[10 out of 20] Hazbin Hotel, Storm [T]

[writtenwordsaloud]

Title: And They Scream
Author: writtenwordsaloud
Fandom: Hazbin Hotel
Challenge: 10 out of 20
Length: 300
Warnings: vague mentions of war

Vox hated the scream rain. He could deal with all the other strange storms of Hell, but the scream rain felt like it was put down here to punish him specifically.

He didn’t even hate most forms of screaming. But when it came from nowhere, in a flash under the rain, all he could think about was the war he was never meant to go to. One he should have avoided. The wrong people who had been shot. The letter his wife sent telling him the son he had never met was dead.

When he flinched, Valentino or Velvette would laugh. How easily startled he is. Don’t worry, the lightning won’t hit you. Vox scowled and shrugged it off.

He wasn’t about to say anything about the parts of his life he refused to share. He had lied about enough of it, so why come clean now? These were weaknesses he needed to push down into nothing. Forget about those fragments until he was stronger than that, stronger than the storm, and his current would remain strong and consistent.

The screams continued. Vox clutched the armrests of his chair and pretended that his pulse remained the same. These rooms could cut out the sound of the city below, being perfectly soundproof, but the storm couldn’t care fucking less about that.

Vox plugged into the system and left his body for the servers. Even in there the sound would follow, but he had the buffer. The microphones could be ignored and the sight of the waveform graphs didn’t cause him the same problems. He would be fine.

When Val came in to coax him back to his body, the storm would hopefully be over. Vox would pretend it was about work and not avoidance.

It wasn’t about sound.

Not about memory.