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“Charlie, I’m not saying that he hasn’t been useful, or that you have to kick him out. I just think that maybe you’re giving deer-boy a little too much trust.”
“Dad, what are you talking about? Alastor’s been a great friend! And he’s made a lot of progress on opening up lately-”
“Just. Sweetie, pumpkin, apple of my eye. Promise me you won’t rely on him as a father figure, okay?”
“Awww, Dad! I’m not replacing you, I promise.”
“What a heartwarming baring of your insecurities using me as a target for the blame you don’t want to put on yourself or your daughter for your admittedly strained relationship!” Alastor enthused, as usual lashing out to hurt emotionally when physically isn’t an option.
“Psshhhht what? No, if Char-Char wants more parental figures she deserves to have as many as her heart desires. Maybe the cat at the bar or something. There’s no upwards limit on the amount of parents someone can have and connect to, dumbass. I just don’t want her looking to you to fill that spot. My baby deserves the best! Or at the very least, not to scrape the bottom of the barrel when I’m not around to give advice.”
“Excuse you? I would make an excellent-”
“Absolutely not. Just look at the tangled mess you’ve turned your relationship with your kid into. I think you’ve invented a new color of hate on the metaphysical spectrum.” Lucifer gestures to the air around Alastor at something that it’s evident only he can see. “If that’s your idea of good parenting, maybe you should-” here he stops and glances at Charlie, clearly swallowing back whatever violence he was originally going to suggest in favor of scooting Charlie so that a few more feet of space are between her and Alastor. “...join some of the group therapy available here at the hotel.”
Alastor, for his part, has just had to absorb a lot of information very quickly. One, his son is in hell. Upsetting, but not beyond belief. Vincent had been a very sweet boy, but Alastor himself had always been a darling for his own mother. The prospect raised a whole slew of questions, ranging from what he’d done to land himself here to why he hadn’t sought Alastor out, but those questions could be addressed later.
Two, Lucifer can see the ephemeral strings that connect souls to one another. What an unfairly useful and powerful ability which the idiot apparently only used to sus out how trustworthy his daughters acquaintances were. That information was interesting, but not worth dissecting in the current moment.
Three: Alastor has done something to make Lucifer look at him like he’s a stain on the name of parenthood itself as a concept. Is Vincent someone he’s massacred in one of his rages to let off steam? Someone he’s eaten? Someone he’s tortured? Surely if he had ever gotten his son’s soul in a contract he would have noticed, would have recognized him. The name would have caught his eye when it was signed, at the very least! Then again, as little attention as Alastor made a habit of paying to his debtors… And who’s to say that his son had even kept his name? If his mother had had any sense, then once the fallout of his murder and investigation had come to light, she would have erased every shred of connection remaining between them, and Vincent could have grown up as any Tom, Dick or Harry.
Vincent had been young when he died, as well. There was a chance he hadn’t remembered him enough to even know to seek out the infamous Radio Demon, or perhaps he’d had the sense to be wary and avoid him. The thought hurts something in him that he refuses to name as feelings, an unpleasant pinch in his ribcage at the idea that if that were the case it would apparently have been justified, because he’s done something to make Vincent hate him in their shared afterlife. Memories of his own father rise up unbidden, and Alastor forces himself to focus on what’s important.
“Where is he?” he demands, looming and half beastly, not as a threat but because he can’t quite fold himself down into something palatable, can’t take the shape he knows makes him seem reasonable. “Who is it!” The lights are flickering and there’s the screech of a radio attempting to tune itself in the background. His grin feels strained. Whatever he’s done, he has to fix it.
Charlie looks worried for him, or possibly what his loss of composure means for the future of the décor in a room that’s rapidly becoming too small to contain him. Lucifer is squinting at him in vague disbelief.
“You’re kidding, right? Is that a joke? Why else would you have left him alive after so many of your fights if you didn’t know who he was? You kill overlords all the time!”
There is dread twisting its way into Alastor’s stomach the longer Lucifer’s rant continues.
“I mean, it was almost sad, watching you dangle your potential approval over his head and belittle his every accomplishment when he was trying so hard to make you proud of him.”
No no no no, don’t say it, stop talking, name anyone else-
“All of hell rooting for him, and he even captured ME, and you still called his efforts pathetic. Repeatedly. Sometimes on live television.”
Charlie’s face has twisted into something tearful and pitying. No matter how many times he breathes in, Alastor can’t feel the air hit his lungs. He might as well be drowning. He wishes he were drowning, because at least then he wouldn’t be here, hearing this. He needs to get away.
The shadows obligingly reach up to take him, the closest he can get to the floor opening up and swallowing him whole. For a hysterical second he wonders if he’ll be dragged down to a deeper hell than the one he was consigned to the last time, but that sort of escape would be a mercy. Instead he’s regurgitated in his room, the bayou flickering in and out of existence with the last shreds of his composure.
‘Surely not,’ he thinks. ‘Surely Lucifer was lying.’
But the first time he’d spared Vox’s life, wasn’t it because of the familiar cadence to his voice, the way he’d wailed “Make it sto-o-op!” with the same tone Vincent had that day he broke his arm at the lake?
No! No, Lucifer was lying! ...But didn’t Vox sleep just the same as Vincent had? Curled up and pouting when he passed out drunk, mouth pursing and eyebrows scrunching before his screensaver kicked on and his entire face went black. Hadn’t Alastor been struck with such familiarity at the sight that he’d hunted down a blanket to tuck around him?
LUCIFER WAS LYING, he had to be lying. Except. Hadn’t Vox looked so very hurt, standing on top of that canon? Hadn’t he said that if Alastor was just going to keep leaving then he could stay gone this time-
This is ridiculous. He shouldn’t even be entertaining this! If Vincent was in hell, then he would have hunted Alastor down and told him who he was. Alastor will go talk to Vox, and prove that Lucifer was just trying to torment him with his stupid words.
(He’s thinking about the mocking, now, and how fraught his and Vox’s relationship is with belittling and violence. He’s thinking about the way Vox froze up when he leaned suggestively into his space, how the TV flustered and fumbled at the mildest of flirting- but only when Alastor was the one doing it.)
Vox is just chilling with a glass of alcohol, running his fingers over the scar on his neck that’s nearly completely healed over. Wondering if he should come clean to Val about why he’s so twisted up about Alastor, or if it wouldn’t be worth the inevitable endless torrent of daddy issues jokes. If he could even trust Valentino to keep his secret, when the moth was so mad.
It’s not exactly a great play for understanding, spilling that the guy he’s hung up on will never stop being a core part of his identity no matter how far Alastor goes. He’s also not jazzed about the idea of admitting to anyone out loud that he LET Alastor twist him up that way, when he probably could have stopped it years ago if he’d just been willing to give up those rare moments when Alastor used his crush against him.
What they have is toxic, and even Al doesn’t even realize exactly how unhealthy Vox’s addiction to him really is. Worse, at this point Vox isn’t sure that if he found out, Alastor wouldn’t just add incest to the pot shots and the mocking. What if it doesn’t matter to him at all? Vox isn’t sure he could handle having his happy childhood written off as nothing, or even a mistake.
So Alastor shadow portals in, and Vox sighs at the fact that he hasn’t scrubbed Al from the authorized list in his security program yet, and he pours more alcohol into his cup.
“What do you want? Here to gloat?” Usually he’d have more energy at the sight of his professed rival, but he’s just. Tired. Of the cat and mouse of it all. Of reaching for approval he’ll never earn. Of hoping to ever recapture those golden years of almost-kindness that he had dared to call friendship.
One of Alastor’s shadows is tilting his screen up. He’s smiling in that way that’s more of a grimace, leaning in to stare intently at Vox’s features like he’s searching for something. If it’s Vox’s self-respect then good fucking luck finding it.
A single red claw comes up to trace the blue lining on Vox’s mismatched eye. Whatever he sees makes him bare his teeth more.
“You said,” he hisses, “that your father died when you were young. That your mother raised you, and you had a decent childhood.”
“All true, but I’m not sure what your angle digging for information about my formative years now of all times is.”
“When he died. How old were you?”
Shit, that’s the scary voice. Vox’s heart has sped up quite a bit, because there are implications to this line of questioning, and he doesn’t want to entertain them.
“None of your business!” He shoves Alastor back, and if he were thinking more clearly he would realize what a tell that is, would realize that he’s never pushed Alastor away before when he could have him close. “Why the sudden interest in my human life?” He’s defensive, protective of this in a way he didn’t have to be with most of it. Alastor had died when he was nine; there hadn’t been much missing from his life story when he’d spilled it out over drinks throughout the years. He grew up in the midwest- True, after his dad died and they’d had to move to get away from any potential scrutiny. He never met his grandparents- True, for him and a million other people. Hardly a fact that would give away his identity.
“Look, Alastor, whatever you’re thinking…”
Alastor is stumbling back, now. Reeling away from him with wide eyes until his back hits the wall, arms trembling as he raises them to yank in distress at his hair.
“Tell me you’re not,” he whispers, smile looking uncomfortably wobbly. “Tell me he was lying, and that you have no idea what I’m talking about. Tell me your father died when you were six, or seven, or twelve! Please,” he entreats, “Tell me you don’t have any idea why I’m here asking you these questions!”
Vox sighs the sigh of a man who’s life was already in shambles. ‘This might as well happen,’ he thinks. ‘Coming out of this month with any dignity at all was clearly too much to ask for.’
He stands slowly, approaching Alastor like he’s a startled animal who could lash out at any moment. He holds out the drink he had poured for himself.
“You look like you need this more than me,” he says, gentle in a way that makes everything feel so much worse. “Who told you? Everyone who came down with me is locked tight under contract. It’s not like I’ve been handing out my name or personal history to anyone who asks.”
“You told me your personal history,” Alastor harrumphs, staring into the amber liquid in the glass like it has any sort of answers.
“Well, yeah. I wanted you to be proud of me.”
Alastor takes a swig of the drink so that he can pretend the burning in his chest is from the alcohol. Vox had been trying to impress him- obviously and at every opportunity. Alastor had responded with derision and mockery, because some random sinner’s unimpressive kill list hadn’t been worth the time it took to hear.
“If you had just- If I knew-” he tries to defend, and Vox sits down next to him and scoffs. There’s a foot of space between them that usually Alastor would be thankful for, but now feels like some sort of statement.
“I didn’t want you to humor me because I was your son,” he says, and Alastor flinches at the truth tossed into the air between them. “I wanted it to be real. I wanted… I don’t know, to feel worthy. Like the person I became was someone you’d… It doesn’t matter. My accomplishments never met whatever standards you were judging by.”
The silence stretches between them. Alastor wonders if he should address the elephant in the room. Wonders if it’s worse not to, because he’d known about Vox’s crush on him from nearly the very beginning, but at some point he’d decided that it was something he could potentially use, and started encouraging it. It was an unkind decision on his part, to be sure, but not one he would have ever entertained had he known the truth.
“The first time I accused you of being in love with me,” falls out of Alastor’s mouth before he can lose what courage he’s scraped together. “Is that when you decided to keep up the ruse?”
“No. Fuck, no that would have been reasonable. Like, oh, how embarassing, my feelings are obvious, now he can never know. Ugh. Remember the night I threw up in your piano?”
Alastor does remember. He’d been a little offended, because Vox had turned and upended his stomach after his first attempt at making bedroom eyes to see if he could garner some sort of reaction, and it had stung his pride and irritated him that Vox was such a lightweight that the effort practicing a heated smoulder in his mirror had probably been wasted.
“Hah. Judging by the look on your face you remember enough. Yeah, you asked me what song you should play, and I almost answered ‘Yankee Doodle,’ because that’s what I always asked for as a kid. I figured, no one else would have any reason to know that, right? That my dad always played Yankee Doodle on piano for me, as the first song when he sat down. So there was no way I could be lying about who I was, and even if you didn’t recognize me with the screen you’d know I was telling the truth. But then…”
“I’m sorry!” Alastor blurts, horrified and guilty, because he’d practically come on to his son.
“God, stop making that face. It’s not your fault. I just. You looked at me like that, and it really hit me that you were my dad, and the nostalgia got all mixed in with the sex eyes, and I realized that I was selfish. That if I told you who I was you’d never- You’d never look at me like that again. I figured, as long as he doesn’t know, there’s a chance he’ll keep using my feelings against me, and I could have that. The pretend and the teasing. It was a lot of emotions, and I was drunk and guilty and horny and disgusted with myself.”
“You knew I was stringing you along and toying with your feelings, and you decided that that was-”
“Fair game and preferable to ever having any sort of healthy relationship with normal boundaries? Yeah, hands down, no question.”
Alastor starts running through his parenting choices from back when he was alive with a fine-toothed comb. He doesn’t think he did anything that would have encouraged how their relationship in hell turned out, but he also never thought he had the capacity to raise a hand towards his son. The memories of goring Vox are less satisfying and more horrifying in this new light. Also uncomfortable is how very receptive to being hurt Vox often was, in a way that Alastor hadn’t been shy about taking advantage of to encourage the crush.
“You’re thinking too much,” Vox Vincent Vox grumbles.
“There is a lot to think about!” Alastor shrills, feeling a little hysterical.
“Listen, the crush wasn’t something you could have prevented. I was operating under the assumption when I was alive that death was more of a permanent thing. They hadn’t invented decent therapy yet back then, but I’m sure someone somewhere would have had something to say about how I used your recordings.”
“You had recordings?” Alastor asks, unsure he wants any more answers but unable to keep from asking.
“Of your shows. They could probably write a book dissecting how puberty mixing with my need to feel cared for lead to bad decisions. Long story short, I pavlov’d myself into finding your voice with the radio filter over it sexy. Not that your voice isn’t- Ugh this is awkard.”
Alastor reaches out a shadow to pick the bottle up off the table, refilling his glass before passing said bottle to Vox.
“Tell me about it, pal,” he responds on instinct, before realizing that the filter was still on his voice and blushing. “Ah, is this… preferable?” Alastor asks, small and nervous without the static. It isn’t comfortable, but for Vincent, he could probably…
“Al. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but nothing you could do would uncross my wires at this point. You can keep the mic on, I promise dropping it isn’t putting a dent in my fucked up complex.”
He shouldn’t feel relieved at that. With all the things he’s learned, he isn’t sure he deserves to ever experience any type of relief again. But Vox…
“You aren’t touching me.”
“You called me a creep for touching you. Which, hey, surprise, you were right. But for the record? Shoulder touches are pretty fucking platonic.”
“I’m very selective with my personal space,” he defends, annoyed, because Vincent should know that.
“Yeah, I guess I never really adjusted to not being one of your exceptions.”
And doesn’t that sentence hit like a blow, because in life Vincent had been an exception. His son should be able to touch him. He closes his eyes and holds his hand out, palm up and waiting, wondering if when Vox reaches out he’ll feel the revulsion or not.
Vox doesn’t reach out.
“I’m not going to hold your hand,” he says, like it should be obvious. “It doesn’t- I wouldn’t be doing it as your son.”
“You’re always my son,” Alastor says reflexively, before realizing what exactly Vox means. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me,” Vox rebuts, hurt and bristling at what he sees as another in a long line of dismissals of his feelings.
“Oh, for the love of,” Alastor grumbles. “Vincent,” he says, the same tone he used to wield when ordering the cleanup of toys or the cessation of a tantrum. Vox’s head snaps around to face him, eyes blown wide and a shiver coursing through him. Clearly that’s something he’ll have to use sparingly, if the strength of the reaction is any indication, but for now it suits his purposes and gets Vox’s full attention on him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he enunciates slowly, trying to press this meaning into his picture box’s thick skull. The lesson will probably need to be repeated, with years of whatever cocktail of self-loathing (that Alastor’s previous disgust no doubt contributed to) floating around in his memory banks, but for now…
“What- Al- Dad?”
Oh look at that, his eyes can grow wider.
“You are not calling me ‘daddy’ in bed,” he asserts firmly. “Perhaps Père, if you’re very good.”
“I can be so good,” Vincent says, sparks shooting between his antennae, before what exactly Alastor has said catches up to him. He glitches and makes an enquiring little squeak, like a single word might break this moment. Alastor finds himself charmed.
“I’ve hurt you quite a bit, haven’t I?”
Vox nods slowly, looking for all the world like he isn’t sure he believes that what’s happening has a remote chance of being real.
“Would you like me to kiss it better?” Alastor croons, soft and sweet like he hasn’t been since waking up in hell.
He knows Vox, and he knows himself. That’s why he knows that Vincent will forgive him.
Alastor is feeling very pleased with the handle he has on getting back into his son’s good graces, as well as a little sore from the sudden drastic spike in his sex life. Really, whyever would he want to fix Vox’s obsession with him when it’s so very easy to leverage. Truly, his newly gained understanding feels like having been given the keys to the kingdom that is the other man’s psyche.
He’s humming a jaunty tune when he makes his way back into the hotel he had half-fled what feels like an eon ago. Lucifer, upon seeing him glide through the lobby, goes from looking suspicious to looking positively green.
“Vox and I have resolved our enmity,” Alastor reports smugly. He doubts there’s much room for hate in their relationship now.
“That’s good!” Charlie enthuses. “So you apologized?”
“I did say sorry,” Alastor affirms, because he very much had uttered that word at least once in that trainwreck of an office conversation. “And I’ll continue making it up to him in the future.”
“Yay!” says Charlie, who’s pleased that he has been taking her little musical lessons to heart.
“Yay,” says Lucifer flatly, clearly horrified by Alastor’s methods. Maybe he should have thought the consequences through more thoroughly before inventing sin, if he was going to cast judgement. Vincent certainly had no complaints.
“I suspect he and I will maintain a much closer relationship going forward,” Alastor purred, just to watch Lucifer’s expression further turn with discomfort. Perhaps he should ask Vox to leave a few visible hickeys next time; he’d probably be elated.