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The Vees’ tower was quieter than Alastor remembered.
That, more than anything, was wrong.
The exterior still screamed excess; neon crawled up its spine in colours that hurt to look at, holographic adverts stuttering and looping through half-broken slogans that promised pleasure, power, permanence. The building still wanted to be seen. It still wanted to be admired. It still wanted to be feared.
Velvette and Valentino had repaired the exterior within days.
Inside, though, it felt abandoned. Not ruined, not destroyed - simply neglected. As though everyone had agreed, without saying it out loud, not to come back.
Alastor moved through it without resistance. No alarms shrieked. No traps sprang. Shadows parted for him like they always had, pliant and eager, whispering against the walls. The lobby lights flickered overhead, dust drifting through the beams in slow spirals. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the polished floor and barely recognised it; thinner, perhaps, or simply more tired than he had been willing to admit.
He told himself he was curious.
That was the word he used when he didn’t want to say the others.
Concern. Unease. That low, crawling sense of absence that had been gnawing at him ever since Vox had vanished from the public eye.
No broadcasts. No outbursts. No petty, theatrical declarations of dominance crackling across the city’s screens. Velvette had been spotted plenty in the last month, alive and vicious as ever; Valentino had taken over every television network, most of them now a twenty-four-hour cycle of porn. Vox, however, had simply… stopped.
Alastor had waited longer than he would admit to himself before coming here.
The doors parted on Vox’s floor with a soft chime that echoed too long in the silence.
The penthouse smelled stale.
Not rotten. Not decayed. Just unused. Old electricity clung faintly to the air, the ghost of ozone and heated metal, but it had gone thin with time. Dust lay in a fine, even layer across the surfaces, undisturbed; not the chaotic scatter of a struggle, but the quiet accumulation of weeks left alone.
It had been at least a month, Alastor thought distantly.
He walked further in, footsteps soundless on the floor. Screens lined the walls, dark and inert, their black surfaces dulled beneath the dust. Once, this room had glowed like a second sun; once, it had hummed and crackled and screamed with Vox’s presence, every inch of it an extension of his will.
Now it felt like a mausoleum.
The couch was where Alastor remembered it. Same shape. Same orientation. Same faint scorch mark on the armrest from the last time Vox had overloaded himself out of spite.
And on it-
Alastor stopped.
For a long moment, he didn’t move at all.
Vox was still where he had been left, likely tossed there by an angry Valentino once they’d returned after the battle.
He was only the screen now, resting against the cushions at an awkward angle, cables trailing loosely from where his neck had been.
Dust coated the top of him.
That was the part that finally made something in Alastor’s chest give way, just slightly. Vox would never have allowed that. The man had been many things - vain, vicious, constantly obnoxious - but never still.
Alastor approached slowly, as though the thing on the couch might startle if he moved too fast.
The screen flickered.
Just once.
Alastor’s smile snapped into place on instinct. Bright. Polished. Cruel in all the ways it had always been when he faced Vox. “Well,” he said lightly, hands clasped behind his back, “this is a new look for you, my dear. Minimalist. Very avant-garde.”
The screen brightened. Vox’s eyes resolved out of the static, dimmer than Alastor remembered, their glow muted and uneven.
“Alastor,” Vox said.
His voice was flat.
Not calm. Not mocking. Flat, in the way voices only became when something essential had been drained out of them.
Alastor’s grin faltered for half a heartbeat before he forced it wider. “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve finally learnt some manners. I preferred you screeching.”
Nothing answered him.
Vox’s gaze tracked him as he circled the couch, but there was no electricity crawling along the carpet, no pressure building in the air. Alastor became suddenly, acutely aware that he was standing in a room that felt very wrong.
“You’re late,” Vox said.
“That’s rich, coming from you.” Alastor stopped in front of him, looking down at the screen. Up close, he could see the fractures spidering faintly beneath the glass, old damage that had never quite healed. “What happened, Vox? Finally let someone hit the off switch?”
A flicker passed across Vox’s eyes. Something like irritation. Something like exhaustion.
“Go to the bedside drawer,” Vox said. “The left one.”
Alastor stilled.
“…Absolutely not.”
“Al.”
“I am not rifling through your drawers,” Alastor replied crisply. “I’ve seen what you keep in them.”
“Bring me what’s inside.”
Alastor tilted his head, studying him. “You’re being uncharacteristically dull. What’s the game?”
Vox’s eyes dimmed further. “There isn’t one.”
That was wrong, too.
Alastor moved anyway.
The drawer slid open with a soft rasp. Inside lay a single object, resting neatly against dark velvet.
Angelic steel.
The dagger was small, utilitarian, its surface faintly luminous even in the low light. Alastor felt the air around it shift the moment he laid eyes on it, his power recoiling instinctively as though burned.
He went very still.
“You’ve got to be joking,” he said carefully.
“Bring it,” Vox repeated.
Alastor turned back, the dagger heavy in his hand despite its size. “What,” he asked softly, “do you think you’re doing?”
Vox sighed.
A real sigh. Tired and human.
“Kill me.”
The knife slipped in Alastor’s grip.
He caught it reflexively, fingers tightening around the hilt as his dead heart slammed uselessly against his ribs.
“…Excuse me?” he said, and there was no humour left in his voice at all.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Alastor turned, the dagger still clutched in his hand, and crossed the room back toward the couch. His steps were slow, cautious. He stopped directly in front of Vox, looming there with the angelic steel hanging uselessly at his side.
“Say that again,” he said quietly. “Look at me, and say it again.”
Vox’s eyes flickered.
Electricity cracked through the room without warning - sharp and biting, skittering across Alastor’s skin like needles driven under it. He hissed despite himself, muscles tensing as the shock crawled up his spine.
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” Vox snapped.
Alastor stood there, angelic steel humming faintly against his skin, and for the first time in decades, he found himself unwilling to move. The metal rejected him on a fundamental level; his power recoiled, crawling back into him like a wounded animal. The air around the blade felt thin, wrong, as though reality itself wanted distance from it.
“No,” he said quietly.
Vox’s eyes flickered. Not irritation this time. Something duller. Older.
“Alastor.”
“I will not,” Alastor repeated, sharper now, a thread of something dangerous winding into his voice. “You don’t get to order me around like this.”
A pulse of electricity cracked through the room, harsh and sudden. It skated over Alastor’s nerves, forcing a gasp from his throat.
“Stop that,” he snapped. “You’re being melodramatic.”
Another surge answered him, stronger, enough to make his knees buckle.
Vox watched him without pleasure.
“That’s the point,” Vox said flatly. “Bring it closer.”
Alastor’s hand shook despite himself. “You think this is funny?” he demanded. “You think this is some last little stunt to get under my skin?”
Silence.
Then, quietly, “I can’t feel anything anymore.”
The words landed wrong. Not dramatic enough. Not sharp enough. Vox said them like an observation, the way one might note that a room had gone cold.
Alastor swallowed. “That’s not my problem.”
“I know.”
Electricity lashed out again - not as a strike this time, but a sustained pressure that crawled under Alastor’s skin, locking his muscles in place. He staggered forward despite himself, boots scraping against the carpet, the hand holding the dagger beginning to tremble.
“Stop,” Alastor said, and this time it wasn’t a command; it was a plea. “You don’t mean this.”
Vox’s screen dimmed, then brightened again, struggling to hold a stable image. “I’ve been sitting here for thirty-seven days.”
Alastor froze.
“Valentino came once,” Vox continued. “He laughed. Velvette didn’t come at all.”
Static crackled at the edges of his face.
The dagger hovered just above the glass now. Alastor could see his own reflection warped across Vox’s face, fractured and doubled.
“You could have called me,” Alastor whispered.
Vox’s mouth twitched. “You wouldn’t have come.”
The electricity spiked violently, pain ripping through Alastor’s nerves as his body betrayed him, pitching forward. He fought it - gasping, straining, his muscles screaming - but Vox had always known how to overpower his shadows when he wanted to.
It was the one thing Vox had over him. The single aspect in which he was stronger, despite everything else.
The tip of the blade pressed against the screen.
A hairline crack spread outward with a soft, awful sound.
Alastor sobbed.
“Vincent,” he said, his voice breaking completely now. “Don’t do this. Don’t make me do this.”
Vox’s eyes softened.
“Look at me,” he said.
Alastor did.
For a moment - just one - the glare was gone. The arrogance. The vanity. What looked back at him then was tired and stripped bare and achingly familiar, something that felt less like Vox and more like the ghost of Vincent.
“I’m so tired, Al,” Vox said. “I don’t want to sit here anymore.”
The electricity surged again, brutal and unforgiving, forcing Alastor’s arm to drive forward-
The dagger pierced the screen.
Not all at once.
The glass resisted, screaming as it fractured, light spilling out in jagged bursts as Vox convulsed, static shrieking through the room. Alastor snarled, trying to pull back, but the blade was already embedded, sunk too deep.
Vox glitched violently, his image stuttering and tearing, sparks arcing wildly across the couch.
“Al-” he gasped, the word breaking into feedback.
“I’m sorry,” Alastor choked, hands useless, slick with energy and heat.
The electricity faltered.
Vox’s face steadied just long enough to smile.
A real one. Small. Grateful.
“Thanks, Al,” he said.
The light went out.
The room collapsed into silence so absolute it rang.
Alastor stood there for a moment longer, the dagger still lodged in the dead screen, his hands trembling as though they no longer belonged to him. When the last residual hum faded, when the space where Vox had always been finally registered as empty, something inside him tore open completely.
He dropped.
The sound that came from him was not a scream but something lower, animal and broken, dragged up from a place grief had been waiting patiently to reach. His chest seized, breath stuttering uselessly as he folded over the corpse, clutching the edges of the couch like a drowning man.
Ninety years.
Ninety years of fighting, of circling, of never quite touching the thing beneath it all. He had built his eternity on the assumption that Vox would always be there - hateful and brilliant and alive enough to push back.
He had not imagined this.
The loss was not sharp. It was suffocating. It filled his lungs, crushed his ribs, hollowed him out from the inside until even breathing felt like a betrayal.
Alastor pressed his forehead to the cold, ruined screen and sobbed until his throat burned, until the weight of it threatened to split him open entirely.
Vox was gone.
Vincent was gone.
And there would never be another like him again.