside the hollow of the neck, and lowered his mouth to the open wound once more. He licked the gash slowly, savoring the deep metallic taste while his other hand closed around that heavy, flaccid cock. He felt it in his palm: warm, soft, strangely vulnerable. He stroked it with possessive slowness, squeezing carefully, exploring its weight and shape without hurry.
It was strange.
It was intimate in a way it had never been when Vox was alive.
He settled more comfortably over him, spreading the legs with his knees and positioning himself between them. His own arousal pressed against the fabric of his pants, hard and hot, but it wasn’t haste he felt. It was a deeper need that gnawed fiercely at Alastor.
He wanted to claim a place.
He wanted to completely reverse the roles.
He wanted to make every inch that had once been denied or contested his, instead of always being the one who ended up receiving.
“How obedient~” he whispered against the skin of the neck, voice low and rough.
He slid his own pants down just enough to free himself.
The first contact of his hot flesh against Vox’s cold one pulled a shaky sigh from his throat. He pushed in slowly, inch by inch, feeling the strange resistance of a body that no longer opened by its own will. It was tight, inert, and that very lack of response sent a wave of sick, nostalgic pleasure through him.
Alastor closed his eyes and buried his face in the open hollow of the neck, breathing in the smell of blood, flesh, and dying electricity as he began to move. Slowly at first. Then deeper, more possessive. Each thrust was deliberate, intensely sensory: he felt the friction, the contrasting temperatures, the way the body only moved beneath him because of the force of his own hips.
There were no distorted moans.
No claws digging into his back.
No Vox cursing between gasps.
Only silence.
Only flesh.
Only the wet, rhythmic sound of his own body claiming what was now, finally, completely his.
And Alastor, with half-lidded eyes and the blush still burning on his cheeks, smiled against the open wound as his hips kept moving with an increasingly deep and confident rhythm.
He pushed deeper, with a slow, deliberate roll of his hips, feeling the inert body yield. The friction was strange: tight, cold in some places, still warm at the core, with that irregular texture where flesh mixed with thin cables. Every thrust sent a sharp wave of pleasure up his spine.
In his mind, the old Vox would never have stayed quiet.
He never did.
Not in moments like this.
Because Vox felt too much and didn’t know how to hide it. He would breathe against him as if every touch tore something real out of him. He said his name with clumsy, low, almost embarrassed devotion. Sometimes his voice would break. Sometimes he’d murmur disjointed things right against his ear, with that raw physical honesty Alastor never knew how to accept without turning it into control.
More than once, he had covered Vox’s mouth with his hand. Not even out of anger anymore, but pure shame.
Because hearing him like that was too much.
Because Vox sounding like that made him feel seen. Wanted. Necessary. Needed.
Vox said ridiculous things. Dangerous things. Things that, even in a rotten heart like Alastor’s, managed to ignite something close to illusion.
Things Alastor preferred to cut off before they could be named.
And now…
Now he would have given anything to hear him.
A breath.
A murmur.
His name spoken in that low, broken, too-sincere voice.
Anything.
But there was no voice.
No screen tilting toward him. No blue light falling across his face. No clumsy kisses against his skin, no desperate caresses, no impossible mouth of Vox finding ridiculous ways to touch him even without lips.
There was no voice whispering too close to his ear. No broken murmurs against his neck. No fixed, devoted, unbearable stare that made it seem like Vox’s entire world narrowed down to the exact place where Alastor was.
There was only the body.
Only the silence.
The irony left a bitter taste on his tongue.
And what could he do about it now?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
So Alastor let himself be carried away with bitter obedience, letting out a low breath against the open wound at the neck, hating every second of that silence he had once tried to silence with his own hands…
And then he heard it:
“Fuck, Alastor… Is that all you’ve got, you damn deer?”
Alastor froze.
The voice hadn’t come from the room. Not exactly. It didn’t come from the bed, or from the body lying beneath him, or from any visible corner. But it didn’t sound like a normal memory either.
It was too clear. Too close. Too Vox.
Mocking.
Broken.
Alive in an impossible way.
Alastor slowly lifted his face.
His ears perked up.
For a second he looked toward where Vox’s head should have been, as if some absurd part of him expected to find the screen tilted, lit up, staring at him with that unbearable arrogance. There was nothing. Only the open neck. The cold body. The stained bed. The old music filling the gaps where there should have been insults, gasps, noise.
But the voice was still there.
Inside his head.
Or somewhere worse.
Alastor narrowed his eyes.
He felt something shift inside him. The shame didn’t disappear. Neither did the guilt. But the silence had just been broken, even if in this sick way, even if it was only an echo, an interference, a hallucination born of desire and rage.
And damn him, it was the best part of all.
Because for an instant, Vox was there again.
Defiant. Insolent. Trying to provoke him even from nowhere.
Even imagined…
Even half-dead…
Even headless…Vox was still trying to mark his territory.
Alastor’s smile spread slowly, sharp and dangerous.
“Even without a head you don’t know how to stay quiet,” he growled against the open neck, his voice low and heavy with authority.
He dug his claws harder into Vox’s hips, holding him with brutal possession, and suddenly picked up the pace. It was no longer slow or contemplative. He thrust with dominant force, deep and punishing, as if he wanted to erase every time Vox had believed he held control over him.
The thought came laced with bitter nostalgia.
He missed the weight of Vox on top of him, the electric sweat sticking to his skin, the way he looked at him with hatred and desperate desire. He missed how Vox broke a little more every time he managed to make him moan his name. But now he had absolute control and it hurt how delicious that defeat felt under the circumstances.
Still, his mind kept filling in the blanks.
He imagined Vox conscious inside that decapitated body. He imagined him writhing internally, cursing him, trying to move hips that no longer obeyed him, gills trembling with rage and pleasure.
Alastor thrust deeper, with a sharp snap of his hips that made the bed creak.
“Look at you…”
It sounded with that filthy arrogance Alastor knew too well.
“All that control and you still can’t let me go, you bastard…”
Alastor let out a low growl.
“You’re going to criticize me now?”
“Criticize you? No--… Ahhg… F-Fuck…” The voice strained into a hoarse moan when Alastor delivered another brutal thrust. “I’m only saying it because a second ago you wanted me to talk, so there. I’m talking to you! Just like you wanted!”
Alastor smiled with gritted teeth and slammed in harder, deeper, almost as if punishing that damn insolence.
“And now that I can hear you, I’ve changed my mind, Vox.”
“Liar~”
“Son of a bitch.”
Vox let out a low, distorted laugh that vibrated against his ear.
“Then shut me up, you shitty deer.”
Alastor released a dark, almost feral laugh, far too amused to pretend disgust.
“Even without a head you’re still trying to give me orders…”
“And you still obey when it suits you, Al,” the voice answered, rough and satisfied.
He leaned further over the body, chest to chest, and kept moving with a brutal, selfish rhythm. His hips crashed hard against Vox’s, holding him without mercy. One hand slid between them and wrapped around that flaccid, warm cock, squeezing it possessively while he continued to fuck him savagely.
He pressed his face into the open hollow of the neck, breathing in the scent of blood, electricity, and defeat, and let his hips take on an even wilder pace. Every thrust was a reclamation. Every low groan that escaped his own throat was proof that Vox was finally exactly where Alastor had always wanted him:
Underneath.
Surrendered.
His.
And though he hated to admit it, he had never wanted it as much as he did in that moment.
In his twisted mind, Vox was alive. Completely alive. Beneath him, sweating, furious, and desperate with pleasure.
“Fuck--… Alastor--!” the phantom voice moaned, distorted and broken. “Harder!”
And Alastor gave it to him.
His hips slammed brutally against Vox’s, the wet, fleshy sound filling the room. His back arched with every powerful thrust: rising slowly, almost pulling out completely, only to slam back down with animal force, burying himself to the hilt. He felt every inch. The tight friction, the internal heat enveloping him, the way the body yielded despite the imagined resistance.
It was strange.
It was overwhelming.
He had always been the one who received. The one who opened up. The one who moaned underneath while Vox destroyed him. Now, for the first time, he was the one fucking. And the pleasure was completely different: rawer, more dominant, deeper. He felt the hot flesh squeezing him with every movement.
Each thrust sent electric shocks from the base of his spine to the back of his neck.
It was indescribable how his own cock throbbed inside that tightness that sucked him in, as if Vox’s body was claiming him with the same ferocity.
“Ahh… shit…” Alastor groaned, voice rough and broken.
His ears were completely flattened against his head as he fell apart on top of him.
His back arched again, muscles tense beneath the sweat-soaked red shirt. He thrust with the full weight of his body, hips rolling hard, pulling out almost completely only to sink back in with a heavy, deep slap. His claws dug into the foreign flesh, leaving deep marks that didn’t bleed due to the lack of circulation, but still left red imprints as he held him at the exact angle that gave him the most pleasure.
In his fantasy, Vox writhed violently beneath him, gills trembling, screen full of pleasure glitches, like the maniac he was.
“Son of a bitch--… Don’t stop!” the voice growled in his head, hips trying to push up, but Alastor held him down harder and fucked him even more brutally.
The bed creaked violently. His back curved again and again in sharp, powerful movements: rising, tensing, then slamming down with all his weight. Every thrust tore a guttural, rough moan from him that he couldn’t contain.
He wasn’t used to this. He wasn’t used to feeling so much pleasure while giving it.
The heat built in his lower belly, heavy, burning, unbearable. He felt his balls tighten, his cock swollen and throbbing inside that heat. Every internal stroke drove him insane. Pleasure rose in increasingly intense, almost painful waves. His hips lost all control. He thrust faster, erratic and deep, chasing the pleasure that was consuming him.
Until it finally hit.
A brutal, blinding orgasm tore through his entire body.
Alastor buried himself to the hilt with one last violent thrust and came with a long, broken moan, growling hard. He felt every hot pulse, every thick spurt that poured out of him and filled Vox.
His back arched in a tight bow as he trembled, and unconsciously his hips gave small, residual thrusts, as if he never wanted to leave that heat, emptying himself completely until there was nothing left.
He stayed buried deep, breathing hard, body shaking from the climax. His mind was still filled with the image of Vox, who would have been just as lost as he was, taking everything without hesitation.
Alastor let out a low, exhausted, satisfied laugh, still leaning over the body.
“Vincent…” he whispered against the skin, voice rough and possessive. “Fuck… Vincent…”
The name slipped out like an old, almost forbidden confession.
For a few seconds he just stayed there, trembling, face buried in the neck of the corpse.
Then, very slowly, he began to kiss it.
Sick kisses. Tender kisses. Kisses that had no right to exist in a place like this.
He kissed the stained skin of the neck, the torn edges of the gills, the now-cold chest where the sparks had died as if the body had finally surrendered.
Slow, wet, almost reverent kisses.
His lips dragged lazily, as if memorizing every texture. He smiled against the skin with a small, embarrassed, and infatuated smile at the same time.
His cheeks burned even hotter.
“How humiliating…” he murmured, almost against him. “You’re unbearable even when you can’t say anything…”
He slid his arms under Vox’s body and hugged him tightly against himself. He pressed him to his chest, feeling his dead weight, his cooling temperature, his absolute surrender. He rocked him gently, as if he were something fragile and precious he had just claimed.
He let out a long, deep sigh, one that seemed to pull years of tension from his body.
He rubbed his cheek against Vox’s chest, flushed, infatuated, possessive. His hands roamed over the back, waist, and hips, caressing with a dangerous tenderness.
His ears, completely flattened, left no doubt about how he felt in that moment.
And his tail, the one Alastor hid so carefully under his coat, swayed from side to side, excited by the sudden freedom now that his pants no longer pinned it down.
“I could get used to this…” he whispered, almost to himself. “To taking care of you. To having you here. No screens. No screaming. No need for you to pretend you hate me…”
He hugged him tighter and buried his nose against his skin, breathing in that scent now mixed with his own.
For a moment, it almost looked peaceful.
As if he were seriously considering keeping that body. Learning to preserve it. Turning it into something he could care for in his own twisted way.
Finally, with a resigned and satisfied sigh, he pulled back slowly. He withdrew from him carefully, almost gently, and let himself fall sitting on the edge of the bed. Vox’s body remained sprawled, open, marked, and full of him.
Alastor stared at him for a long time, with a crooked smile, soft at the edges, much softer and more honest than he would have allowed at any other moment.
He leaned toward the nightstand, opened the drawer, and took out a pack of old cigarettes along with a scratched silver gas lighter. He lit one with a smooth motion, took a deep drag, and blew the smoke toward the ceiling with half-lidded eyes.
He let out a low, dark laugh, almost mocking.
“After all this… I still smoke like it’s 1930,” he murmured, shaking his head.
He took another long drag, savoring the tobacco, then glanced sideways at the body lying beside him, naked, stained, and still.
He reached out and brushed Vox’s cold hand with two fingers.
“Want one, Vincent?” he asked casually, as if Vox could answer him. “It would do you good after a disaster like that~”
He released another mouthful of smoke, smiling lazily with twisted affection.
“…Oh, no. Wait. Of course not. You never smoked these. Too old-fashioned for the great Vox.”
He laughed to himself, low, almost domestic, as the radio changed melodies. The new song came in with a livelier rhythm, more shameless, and Alastor tilted his head slightly, following the beat with the cigarette between his fingers.
“You smoked that other disgusting brand,” he said, watching the smoke rise. “One of those menthol ones. How revolting that was~ Nothing better than real, pure tobacco…”
He took another drag and smiled to himself, as if they were sharing an old conversation after a fight.
“Always so modern. Always so convinced that even vice needed propaganda…~”
“Better than your old-man cigarettes, Al.”
Alastor froze.
The smoke caught in his mouth.
The voice had sounded right behind him.
Clear.
Close.
Alive.
Too real to have come from inside his head.
For one second, he did not move. He did not even breathe. His eyes opened slightly, fixed on the radio, on the wall, on anything except the body lying beside him. The room seemed to tighten around that impossible voice.
“But, if I may say something, and even if you don’t let me, I’m going to say it anyway…” Vox continued, with that unbearable familiarity, with that same venomous lightness as always, “for once, you were on top of me like a complete lunatic… What a surprise, huh! Regardless of the circumstances and of how the fuck I am right now… You weren’t bad at all, Al. Credit where credit’s due~”
Alastor said nothing.
The ash on the cigarette grew between his fingers.
For a moment, Alastor stopped breathing.
“I’d do it again, you know?” Vox added, almost amused. “I liked it!”
Alastor swallowed slowly.
Impossible.
The word crossed his mind with poor, useless clarity.
Impossible.
“You’re dead,” Alastor murmured, without turning around.
“You say that so dramatically.”
Vox only laughed softly.
Alastor could hear him.
He could hear that damned laugh.
It was his laugh.
It was his voice.
It was him.
Impossible.
“You’re only a body,” he said, lower.
“… And yet you’re hearing me, aren’t you?”
Alastor tightened his fingers around the cigarette.
“You don’t have a head.”
“Details~”
“You’re only a corpse.”
“A corpse…? Al, please! You, of all people, should know how hard I am to kill.”
The room seemed to tighten around that voice.
Alastor did not move.
“You’re not here.”
“Oh, I’m not?” Vox let out a soft laugh, barely distorted at the edges. “Then let’s repeat it slowly… Can you hear me, Alastor?~”
Alastor swallowed.
“I-Impossible…”
His voice trembled.
He did not want to look back.
“This isn’t real.”
“Depends on how you look at it. And, well… depends on how I am right now.”
The voice sounded as if Vox were examining himself, moving on the bed with that same light insolence as always.
“Although I do have one question… did you really need to eat so much of me? God…”
Alastor did not answer.
“That’s going to be hard to hide,” Vox continued. “You took half my stomach. Did I at least taste good?”
Alastor shook his head.
He wanted to say something, but the voice would not come out of his throat. Only then did he notice that his hand was shaking.
“Besides, impossible how?” Vox went on. “That deep down you had all that animal brutality hidden away? I’ll admit, it suits you pretty damn well~”
The radio changed again, moving into a new song.
The next melody turned livelier, warmer, with an old rhythm Alastor knew without wanting to know it.
Vox let out a small laugh.
“Hey, Al… Listen! That’s our song! The one you composed for me once! Remember?”
Alastor closed his fingers around the cigarette.
“…”
Until that moment, he had not realized what song it was.
Not until Vox named it.
“Yes,” Vox said, soft now, too close. “You remember.”
The song kept filling the room.
Old.
Sweet.
Ridiculously cheerful for everything that lay on the bed.
“It was one of our favorites,” Vox murmured. “I’d love to be able to dance to it now. You and me. Like before.”
Alastor looked at the radio.
The melody was familiar.
Too familiar.
One of those songs that had played in rooms just as small, in dirtier bars, on nights when Vox still had a head on his shoulders and a smile capable of ruining his patience.
A song Alastor had pretended to despise only because Vox liked it too much.
“We’re going to do that again, aren’t we?” Vox asked.
Alastor breathed, slowly.
“Dance together again, I mean,” Vox insisted softly, right behind him.
Finally, though somewhat hesitant:
“There aren’t many reasons to dance, Vox,” Alastor said.
Vox fell silent for an instant.
When he returned, he sounded lower.
Less mocking.
“You told me once you didn’t have any good reasons to dance until you danced with me.”
Alastor felt something old move beneath his ribs.
“So we could do it again… You and me. We can find new reasons together, don’t you think, Al?”
He said something unpleasant.
He said something far too human.
“Vox…”
“I missed you, you know?” the voice said, almost over his shoulder. “I missed being with you again, Al…”
The cigarette fell from his fingers.
Alastor turned around sharply.
“Vox!”
The room did not answer.
There was no glowing screen.
No blue smile.
There were no glowing eyes, no distorted voice, no hand rising to touch him back.
There was only the body.
Lying on the bed.
Cold. Still. Decapitated.
The skin dull, stained. The gills broken. The chest motionless. The hand open on the sheets like something abandoned halfway through a sentence.
Alastor remained seated on the edge of the bed, his mouth half-open and Vox’s name still broken between his teeth, completely motionless.
The radio kept playing in the corner, but for a moment, he did not even realize it was not music. Only a constant, miserable signal of static, filling the room like a cheap mockery.
The song —their song; the song that belonged to the two of them— had existed only inside his head.
A fucking shit song.
Alastor let out a low laugh. Small, twisted, completely out of place. He dragged a hand over his face and then through his hair, pushing it back with fingers still stained with blood and sweat. The laugh broke in his throat, became weaker, wetter, almost unrecognizable. A disguised sob that never quite made it out.
For an instant, he saw him.
He saw Vox.
Alive.
Whole.
Insufferable.
With that huge smile and his hand extended as if the entire world had to step aside to make room for them. He imagined him dancing with him again in that bar, with Vox too proud to admit that Alastor had always kept rhythm better, and Alastor too delighted to correct him right away.
Then the image twisted.
Vox without a head. Without a voice. Without that hot arrogance that had always made him so alive. Only a cold body following the song that belonged to them both, a rhythm he could no longer hear, held only by Alastor’s arms, by his memory, by a cruelty so sad it almost felt like affection.
Alastor squeezed his eyes shut.
“… Yes…” he murmured, his voice broken and far too low. “It would be nice to dance with you again.”
In his head, the two images of Vox alternated without mercy.
“Yes…”
His hand searched blindly for Vox’s on the sheets and squeezed it slowly. The cold fingers remained inert, heavy, never closing around his own.
“Maybe later…” he whispered.
The phrase hung in the air, absurd and impossible.
Alastor blinked once, slowly.
His eyes had blurred without him realizing it. That made him go even stiller, almost offended, as if his own body had taken too long to warn him that something inside him had broken.
He leaned toward Vox carefully, almost afraid of breaking him, and set a hand on the motionless torso, as if closeness could still be of any use.
There were no residual discharges left.
There was no heat left.
There was nothing left that could pretend to answer.
Only a room sunk in a stained silence, impossible to clean.
How lonely does a man have to be to do this to the body of someone he loved?
But there was no one there to answer him.
Alastor closed his eyes and finally rested his cheek against the cold chest, his ears flattened, breathing against that silent flesh as if staying close enough, for long enough, could give something of life back to him.
Vox had always been exaggeratedly loud.
Insufferable.
Deafening.
But Alastor had been captivated by his frequency.
By that way he had of speaking as if every word had to fight to occupy the world. Passionate. Vulgar. Brilliant. Insufferable in his truth.
Exaggeratedly alive.
Loud, yes.
But Alastor had learned to love that noise.
And now he missed it.