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Vox is lying amongst the tall grasses on the bank of the bayou when she hears a soft knock on the hotel room’s door, distant and surreal. She’s been drinking, of course, the half-empty bottle of cognac clutched in one hand like a lifeline. It softens everything: the boredom, the anxiety, the need, the clamouring voices in her head. The smell of wet vegetation out here isn’t something she ever thought she’d take comfort in—earthy and underscored by a damp rot—but there’s echoes of Alastor in it, too.
Here, she can be surrounded by the faint chirping of cicadas and intermittent rumbling of bullfrogs, a welcome imitation of other life that lets her pretend for a moment that she's not alone, even if they're nor real. She’d always been a city girl in life—and death, for that matter—but here she finds herself clinging desperately to the change of scenery it offers. Occasionally wet splashes will sound, though she’s never been able to glimpse the cause. She blinks slowly up at the hazy glow of fireflies drifting above her, and this time there's an audible click of the doorlatch as it opens. Vox knows it's not Alastor; she never enters the room so hesitantly.
“Vox?” She sits up so fast her vision blurs, screen probably glitching drunken nonsense as the brighter lights emanating from the main area of Alastor’s room in the distance settle into focus. Her back is damp from the grass, the thin material of the silk slip she rarely bothers to change out of soaked through as she scrambles to her feet, trying not to immediately stagger and fall down. “You really in there?”
It’s not Husk. She knows this voice too, though, all too well. God, she’d fucking despised him and the feeling had been entirely mutual. That doesn’t stop her from stumbling through the long grass, though, abandoning the bottle on the ground behind her as she claws her way through the vegetation to ultimately trip and fall heavily to her bare knees when she reaches the familiar crimson of Alastor’s carpet. The room is still spinning around them, Vox’s throat dry and stomach nauseous as she looks up, eyes abruptly stinging. Why him?
Why him?
Angel stares down at her, expression twisted in a conflicted amalgamation of incredulity, hatred, disgust, and worst of all—pity.
“This is so fucked up,” he whispers hoarsely, and it occurs to Vox that she must look like shit, must look—crazy, half-dressed and lunging drunkenly from the bayou like a lunatic.
“It’s—” she begins, and stops, voice stuttering and glitching as she tries to explain. “It’s nxxxzot what—what you think.”
Vox doesn’t know why she says it. It is, in reality, probably exactly what he thinks—except now Vox is forced to confront the humiliating fact that seeing people also requires being seen. And she—it’s hardly as though Alastor’s responsible for her current state. She has a wardrobe full of well-tailored clothes she could be wearing, countless books, an endless supply of music and blank paper she could lose herself in, she just… doesn't.
“Sure,” Angel says with a tense laugh, raking a hand through his hair as he takes a step back to sink into a chair. “You’ve just been taking a relaxing vacation in Al’s fuckin' bedroom for the past year, huh?”
Year. The past year. An entire fucking YEAR—
“Charlie’s gonna flip,” Angel's still muttering to himself, eyes wide and fingers still buried in his hair, another hand clenching into a fist, “Val’s gonna flip, oh my fuckin’ god how can I possibly spin this in a way where we don’t—”
“Val?” Vox interrupts, chest constricting, “he’s stixxzxxll, he’s not—”
—dead? No, Alastor had never said, but the implications had been clear enough: that the only reason she was alive was thanks to her deal with Alastor. So how had Val—
“Vox,” Angel says, voice tense and refusing to meet her eyes, “he’s a guest here.”