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The trouble with getting Vincent drunk was that the man couldn't hold whiskey for a damn.
This was, in Alastor's estimation, a character flaw of the highest order, not unlike chewing with one's mouth open or interrupting the punchline of someone else's joke. Especially so given that Vincent insisted on whiskey every time, despite it being the very thing that brought out the worst of his tolerances. There were other spirits that treated a man more gently when his constitution refused to cooperate -- wine, for instance, or even beer, though Alastor would sooner burn his tongue off than recommend it. But Vincent was a creature of stubborn ambitions, and if Alastor had learned anything in the handful of years since the former weatherman had begun sidling up to his table at whatever establishment Alastor happened to be patronizing, it was that the man did not respond to sensible suggestions with anything approaching grace.
So: whiskey. Bourbon, specifically. Vincent favored a particular brand that Alastor privately considered mediocre and publicly called "perfectly adequate, for what it is," which rankled Vincent in a way that never failed to be amusing. The man's screen would do that thing where his pupils sharpened into fine needles, and the pixelated suggestion of a frown would corrugate his display before he caught himself and smoothed it out, because heaven forbid the great Vincent Whittman be seen caring about something as pedestrian as another person's opinion of his liquor.
But he did care. That was the thing about Vincent that made him worth the investment of an evening. He cared enormously, about everything, all the time, with a sincerity so thorough it would have been embarrassing on anyone with less showmanship -- buried as it was under all that bluster and that cultivated drawl of his. Mid-Atlantic, Alastor had concluded. Virginia, perhaps, or the upper reaches of Maryland. Somewhere men learned to round off their vowels just enough to sound as though they'd always had money, and had simply forgotten which county they'd come from.
Tonight they were at a place called Morello's, which had the dual virtue of being far enough from the studio district that nobody of real consequence would bother them, and close enough to one of Alastor's preferred routes through the Pentagram that he could vanish easily if the evening went south. It was a narrow establishment, low-ceilinged and warm, with mahogany panels on the walls and a jazz quartet in the back corner worrying their way through Fats Waller. Morello himself had been dead for decades, naturally, but his granddaughter ran the place now -- a hyena-type sinner with impeccable taste in glassware and a policy of not asking questions. The whiskey was honestly quite good.
The booth they always took was in the back, tucked behind a partition where the light barely reached, which meant that the soft blue-white glow of Vincent's screen became the primary source of illumination for the both of them.
"-- and that's the thing nobody in this town seems to get," he was saying, four drinks deep and gaining momentum like a streetcar on a downhill grade. "They're still thinking in terms of territory. Who owns what block. Who's got the most muscle on the street. That's old thinking, Al. That's -- I mean, no offense -- "
"Oh, none taken." Alastor tipped his glass and watched the amber catch. "Do go on. I'm riveted."
"The real power isn't in territory anymore. It's in reach -- in how many eyeballs you've got on you at any given second. You think Zestial's scary because he can melt a guy's bones? Sure, that's swell for the guy whose bones are melting. But what about everyone else? They're not there. They didn't see it. Now -- if I put that on a screen, if I make a hundred thousand sinners watch it over their morning coffee -- that's power. That's leverage. You don't even have to hurt anyone. You just have to make them think you could." Vincent pointed with the hand that held his glass, which slopped bourbon onto the tablecloth. "And I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say radio did it first."
"I wasn't going to say anything of the sort."
"You were thinking it."
"My dear fellow, I was thinking about the Waller. They're jumping the bridge a full bar early, and it's nettled me since the second number."
Vincent had a particular expression for this -- the one where he couldn't quite determine whether he was being made fun of. Alastor had always thought of it as his held-breath face. He smiled back at it and offered nothing further.
"You're full of shit," Vincent said, and laughed.
Alastor waited, and then raised a finger for the waitress. The glasses she brought were heavy crystal, properly chilled. Sazerac for himself; bourbon, again, for Vincent. He lifted his and touched it to the rim of Vincent's, which rang like a small agreement between them.
Two more bourbons and the better part of a Sazerac later, the self-consciousness was going out of Vincent, replaced by something looser and more generous: something that slouched and gestured too widely and said things a sober man would have swallowed before they reached his tongue. His screen had gone brighter at the edges, the blue-white glow spreading a little further than it usually did, as if the liquor were changing the temperature of his light from the inside.
Alastor was also drunk, in the pleasant and somewhat perilous fashion he associated with the finest evenings of his living years: thoughts moving with a liquid ease from one point to another, limbs agreeably unmoored. The music in his living days had been better, on the whole, the company more expendable, but there was something to be said for an evening that held no particular danger -- or rather, he amended privately, only the kind he had chosen.
Vincent had been talking for the better part of an hour. He liked to talk; he liked to plan; he liked to unspool his vision of the future in elaborate, breathless detail, with timelines and contingencies and periodic digressions into the mechanics of whatever apparatus he was building in that warehouse of his. Self-aggrandizing twaddle, most of it. Alastor had stopped following the thread some time ago and turned his attention to the bourbon -- specifically, to what happened when Vincent drank it.
From previous evenings of half-attended explanation, he knew that the grey-green glass of Vincent's face was something called a cathode ray tube. What he had never thought to ask was where the bourbon went. The projected mouth opened, the glass tipped, and that was the end of it. No accumulation behind the glass, either, because Vincent could drink all evening without overflow, and frequently did. The liquid simply entered and ceased to exist, by whatever logic governed a dead man with a television for a head, and until tonight, Alastor had found this no more remarkable than anything else about him.
"-- which is why vertical integration is the only path that makes any kind of strategic sense, because if you don't own the means of distribution then you're always going to be at the mercy of whoever does, and that's -- "
"Vincent."
"What?"
"Are you quite finished?"
"Finished with what? I was in the middle of -- "
"Exactly so," Alastor said pleasantly. "You were in the middle of it. You have been in the middle of it for approximately forty-five minutes, and while I find your ambitions perfectly charming in their way, I confess my attention has been elsewhere for some time."
"Elsewhere where?"
Alastor leaned forward and tapped the tip of one claw against the center of Vincent's screen, just below the projected mouth. "Where does the bourbon go? I've watched you drink six of those tonight, and not a drop has come back out. You haven't got a stomach -- don't look at me like that, you haven't, I've seen the innards of enough creatures to have an opinion -- and I don't see a drain, unless you've got one tucked somewhere indelicate. So where does it go?"
"Honestly? I don't know exactly. I mean -- it's in there, somewhere. I can taste it. I can feel it hit. I get drunk off it, obviously, so it's doing something. Best I can figure, it just... goes wherever everything else goes. Into whatever I'm running on."
"How thoroughly unhelpful."
"Hey, do you know how your radio shit works? Like, the actual mechanics of it. Where it comes from, what you're running on. You push a broadcast out across six city blocks, and I don't think you've got a clue what's happening inside you when you do it."
It was a fair point, which made it irritating. "I know my medium," Alastor said. "I know what a frequency does and what it's for and how to ride it. The rest is -- "
"Instinct?"
"Showmanship."
Vincent snorted. "Same difference."
The waitress brought another round without being asked. Alastor accepted his Sazerac and watched Vincent drink, properly this time, and what he saw was not an absence. The glass closed around what entered it and continued as before, unchanged. It accepted what was offered.
Alastor set his glass down. He had, he realized, been thinking about this wrong.
"Open your mouth."
"...Sorry?"
"Your mouth. Open it. I want to see the inside."
"You want to -- " Vincent glanced around the bar. "Al. There are people here."
"There are people everywhere. It's Hell."
Something happened to Vincent's screen at that: a flush of color in the cheeks, there and gone before he thought better of it. "Fine." At last, Vincent stirred, exhaling a rough, fraying sigh. "Fine, you weirdo. But if you tell anyone about this -- "
"Oh, please. Who would I tell?" And then, because the rye had loosened whatever usually kept his better ideas in check and the situation seemed to call for a degree of ceremony, he reached across the table and took Vincent's head in both hands, thumbs braced against the sides of the housing. "Good evening. This is your host, speaking to you from a regrettably dim establishment in the lower Pentagram, and tonight we have a most unusual program."
"Oh, Christ." With his mouth open, Vincent's words came out muzzy around it. "You're doing the thing."
"I am doing the thing, and you are going to sit still and let me. Now, for the benefit of our audience at home…"
He tilted Vincent's head toward the light.
The inside of the mouth was -- not what Alastor had expected. The teeth were real, or near enough: hard, pointed, set correctly into the jaw, with the slight forward overlap of the incisors and the canines drawn down into proper fangs. Handsome, as these things went. The tongue was there too: blue-grey, a shade darker than the skin, and when Vincent swallowed, Alastor's fingers had the sudden, entirely unreasonable urge to interrupt it.
"Our specimen," Alastor narrated, settling into the rhythm, "presents a most impressive dentition -- the canines, you'll note, substantially longer than is standard. Predatory in their proportions, one might say, which is charming given that the specimen in question subsists primarily on bourbon and a truly astonishing quantity of unsolicited opinions."
"Ahh cah heah oo."
"Yes, I should hope so. Hold still."
Vincent's mouth was warm inside, and wet with something thinner than saliva, a fluid that coated the interior surfaces and carried some kind of charge. Alastor ran the pad of his finger along the ridge of the lower teeth, back molars to front, counting. Sound, all of them.
Vincent's hands were flat on the table and perfectly still.
"Twenty-eight," Alastor announced. "Or thereabouts. I confess the rear set is somewhat difficult to distinguish by touch alone. Every one of them sharp enough to cut, which raises the question of how our friend manages to eat solid food without shredding his own tongue in the process." He hooked his claw under the edge of the tongue in question and lifted it, just slightly. The muscle -- if it was a muscle -- resisted for a fraction of a second and then yielded, curling around his finger in a way that seemed more reflex than volition. "Ah, but this is interesting. The tongue itself has a somewhat rubbery quality. Quite dense. Smooth on the upper surface. Less so beneath."
The fluid was warmer deeper in, and the charge stronger, his fingertips buzzing with it in a way that was not, on reflection, entirely unpleasant -- not unlike the particular prickle of a live wire held at a careful remove. The palate was ridged near the front and smoothed as he pressed further back, the surface giving way by degrees, and what he did not find, at the end of it, was a throat.
Alastor had expected resistance. The body's reflexive objection, the involuntary closing of a passage around an intrusion; he knew that particular response well, from long professional acquaintance, and he had been waiting for it. It did not come. His fingers reached the back of the mouth and continued, meeting nothing but a gradual narrowing that accommodated him without complaint. Beneath it all, a vibration, running through the palate and the housing and into his hand.
"Well, now." He drew his fingers slowly back, dragging them along the surface of the tongue as he withdrew. "No gag reflex whatsoever. How very accommodating."
"Ahh -- " Vincent managed, and then clamped his mouth shut, the screen flickering badly before the image stabilized into an expression of pure indignation that was somewhat undermined by the color of his display, which had bloomed several shades warmer than his usual cyan. "What the fuck, Al."
"Language."
"Language? You just had your whole hand in my -- "
"Two fingers. Hardly the same thing." Alastor examined his wet claws in the glow of Vincent's screen, turning them idly. The fluid was already gone, absorbed into his skin or evaporated, but the charge it had left behind lingered. He picked up his Sazerac and took a measured sip.
This is where the evening should have ended. Alastor could have set down his glass, offered a pleasant lament at the fact that he still was unsure of where the bourbon went, and steered the conversation back to Vincent's tiresome empire-building.
Instead, he put his fingers in his own mouth.
The taste that hit was sharp and acrid, not unlike biting a green pecan off the branch before the casing had cracked, that astringent first shock that meant there was something worth getting to beneath.
"Did you just taste that? Did you just put your fingers in your mouth and taste -- "
"You know, in the culinary traditions of my home state, tongue is considered something of a delicacy. Beef tongue, typically, though one shouldn't limit oneself. The trick is in the preparation -- low and slow, until what's left is tender enough to come apart with a fork."
"Are you. Are you seriously sitting here and comparing my tongue to a beef tongue? "
"I'm comparing it to every tongue I've had occasion to evaluate, and finding it superior. You should be flattered. It is almost like -- well, I'm not sure what it's almost like. I don't have a comparison. Which is precisely the problem."
"The problem."
"When one encounters an unfamiliar substance," Alastor said, and he could hear himself getting drunker in the way the consonants were starting to lean on each other, "one has a professional obligation to evaluate it properly. Sight, first -- well, that's done, the interior is, if I'm being generous, rather handsome in a mechanical sort of way. Touch -- " He wiggled his fingers. "Also done, and most informative. That leaves us with taste, and I confess I'm at something of a disadvantage, given that what I got off my fingers was -- evaporative."
"You're not serious." Alastor watched Vincent's screen stutter, the fan inside his casing jumping audibly to a higher pitch before catching itself. "You are not about to -- "
"I haven't said what I'm about to do."
"You're looking at my mouth like it's a goddamn buffet, Al."
"Am I? How indelicate of me."
He came around to Vincent's side of the booth, and when Vincent did not move over quickly enough, sat down regardless. At this distance, the hum out of the housing was no longer something to listen for; it pressed against his left ear with the insistence of a second pulse, and the heat off the glass reached the side of his face. Vincent had gone very quiet beside him.
"You could have moved," Alastor said pleasantly. "Now then. For our listeners. Having completed our manual examination of the specimen's oral cavity, we move on to the final stage of our investigation, which necessitates," he continued, tilting Vincent's head in a manner that left no ambiguity about who was directing this particular production, "a more direct approach."
"Al." The sound Vincent made at being handled that way was the kind his hindbrain filed under prey. "Al, what are you doing."
Then Alastor finally leaned forward, and placed his mouth against the screen.
He jerked at the charge of it. Something came through his lips and into his jaw with a vividness so sudden and complete that he made a sound he had not planned on, wrenched out of him before he could think better of it, and his hands tightened on the sides of the housing almost before he knew they had moved. The charge bit into his palms too, sharp at every point of contact, and he pressed closer rather than back.
Vincent, it turned out, had been waiting for this. He allowed himself one moment of stillness, and then his hands came up and found the back of Alastor's head and pulled, with a want so unguarded it caught Alastor off guard. The charge changed with it, loosened from its careful hum into something that had given up on being careful, and Alastor felt it move through his lips and his jaw and the thin skin at his wrists and the soft place behind his ears, pouring into him with the quality of something stored for a very long time that had finally found somewhere to go. Vincent kissed with his whole body, one hand gripping the back of Alastor's head and the other doing something frenetic and lost against the booth seat as if it could not settle on what it was permitted to want. His tongue was in Alastor's mouth now, and the taste of it was so immediate and so peculiar that Alastor bit down without thinking, and Vincent's hand moved from the back of his head to his lapel and gripped.
The tongue gave under his teeth and held, compressed without bruising and reformed without tearing, the way good rubber does, and the frustration of that made Alastor bite harder.
He was salivating into Vincent's mouth.
When Alastor finally pulled back, it was because his neck had begun to register a complaint about the angle, and because the charge off the glass had worked its way so thoroughly into the bones of his jaw that his back teeth ached with it and had been aching for some time. He was still close, one hand braced at the back of the housing, his knee against Vincent's thigh, and his own breath was fogging the glass in slow patches that cleared and returned.
Whatever careful production Vincent ran on his own face was gone, the image burning bright in the wrong places and losing its edges where it used to hold them sharp. Alastor ran his tongue along the back of his teeth, tasting copper and ozone and something underneath both that he had no word for, only an appetite, and found he was in no particular hurry to move his hand.
"Well," Alastor said, with some satisfaction, and became aware of the saliva running down his chin. He wiped it on the tablecloth, which was already ruined with bourbon, and considered the matter resolved. "The texture is promising, but I find the finish rather aggressive. You could strip paint with that, I think."
"You know," Vincent started, and his voice was glitching on every other syllable like a recording that had been played too many times, "you know, I gotta say, that was -- that was really -- "
"Inconclusive."
"...What?"
"The examination." Alastor sat back. His coat was wrinkled where Vincent's hand had been; his ears had been flat so long that bringing them upright required a moment's concentrated effort, which he managed, at some cost he preferred not to quantify. He smoothed his lapel. "The examination was inconclusive. We've been sitting here for -- how long has it been? -- and I still don't know where the bourbon goes! But there's our program, I suppose."
The waitress brought the check unprompted and set it on the table without looking at either of them. Alastor reached for the folio. Vincent reached at the same moment, their fingers met over the leather, and the charge ran through the contact and into the joint of his thumb. He withdrew his hand and let Vincent pay. His goodbyes, when he made them, were warm and unhurried. He walked home.
The trouble with getting Vincent drunk, Alastor reflected, as he turned the key in his lock, was that the man could never hold whiskey for a damn.
The trouble with getting himself drunk was rather more inconvenient. He could hold whiskey perfectly well. It was everything else he'd put in his mouth that evening that was giving him difficulty -- not the keeping down, precisely, but the setting aside.
He went to bed. He did not think about the mouth. He did not run his tongue along the gap between his back molars where the ghost of the charge still hummed. He did not lie in the dark with his claws in the sheets and the hunger sitting patient in the pit of his stomach, waiting for next week the way a thing with teeth waits for the door to open again.
His shadow, curled at the foot of the bed, had the good sense not to look at him.