Static
He floats in a black void, and the worst part is how much time he has to think.
Vox counts. One. Two. Three. Four. He reaches a million, loses his place, and starts over. One. Two. Three. The counting is the only thing keeping him from screaming into the nothingness, except he can’t scream—no power means no voice means no sound means nothing—just his consciousness, trapped in a dead screen, replaying every mistake on loop.
The humiliation broadcast. Alastor’s laughter. Charlie Morningstar’s disappointed face. Valentino’s hands on his screen, lifting, twisting—
He stops counting. Starts over. One. Two. Three.
He deserves this.
He tried to rally all of Hell against Heaven. He failed spectacularly, publicly, and now he’s paying for it in the cruelest currency: time. Endless, empty time. He doesn’t know if he’s been here for days or decades. His internal clock died with his power supply, and without external input, his processor... drifts. Sometimes he thinks he hears Valentino’s voice, distant and distorted. Sometimes he thinks he hears the hum of Voxtek’s servers. Mostly, there’s nothing.
The void fractures around him sometimes, his own mind turning against itself. Hypnosis was always his gift—bending others to his will with spiraling patterns and carefully modulated frequencies. But here, in the dark, the spirals turn inward. He gets caught in loops of his own making: the same memory playing over and over, the same conversation, the exact moment of failure. He knows it’s happening. He can’t stop it. Is this the destruction that comes after Hell? He isn't sure. Maybe he's dead, for real, for good, and this is all that is left.
He thinks about Val dropping him in that closet—the casual disregard. Like Vox was just another broken piece of tech, another outdated model to be shelved and forgotten. How long did Val wait before replacing him? An hour? A day? Did he wait at all?
One. Two. Three. Four—
Warmth.
It seeps in gradually, so slowly he thinks he’s imagining it. But no—there’s power, actual electrical current, feeding into his systems. His screen flickers. Once. Twice. Static crackles across his vision, and then—
Light.
His screen boots up with a painful surge, and suddenly, he can see. The world crashes back in an overwhelming rush of color and shape and—
“Hello there!” The face hovering in front of him is bright. Painfully bright. Yellow eyes, red cheeks, a smile so wide and genuine it makes Vox want to flinch away.
“TV man!” Lucifer Morningstar beams at him like he’s just discovered something delightful in his morning coffee. He bounces. "I did it!"
Vox’s audio systems kick in with a screech of feedback. He forces his processors to orient, to make sense of his surroundings. He’s propped up on a workbench, plugged into—he traces the cable with his eyes—a rubber duck. A fucking rubber duck with a power cord coming out of its ass.
The room is... Jesus Christ. Ducks. Everywhere. On every surface. Hanging from the ceiling on strings. Piled in corners. Some are pristine, perfectly painted, with tiny mechanical components visible through translucent plastic. Others are in pieces, scattered across workbenches in various states of assembly. There’s a smell—solder and hot glue and coffee and something else, something like stale air and old Depression.
“Where is Val?” The words rasp out of his speakers, distorted from disuse.
“I don’t know anyone named Val. Is she someone you know?” Lucifer tilts his head, genuinely curious.
"Valentino!" Vox barks, and the volume makes Lucifer jump. “Where is he?”
“Oh, the butterfly overlord!” Lucifer’s expression doesn’t change, still that same manic cheer. “I do know him. He’s, uh—” He waves a hand vaguely. “Cranky. Very cranky. Lovely fashion sense though.”
Vox forces his optics to scan the room again. Royal quarters. He can tell by the architecture, the vaulted ceilings, the gold inlay on the walls—though most of it is covered by ducks. Shelves of ducks. Boxes of ducks. A whole corner dedicated to what appears to be duck blueprints. The king of Hell has turned his palace into a rubber duck obsession cave, and Vox is sitting in the middle of it like another broken toy.
“Shut me back off,” Vox says flatly. The void was better than this. At least in the void, he didn’t have to confront the reality of being rescued by the one person he’d publicly humiliated.
“Nope, no can do!” Lucifer actually bounces on his heels. “I fixed you!”
"Fixed me?" Vox’s screen crackles with static. “I’m a fucking screen.”
“You have little legs now!” Lucifer gestures downward with evident pride.
Vox looks down. For the first time, he realizes his screen isn’t resting on the desk—it’s elevated. Beneath the bottom edge of his monitor casing, he can see them: thin, articulated legs made from what looks like... his own claws? They’re black and sleek, ending in those distinctive razor points he used to have on his hands, curved and bladed. They’re bent at odd angles right now, unpowered, but they’re there.
“I did that,” Lucifer continues, oblivious to Vox’s horror. “Helped fix you up with a power cable, too. You’ll have to charge each night, but you should be able to unplug during the day and walk around for a while. I calculated the battery capacity based on your screen size and—” He keeps talking, but Vox isn’t listening.
He’s a head. A screen with legs. Like some fucked up desk lamp.
“What am I even doing here?” The question comes out quieter than he intends.
Lucifer’s smile softens, and somehow that’s worse than the manic energy. There’s something almost gentle in his expression, something that makes Vox want to flinch away. “Oh! I found you in the garbage at Voxtek. I was digging around for some more corded cables—” He holds up a handful of wires, different lengths and gauges, all carefully stripped and sorted. “For my ducks, you know. Gotta get the wiring perfect.”
The words hit like physical blows, in the garbage. Val didn’t just close him. Val threw him out. Literally, put him in the trash.
“I’m gonna regret asking,” Vox says, his voice flat and mechanical, “but why the fuck are you stealing out of my dumpster?”
“To fix my ducks, silly!” Lucifer waves a hand at the room, as if the answer is obvious. “The Voxtek components are actually really well made—” He pauses, then adds thoughtfully, “Well, they’re really well made. Before, you know. The whole...” He makes a vague gesture that probably means an attempt at an apocalypse. "And they are in the trash, that means no one wants them anyway, so I take them."
"What?" Vox blinks, confused still.
“But you just rest now, charge up.” Lucifer yawns, stretching his arms over his head. His jacket rides up, and Vox can see how thin he is, how the clothes hang loose. “I’m gonna go to bed. It’s—” He glances at a clock on the wall. “Four in the morning. That’s a normal time to sleep. Pretty sure that’s normal.” He’s muttering to himself now, moving around the room, turning off soldering irons, capping glue bottles, and organizing ducks with the focus of someone performing a ritual. “In the morning, we’ll make sure you can walk around. Get you calibrated. It’ll be great.”
He’s at the door when he pauses, picks up a small remote from a side table.
“Wait—” Vox starts.
Lucifer presses the button.
Everything goes dark.
“THAT MOTHERFUCKER—” Vox roars into the void, but the void swallows it. He’s back in the black, back in the nothing, and the rage is the only thing he has. Lucifer didn’t ask. Didn’t warn him. Just turned him off like a television at bedtime, like Vox is just another appliance in his collection.
One. Two. Three. He counts, because that’s all he can do. Four. Five. Six.
He’s going to kill that angel the moment he gets a body back.
The lights come back on, and Vox doesn’t know if it’s been minutes or hours.
Morning light is streaming through the windows, a real window, he realizes, not the simulated daylight of Voxtek. The ducks cast long shadows across the workbench. Lucifer is sitting at his desk with coffee, already dressed in a fresh suit, looking like he didn’t get so much sleep.
“Good morning, TV man!” He’s chipper. Who the fuck is that chipper after not sleeping?
“I have a name,” Vox grits out. "Use it."
“Vincent,” Lucifer nods, taking a sip of coffee. “I know all the Sinners’ names. Part of the job description.” He sounds proud of that.
"Vox,” he corrects sharply. “You will call me, Vox.”
“I’ll just call you, TV man, easier to remember,” Lucifer says it so pleasantly, like he’s commenting on the weather.
Vox grumbles, but his attention is drawn downward again. The legs. He has legs. They look absurd, like someone ripped his old hands off and stuck them on backward as feet. The razor-sharp points dig slightly into the workbench surface.
“Move, dammit.” He focuses all his processing power on the nearest leg, trying to send signals to make it respond.
Nothing.
“Easy, TV.” Lucifer sets down his coffee with a soft clink. “I don’t have them wired up yet.” He laughs, light and genuine, and it grates on Vox’s last nerve. “We’ll get you walking.” He assures with pride in his eyes.
He stands, rolling up his sleeves, and Vox notices his hands correctly for the first time. They’re delicate, aristocratic, but there are minor burn marks on the fingers—solder burns. Fresh ones and old scars layered on top of each other.
“I dunno why anyone would scrap a whole person—” Lucifer pauses, his smile faltering for just a moment. His eyes go distant. “Well. Yes, I do.” He shakes his head, and the smile snaps back into place, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes anymore. “People throw away things that don’t serve them anymore. Even people.” He says matter-of-factly, like he's teaching a goddamn primary school lesson.
He picks up a soldering iron, testing the heat with a practiced motion. For someone who seems scatterbrained and manic, his movements are precise. He works with the kind of focused skill that comes from thousands of hours of repetition, the same way Vox used to code—muscle memory taking over while the mind wanders.
Lucifer opens a panel on Vox’s underside—when did he even install panels?—and starts connecting wires. His hands are steady. The room smells like hot metal and flux. Around them, the dead-eyed ducks watch from their perches, some with mechanisms whirring softly, others completely still.
“How long?” Vox finally asks. The question has been eating at him since he woke up. “How long was I in the trash?”
Lucifer doesn’t look up from his work. “Found you about eight months ago. The thing that happened on that stage between us? That was like I dunno almost a year ago.” His tone is casual, like he’s discussing the weather. “Took me a while to get the right parts. Had to fabricate some of them from scratch. Your casing was pretty beaten up—looked like someone kicked you around a bit before tossing you. I even had to replace your OLED screen, and I did have to buy that.”
Eight months, almost a year ago...
Eight months in the void. Eight months counting and losing count and going mad in the silence. Eight months of Valentino and Velvette running Voxtek without him, of Hell moving on, of being forgotten.
“Feel that?” Lucifer asks. Vox realizes with a start that he can feel his left leg. Actually feel it. The sensation of the workbench beneath the claw-point, the slight give of the wood.
“Holy shit,” he breathes. "Yeah, I feel it." He laughs a little. "Holy shit!" he says again.
“Right? Can you move it?” Vox lifts the little leg and taps it gently on the desk. "Alright!" Lucifer grins up at him, and there’s genuine pride in his expression. “Three more to go. Then we’ll calibrate your balance systems. You’ll be walking by lunch!”
He sounds so happy about it. Like fixing a broken overlord, he fished out of the garbage, which is apparently the highlight of his year.
Maybe, Vox thinks as sensation blooms in his second leg, it is.
