Chapter Text
The main studio corridor always gave Vincent a particular thrill. Cameras dipped as he passed, technicians stepped out of his way, and every glossy surface threw back an angle of him worth admiring. He belonged there; everyone knew it. The building bent itself around his presence.
Which was why the moment stood out when someone didn’t.
The newcomer slipped through the hall without so much as a glance in Vincent’s direction. A reel was tucked neatly under one arm, his posture crisp, upright, unmistakably Southern. A mixed-race boy moving through the heart of a national studio with that much confidence was startling on its own. Doing it without acknowledging Vincent Whittman bordered on insolence.
Vincent felt the faint sting of offence settle beneath his ribs.
He stepped into the boy’s path with a smile he saved for people who needed to be reminded of their place. “You lost?”
The boy turned slowly. His curls shifted over his brow, his eyes warm and dark and clearer than they had any right to be. His smile was polite enough to insult.
“Lost?” he echoed. “No, sir. I work here.”
Up close he was too pretty, far too young, and far too fearless. It jabbed at something he thought he’d long buried under ambition, women, and the acceptable appetites of a man in his position.
“You’re new?” he asked.
“Radio,” the boy replied, voice smooth, lightly transatlantic, a touch old-fashioned.
Vincent let the disdain show. “Didn’t realise they were hiring children.”
It made sense, though; no one with that skin tone would be working in his department. The radio studios, however, had always been content to hide their darker hires behind curtains and microphones.
This boy shouldn’t have been standing here. Not in Vincent’s hallway. Not in Vincent’s orbit.
And absolutely not looking at him like that.
The boy’s laugh was quiet and warm, unbearably self-assured. “I prefer a medium that rewards vocal skill instead of… posing. My age seemed rather irrelevant.”
Someone in Vincent’s entourage made the mistake of laughing. Vincent’s glare silenced him instantly.
“Posing,” Vincent echoed.
“Yes.” The boy’s gaze travelled over Vincent’s suit with a slow, appreciative cruelty. “Television can look a little hollow. A little desperate. But you make do.”
Vincent’s stomach tightened. “And you think you can judge that?”
The boy stepped closer - subtle, unhurried, confident in a way he had no earthly right to be. “I think,” he said lightly, “that you’re a man accustomed to privilege and attention. And I find it terribly boring.”
The words were a spark dropped onto oil.
Vincent should have walked away. Instead he moved into the boy’s space.
“You don’t know who I am,” Vincent said, voice low.
The boy smiled a fraction wider. “No, I’m well aware of who you are. It would be hard to avoid all the posters.” he gestured faintly to some of the many pictures of Vincent that lined the wall.
“Then you understand what it means for you to speak to me like this.”
“I understand perfectly.”
He did not look away. He did not flinch. He held Vincent’s gaze - a dangerous thing for any boy to do, let alone one like him in a building like this, in a decade like this.
“I could ruin you,” Vincent murmured.
The boy reached up and adjusted Vincent’s tie with a precision that made Vincent’s breath catch. His fingers brushed the base of Vincent’s throat.
“If you say so,” he said softly.
There was something measured in the touch - too precise, too deliberate - as though he weren’t adjusting a tie at all, but testing the pulse beneath it. The hairs at the back of Vincent’s neck rose.
Something cracked open in him then - want, rage, humiliation, and hunger, tangled together so tightly he couldn’t separate one from the other, couldn’t decide whether he wanted to shove the boy away or drag him closer.
Vincent caught his wrist. He expected the boy’s pulse to be pounding beneath his fingers.
It wasn't.
It was a steady, unhurried beat. Calm and controlled.
A boy like him in a hallway like this, with Vincent Whittman’s hand around his wrist, dozens of eyes on them, should have been afraid. Should have flinched. Should have shown at least one crack in the façade.
Instead he stared up at him with that soft, satisfied smile, as though Vincent had done exactly what he hoped.
A dangerous heat burned in the space between them - not loud, not obvious, but present in the same quiet way a knife is still present even when the blade is sheathed.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
His smile returned, deeply satisfied. “Alastor.”
The name burned itself into his memory with the precision of a brand, hot and unwelcome, and Vincent felt his mouth go dry.
He let go. Touching the boy had been a mistake - too intimate, too revealing.
He turned and left without a word.
For the rest of the day, Vincent moved through his schedule with the practised ease of a man carved from poise and discipline. Interviews, camera rehearsals, a luncheon with network executives - everything ran flawlessly. No missteps, no cracks.
And yet Alastor kept slipping into the edges of his thoughts like a splinter he couldn’t quite dig out.
He’d find himself staring too long at people’s hands, remembering the way Alastor’s fingers had brushed his throat. He’d pause while adjusting his tie before broadcast, half-expecting to feel those same fingers ghost over the knot. He’d catch sight of one of his own promotional posters lining the hallway and think, absurdly, of Alastor’s little gesture toward them.
He hated it.
Hated the way a single encounter lingered beneath his ribs like bruising.
At dinner that night, he carved into his stake with more force than necessary. He didn’t like thinking about why. He didn’t like remembering the look in the boy’s eyes when Vincent had threatened to ruin him. That calm pulse. That unbearable confidence.
He dreamed of Alastor.
Not sex or violence - nothing so dramatic. He dreamed of standing in that hallway again, of Alastor adjusting his tie with that soft, infuriating smile. He woke with his jaw clenched so tight it ached.
By the next morning, he’d convinced himself it would fade. Just another irritation. A passing curiosity. No different from the countless people who tried to impress him, challenge him, mimic him.
Except it didn’t fade.
It got worse.
Vincent found himself scanning crowds - not for fans or executives, but for a flash of dark curls. He snapped at interns more harshly than usual, a misplaced attempt to force the world back into its usual shape. Even his reflection unsettled him; he’d catch himself smoothing his hair or adjusting his tie and realise, with cold humiliation, that he was remembering Alastor’s touch.
He told himself it meant nothing.
He told himself he didn’t look for the boy when he walked past the radio department.
He told himself he didn’t slow down when he heard a familiar cadence drifting through the recording booths.
Every lie cracked a little more each day.
By the end of the first week, the truth sat like a weight in his stomach:
He wanted to see Alastor again.
And he despised himself for it.
The next few days left him raw. Every time he forced the memory down, something dragged it back up. A half-heard Southern vowel in a passing voice, a flash of dark curls through a window, or the phantom feel of fingers against his throat.
It was obscene, how fast the boy had slipped beneath his skin.
Within two weeks, Vincent was haunting the radio department with a patience that embarrassed even him. He timed his steps without meaning to, drifted down hallways he had no business entering, and found himself standing outside studio doors with no memory of choosing to walk there.
He kept telling himself he had reasons, but each excuse grew thinner and more transparent. Every morning began with the quiet threat that he might fail to see Alastor that day, and every afternoon brought the sick relief of catching even a glimpse of him.
It stopped feeling like preference and began feeling like gravity.
Alastor noticed. Of course he noticed.
He always turned at the exact moment Vincent arrived, as though the air itself betrayed Vincent’s presence. That slow, knowing smile followed every glance - sharp enough to insult, warm enough to ruin. It made Vincent feel seventeen again, raw and furious with himself, humiliated by the betrayal of his own body.
And worst of all, the boy enjoyed every second of it.
During his third week watching Alsator from afar, Vincent found him hunched over a console, deep in discussion with the engineers. He wasn’t posturing then. He wasn’t performing. He was simply… brilliant. Focused and competent. His hands moved with an ease that made Vincent imagine what they might feel like in other contexts.
Vincent stayed far too long watching through a gap in the door.
Alastor didn’t look at him.
He only made a vague, offhand comment about wishing he could afford better coffee - delivered with such exquisite neutrality that it shouldn’t have meant anything at all. The engineer beside him laughed and agreed, none the wiser.
Vincent felt the hook anyway.
He resisted for three days.
By the fourth, resistance evaporated.
He crossed the street to his preferred café, bypassed the entire morning queue, and ordered two coffees: one for himself, one black and unsweetened.
The barista flushed at him. He barely saw her.
He took both cups to the radio booth.
Alastor smiled the moment he saw him, pleased.
“For me?” he asked.
“You drink it, don’t you?” Vincent said.
Alastor accepted the cup with both hands, fingers brushing Vincent’s for half a second longer than courtesy allowed. The contact was nothing, barely a touch at all, yet Vincent felt it in his spine.
He tasted it, lashes lowered, and mouth softened around the rim of the cup in a way that made Vincent’s breath tighten against his ribs.
“This is how I take it,” Alastor murmured.
“I know,” Vincent replied, voice steadier than he felt.
The engineer working beside them didn’t even glance up - of course he didn’t. Vincent Whittman bringing coffee to a random boy in the radio department was so far outside the natural order of this building that the brain refused to register it as reality.
But Alastor registered it.
Oh, he registered it.
His smile sharpened with quiet triumph, the kind that made Vincent feel marked. Claimed. As though this small, intimate transaction had meaning beyond the cup itself.
“Of course you do,” Alastor said softly, voice too knowing.
Vincent stood there in the dim, humming booth, coffee cooling in his hand, and felt a realisation blossom beneath his ribs like something poisonous and sweet.
He was already in far too deep.