Work Text:
Blitzo pressed his thumb to the sensor on his phone to unlock it.
He tapped on the icon of his most recent call, a number that was not saved on his phone. It bleeped to acknowledge the command.
He waited as it rang, the tinny sound reverberating off of the closed doorway and awning that he stood before.
“Ok, I’m here,” he said the moment Octavia answered. “Now what?”
“ You go inside, obviously .”
Her voice was low and irritated, as if hissed behind a cupped hand to keep anyone from overhearing her. “ Are you stupid? ”
Blitzo closed his eyes, took a deep breath, counted to ten, and reminded himself that she was a child. Because he had been inches away from calling her an dumb cunt and hanging up on her. Not because he actually thought that she was a dumb cunt, but because it was late and he was tired, and he had no fucking clue what was going on.
“Listen, kid. You’re worried. I get it. But I need information if you want me to help.”
“ ...Sorry. I know. Fuck . Sorry. ”
Blitzo softened at how overwhelmed she sounded. He tried the door handle as she collected herself. It was unlocked. He pushed the door. It creaked open to reveal a dark, empty foyer. He squinted into the dimness and looked around, but there wasn’t really much to see other than a set of steep stairs that led upward into the shadows beyond his sight.
“Door’s open,” he said, switching the call to speakerphone with a flick of his forefinger. “So now can you tell me what the shit I’m doing here?”
“ Um… ” she sounded so much like her father when she hesitated. Blitzo counted to ten again, then fifteen as he hung in the doorway and waited for her to speak.
“ He’s having a prophecy, ” she said at last.
“You mentioned that,” Blitzo sighed. “But–and hear me out kid, because I’m really trying here–I have no fucking clue what that is supposed to mean.”
“ ...You don’t know what a prophecy is? You really are stupid .”
“I know what a prophecy is!” He forced the words out through his teeth. Surely Loona hadn’t been this dense when she was seventeen. “What I don’t get is why I need to be here for it. Prophecies are his fucking job. He does them all the time, doesn’t he?”
She sighed hard into her receiver, a sound that managed to be deeply teenager-y: both angry and upset but somehow also relatable.
“ No. I mean, yes. Yes, but… Umm… ”
“Spit it out, Princess. Does he need my help or are you wasting my time?”
“ Okay, okay, but, like… no one is supposed to know .”
Blitzo thought that his teeth would shatter as his jaw spasmed tighter. He made himself ask:
“Not. Supposed. To know. What ?”
“ ...He’s vulnerable when he's having a prophecy, okay? He’s helpless. And there’s people out there who will take advantage of that… He’s just… ”
Octavia trailed off, but then continued with sudden gravity:
“ He’s not there. He’s in the stars .”
“He’s not… here? He’s not even here ? What does that mean , Princess?” It was so hard not to raise his voice at her. Was Stolas in danger or not?
She huffed another sigh and it crackled through his phone’s speaker like crumpling paper. “ No, he’s there. Just… Just go up the stairs, okay? ”
“Fine. Whatever.”
He put the phone in his breast pocket so that he could still talk to her as he ascended to the second floor and confronted whatever vague threat he would meet at the top of the stairs.
It wasn’t until he was twenty steps up that he realized there wasn’t a second floor. The stairs just kept going. He had seen the tower from far away as he’d approached. In fact, he’d seen it multiple times in the year that he had been making his monthly visits to the palace. He’d never really thought about it before. To him, it was just a tall, spindly structure on the far side of Stolas’ property. As a man who needed to see the stars for his profession, it made sense for Stolas to have his office isolated and high up where the light pollution from Imp City was weakened.
Sometimes when Blitzo was looking out of his window at work–especially the on the nights following one of his contractual fuck-sessions with the Prince–he could see the sky of Pride ripped open with a ragged, glowing gash. It was a fairly common sight above the Goetia’s land and no one really paid attention to it. Just some rich asshole playing with the cosmos. Nothing to worry about.
Tonight’s gash was a little wider than Blitzo remembered them being before. Blitzo had stared up at it on his long walk from the palace’s driveway, across the vast manicured lawn that stretched the breadth of the property.
It was almost frightening, in a way.
The hole in the atmosphere made his insides shiver as he trotted toward the tower. The nearly-full moon seemed impossibly huge, impossibly bright as it stared back down at him. Blitzo didn’t have an especially noteworthy fear of heights, but seeing the depths of space above him opened like a gaping mouth spun his head and nauseated him as if he were hanging from the edge of a bottomless cliff. He wondered if there was a word for whatever phobia that shit was.
The spiraling staircase before him wound around the interior of the tower. There was a window every dozen steps or so and he caught glimpses of the portal’s maw as he jogged up. He decided that he fucking hated the sight and stopped looking out the windows. He pushed his trot into a run.
“ You there yet? ” Octavia asked from his breast pocket.
“Not yet,” he panted, averting his gaze as he passed another window. “What should I expect when I get there? You still haven’t really told me what’s up.”
“ Okay. Okay. I need to… explain some things .” She hesitated for a moment, and that made Blitzo stop his climb. He leaned against the curved wall and waited for her to speak again, catching his breath.
“ So… Dad’s like… a prophet, right? ”
Blitzo almost grabbed his phone out of his pocket to throw it against the wall.
“Mmm-hmm,” he hummed instead, molars creaking.
“ I…I haven’t ever told anyone about this before. I’m not supposed to talk about it. It’s a rule. One of dad’s rules. I promised him I wouldn’t tell. You can’t tell anyone, okay? ”
She suddenly sounded very young. Scared. Blitzo decided not to comment and just waited for her to continue.
“ When he’s having a prophecy, he gets really out of it. It’s like he’s asleep. Dreaming. Or in a coma or something. But he’s not asleep. Mom’s Goetia duties were to take care of him while he was working. Because sometimes… sometimes he’s working for hours at a time. Days, sometimes. He went for two whole days once. Even with Mom forcing water on him the whole time, he spent the next week in bed after he shook off the trance. He can’t sleep or eat while he’s working. He’s totally helpless. And… and now… ”
“...And now your mom isn’t there to help him since she moved out,” Blitzo finished for her, slowly starting to piece together the reason that she had called him. His irritation at her eased a little as he processed. “And she has you at her place, so you can’t help him, either.”
“... Yeah . I’m, um… grounded. I raised my voice at her when she wouldn’t let me go help dad. I’m not even supposed to be on my phone, so I have to be quiet .”
“Got it.”
Blitzo looked ahead. He could see a light not too far above him, the yellowy warmth drifting down the stairs. He started climbing again.
“How long has he been… Propheting? Prophesying? Prophetizing? Whatever?”
“ He said he’d text me when he was done… You know, to check in so I knew he was okay. He sent me to be with Mom because he said it felt like it was going to be a big one and he didn’t know how long he’d be out… ”
“And how long ago was that?”
“Almost five days. ”
Blitzo paused for just a moment, his brain taking several beats to absorb what she had just said. When her words settled, he broke into a sprint.
“What the shit, kid?!” he bellowed as he ran up the turning stairs. “He’s been by himself without food, water, or sleep for five fucking days and you’re only just now telling me?”
“ I didn’t know what to do! ” she defended herself, her voice breaking a little as if she was trying not to cry. “ He gave me your number for emergencies a long time ago, but I didn’t think you’d even care! ”
For some reason, those last words hurt.
Why did he care?
He needed the Book for his business, yeah… but that didn’t explain why his heart suddenly constricted and his stomach flipped with terror. He couldn’t even be mad at her for that one, because when had he ever given her–or Stolas, for that matter– any impression that he cared?
He bolted upward, his thigh muscles screaming as he drove them over the last stretch of stairs. He saw the open doorway on the top landing and raced for it.
The room was large and dimly lit. There wasn’t much in it other than a few low-maintenance plants and a desk facing away from the staircase, toward an impressively huge window. The window was open, giving Blitzo another stomach-turning look at the pale moon and the infinite nothing that surrounded it. A cool night breeze blew in, making eddies of the countless pieces of paper that littered the floor. The pages whispered against one another as they shifted.
Toward the center of the room, floating in the space between the window and the desk, Stolas’ Grimoire glowed. Not glowing purple or blue as Blitzo had seen the magic manifest before, but a stark white with black shadows pouring off of it like smoke.
And at the desk, in a stately velvet-lined chair, was Stolas.
Blitzo couldn’t really see him, but he knew his silhouette. He was upright and appeared to be writing something. Definitely not dead, as some hidden part of Blitzo had been bracing for. He allowed himself a small moment of relief.
“I see him,” Blitzo told Octavia as he started toward him. “He’s sitting at the desk.”
“That’s good.” She exhaled. “Okay. That’s good.”
“Stolas?” Blitzo called out, stepping closer.
“He can’t hear you if he’s working.” Octavia informed him. She went quiet for a beat, then gasped, “Hey, wait, don’t look at him! Shit, I forgot!”
“What?” Blitzo asked absently, not really listening to her as he peered around the chair at his occasional lover, a small, concealed shred of his soul desperate to make sure that he was okay.
“Don’t meet his eyes!”
Blitzo heard the words distantly, but his eyes were already locked with Stolas’ and there was nothing he could do.
The eyes were not the familiar glowing red that Blitzo was so used to looking up at. For a moment, Blitzo thought that they had turned black. His skin crawled at how empty it made Stolas look. Like a corpse.
But no. No, that wasn’t right either. The eyes weren’t black or empty. In the depths there were blues and purples of spiraling galaxies. There were stars.
Blizo couldn’t look away.
There were so many stars .
He couldn’t feel his body.
Stolas disappeared.
Blitzo disappeared.
The office disappeared.
And for one infinite microsecond, there was only space…
And stars .
But then there was screaming. There was heat. Darkness and light flickered in a chaotic dance, punctuated by tendrils of fire that ate a path toward Blitzo. From within the blaze, he could hear Loona howling. Her howl raised in volume and pitch until it became an ear-splitting shriek of pain and terror. Blitzo couldn’t see her, but he could smell her fur as it started to burn and melt into her skin. He screamed for her but his voice was swallowed by the roar of fire and he knew she couldn’t hear him. The flames leapt and writhed, warping into a wall of grinning, laughing faces.
He did not give himself time to think about his terror as he plunged forward into the heat, desperate to find his daughter.
He felt his skin tighten and blister and slough from his flesh. The fire was so bright that he couldn’t see. He stumbled forward blindly, not allowing himself to care about anything except Loona.
He took another step and the fire was gone.
Not extinguished. Gone. No hint that it had ever been there.
He was alone in the dark again. All he could hear was the echo of his own panicked breathing.
A cold sweat broke out on his brow, but then there was a soft hand brushing it away.
A gentle, feminine voice floated to him, through him, covered him like a fine mist. She was humming a lullaby, one that Blitzo remembered very well.
…Momma?
He couldn’t see her, but her quiet singing was so close, as if her mouth was right next to his ear. He could feel her cool hand caressing his brow as she’d always done when he was sick. He leaned into her touch, missing her so viscerally that he felt a sob building in his chest. But then the hand on his forehead stiffened, nails suddenly digging into his skin. He tried to back away, but she was so much stronger than he was. The hand shoved at him, pushing him until he fell backward. He braced himself for impact with the floor.
But there was no floor.
He just kept falling.
Another cold hand landed on his shoulder, pushing him further down into the nothing–into the black of space. A third and fourth hand stabbed frigid fingertips into his thigh and stomach. He fought against them, but more hands came, each one colder than the last. The cold leached into him, filling his veins with ice. His bones were so cold that they felt like they might shatter.
A final frozen hand covered his mouth as he tried to scream.
He was drowning in the cold darkness. In the vacuum.
The humming went silent.
“Momma, stop!”
The word tore itself from Blitzo’s throat.
But then he was in Stolas’ office again.
He was cowering on the floor, his back flush against the wall. His chest heaved so hard that his ribs hurt, his breaths raw and rattling as he looked around in panic.
Stolas was still at his desk in the middle of the room, quietly writing away as if nothing had happened.
Blitzo felt something tickle his cheek and reached up to brush it off. His hand came away wet. It wasn’t until then that he realized that he was crying.
“W-what the fuck…?” he panted, trying to calm his racing heart. His hands trembled as he wiped his eyes with the heels of his palms. “What the FUCK was that ?!”
“...You back?” a voice from somewhere near his feet asked and he nearly jumped out of his fucking skin. His eyes shot down to see his phone on the floor beside him. It still took him several l beats to remember that Octavia was on the line.
“I… I, uh…” his voice shook and his mind was still too fractured to form anything coherent. His head was pounding. “I dunno what…”
“You looked at his eyes, didn’t you?”
“Uh, yeah. I think… I don’t… I-I don’t know what happened.”
“Told you not to look at him.”
Blitzo did not reply to that. He just stared at Stolas’ back as the enthralled prince reached over to add another filled sheet of paper to the messy pile on the corner of his desk, then pulled out a blank one and continued his work.
“...You okay? Do you need a minute?” she asked, with a soft kindness that Blitzo had not expected from her.
But Blitzo still didn’t say anything. His throat was still too tight.
“I know it can be… upsetting when you accidentally break through the veil.”
She went quiet on the line as if waiting for him to put himself together again.
He took several deep breaths until his rumbling heart started to calm. His clumsy fingers fumbled the phone as he picked it up and put it back in his jacket.
“...What was that?” he rasped when he could speak. His words came out thick and hoarse.
“ A prophecy… sort of. ”
Blitzo’s stomach filled with ice. He could almost feel the hands on him still. “Does that mean what I saw is going to happen?”
“ Well… yes, no, and… maybe? ”
“ So helpful. Thanks for that. I feel so much fucking better now.”
“Well, I don’t know what you saw!” she hissed at him. He could tell that she wanted to yell, but was forcing herself to keep her voice down. “And even if you told me about it, it wouldn’t make any sense to me. The stars designed it for you , not for anyone else. It’s not supposed to be taken literally. It’s symbolism.”
She drew out the word “symbolism” as if speaking to a child. He had already been slowly calming from his panic, but her tone snapped him right the fuck out of it.
“I get it, Princess.”
He didn’t really get it, but she already thought that he was stupid and he wasn’t about to drive home that thought by asking her any questions about it. He pulled his shaking legs under him and used the wall for support as he gained his feet again.
“I’ll figure out what it meant later.”
She went silent again. Blitzo moved forward to rest a hand on the back of Stolas’ chair, steadying himself. Stolas kept writing, completely unaware of anything except his work. Blitzo couldn’t really see him with the barrier of the chair-back between them, but he could see the desk and the papers that littered it. He could see the edge of his dark, feathered hand as it pulled a black-inked quill across a page.
He furrowed his brow.
Stolas wasn’t even writing words. Or, at least, not any type of words or letters that Blitzo was familiar with. It was lines and shapes and curls and symbols that did not flow in any way that he thought written language should work. He was not writing left-to-right, or right-to-left, or top-to-bottom. There was a spiral at the lower right corner of the page with irregularly spaced circles. Scrolling, leaf-like shapes surrounded various hatches and squiggles that Blitzo could make no sense of. There was no rhyme or reason to the direction of his scrawling. He went from adding tally-marks in the left margin to adding scale-like consecutive M’s to an open space in the center. He then jumped back to the left side, the heel of his hand smudging the still-wet ink.
Breath caught in Blitzo’s chest again as he watched. Not with horror as it had minutes before, but with a fluttering kind of wonder. The writing was beautiful .
“I still don’t understand what I saw when I looked at him one time during a prophecy,” Octavia said suddenly, interrupting Blitzo’s musings.
Blitzo blinked, shaking himself from the hypnotic dance of quill against paper.
“Wait. You looked at him, too?”
“Oh yeah. Twice. Like an idiot. So don’t feel bad.”
“What’d you see?” he asked, then immediately regretted it because he sure as fuck did not want to share what he had seen. Why would she want to? “Sorry. Nevermind.”
“It’s fine,” she assured him. Her voice was soft again, as if just genuinely wanting to help. “I know it can get fucked-up. The first time I saw…” she paused thoughtfully. “It was like… hellhounds? But they were weird. Like, they were little. Not babies, but littler than real hellhounds. They were all white and they walked on all fours and were just, like, animals. They didn’t walk or talk like normal hounds. They were kinda cute, though.”
“Like the dogs that humans have?”
“Maybe? I’ve never seen one in person.”
Blitzo huffed, snaking his hand out to grab one of the finished pages that Stolas had cast aside so that he could get a better look. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“They tore my skin off and pulled my ribcage open and ate my heart.”
Blitzo winced. “Oh.”
“Anyway, still puzzling that one out.”
“What about the other one?”
She hesitated. Blitzo grabbed another page from the table as he waited for her to speak again, but this ink-covered paper was just as incomprehensible as the others.
“...I don’t want to talk about that one.”
He grunted, setting the paper down again. “Yeah. Me too.”
They both went quiet. The only sound in the room was the endless scratching of Stolas’ quill.
“So…” Blitzo began when the silence had gone on long enough to be unbearably awkward. “Do I try to wake him up, or…?”
“Pff. You can’t wake him up. He’s not asleep. He’s just… not there.”
Blitzo rolled his eyes.
“Okay, how do I bring him back here then?”
“You can’t bring him back. He has to work until he’s done.”
“Then what the fuck am I supposed to do, kid?” he sighed, his ire coming back full-force as he pressed his finger tips against his sore eyes. “You dragged me all the way here and there’s nothing I can even do for him?”
“There’s… there should be water. On the sideboard on the right-hand wall. Try to make him drink it. I think that’s what mom did.”
Blitzo looked over and saw a glass pitcher full of water on a little table by the wall.
“How am I supposed to make him drink if I can’t look at him?” he asked doubtfully.
“No, no, you can look at him. Just not his eyes. Not directly, at least. His eyes are what makes the thing happen. Just… I don’t know, shit, work around it.”
He was about to ask another question, but whatever it was deleted itself from his mind as he heard a rapid banging from the phone, followed by a screeching voice calling Octavia’s name.
“Shit. Shit, I have to go,” Octavia said in a hush.
“Whoa, wait a fuckin’ minute! What do I–”
“Coming, mum!” she shouted, somewhat muffled as if she had taken the phone away from her mouth. Blitzo could hear the distant voice demanding to know why her door was locked. But then Octavia was close again. “I have to hang up. Text me if anything happens, but I don’t know if I can answer right away.”
“Princess–!” he began, but his phone beeped out three flat tones as the call dropped.
He swore loudly.
Stolas did not hear him. The prince slid another blank page in front of him and continued to write.
“Great!” he said to the room at large, sarcasm echoing off the walls. “This is great. I love this.”
He stormed over to the water pitcher and used it to fill an ornate crystal goblet that stood beside it. He turned, goblet in hand, and stormed back to Stolas, sloshing some of the water over the rim.
“You’d better fucking drink this, asshole.”
Blitzo hesitated a moment before coming around the edge of the chair, keeping his line of sight directed low, focused on Stolas’ chest. Blitzo took a breath and raised his gaze to Stolas’ mouth, but then immediately lowered it again as he caught the horrific galaxy-glow of the prophet’s eyes in his periphery.
He closed his eyes tightly, not wanting to admit how scared he was to accidentally bring another prophecy on himself with a wayward glance.
“Come on, coward,” he chided himself. “So what if it happens again? If Stolas can deal with it, so can you.”
He hadn’t really thought about it before he’d said it aloud, but was what he’d experienced what Stolas had to deal with on a monthly basis? Was that his life? To witness–and feel–indescribable nightmares only to be tasked with transcribing them?
Blitzo’s assassin career often got bloody and dangerous… but it wasn’t upsetting like this. Whatever shit he experienced, it was usually easy to shake off when work hours were over. But, just going by his own forced prophecy–which had probably only lasted a minute or two–it was fucking nothing compared to what Stolas must be going through in his multi-day trance.
That was something that Blitzo had to unpack later. For now, he had a job to do.
He looked up at Stolas’ mouth again and raised the goblet to it.
Stolas kept writing, as if Blitzo wasn’t even there.
Blitzo cautiously nudged the crystal against the curve of his beak and tilted it, dribbling water down his chin. It spilled, wetting the chest-feathers that peeked from his half-open robe.
Fuck. This wasn’t working.
He steeled himself, then reached up with his other hand to cover the top part of Stolas’ face. He could feel the warm wetness of Stolas’ four unblinking eyes against his palm and his stomach lurched at the sensation. The feeling of open eyeballs against his skin was not a thing that Blitzo thought he would’ve experienced today. It was fucking gross, but it did make him feel better to have the eyes covered.
He pressed forward, tilting Stolas’ head back a bit. He pushed the glass against his beak again and was rewarded when some of the water made it into his mouth.
“Swallow, bitch,” he mumbled. It was not an unfamiliar phrase between the two of them, but this night's context was certainly different.
It took a moment, but Blitzo saw his throat constrict to pull the water down. Blitzo’s heart leapt a little. He gave him more and waited patiently for it to go down, pleased to finally be doing something to help. He continued the process–one paltry sip at a time–until the cup was drained.
“There, was that so fucking hard?” he asked Stolas. Blitzo didn’t get an answer, but he didn’t expect one.
He trotted over and filled the goblet again.
When he came back and pressed his hand against Stolas’ eyes, cup already upraised, he paused. He put the goblet on the desk, out of range of Stolas’ writing hand so that he didn’t accidentally knock it over, and put his other hand to the prince’s cheek.
It was warm. Too warm. Hot, even.
Blitzo had spent many nights curled against him and knew very well that he was always cold. Stolas had commented more than once that he relished Blitzo’s impish heat, as all imps tended to run much hotter than other hellborns. The only reason that Blitzo had been able to stand staying under the thick-ass blankets that adorned his royal bed was because Stolas was usually fucking freezing.
He worked his fingers deeper into the feathers on Stolas’ cheek so that he could feel his skin. Fuck. He was so hot.
He dropped his hand to his breast pocket and pulled out his phone.
He texted Octavia:
Hes rly hot.
Blitzo thought for a moment, then added:
Not like sxy tho. he has a fevr is that normul?
When he did not get a text back after over a minute, Blitzo took up the goblet again. Now that he was less concerned with having some kind of terrifying hallucination, he paid more attention to Stolas beyond whether or not he was taking down the water.
When Stolas breathed his chest seemed to struggle a little on every inhale, his feathered breast twitching as he drew in air. Blitzo frowned, not liking that at all. He pressed the side of his head to Stolas’ over-warm chest and listened. When Stolas breathed in again, Blitzo could hear the air crackle in his lungs as if they were full of fluid.
Fuck .
He turned to his phone again.
Think hes sick, he typed out.
He stared at his phone and waited, hoping against hope that the princess would reply.
Nothing.
Fuck , he thought again.
All the while, Stolas stared straight forward through the window, his hand sketching out the unknowable truths of the universe.
Not knowing what else to do, Blitzo forced more water down his throat until the second goblet was empty. He went to grab a third.
It took about an hour, but eventually the whole pitcher was emptied. Sure, some of it ended up on the floor or on Stolas’ lap, but Blitzo had gotten him to drink the majority of it.
“Now what?” Blitzo asked.
Stolas–of course–said nothing.
Blitzo sighed and leaned against the edge of the desk.
He pulled out his phone.
Nope, nothing from Octavia.
He sighed again, louder, and put it back in his pocket.
Blitzo felt so useless. He hated feeling useless. Uselessness was one of the worst things an imp could be. Useless meant unproductive. Unproductive meant replaceable. In a world where imps were already seen as disposable, Blitzo had learned at a very early age to never be useless. That shit could get you killed. Or, worse, tossed aside and forgotten.
No. He could not allow himself to be useless.
Blitzo was jolted from his dark thoughts by a loud snap! behind him.
He turned and saw that the hovering Grimoire had slammed itself shut. Its halo of unholy power snuffed and it dropped to the paper-strewn floor.
Blitzo stared down at it uneasily, not sure if that was a good sign or a bad sign. He did not have long to wonder before he heard a soft groan at his side.
He whipped around as Stolas raised a wavering hand to his brow. The abandoned quill rolled across the desk and then fell to the floor.
“...Stella…?” Stolas rasped and pushed his shaking arms against the desk to stand.
Blitzo was so relieved to hear his voice that he did not have enough presence of mind to think that Stolas should probably not be trying to stand up at the moment.
Unfortunately, this thought did not occur to him until the side of Stolas’ head cracked off the edge of his desk as he went down. He hit the cold floor with a sickening thump and did not try to get up again.
“Shit, shit, SHIT!”
Blitzo clambered over to him and hit his knees. He ghosted his hands over him for a moment, unsure of what to do. If possible, he felt even hotter than he had an hour ago.
“Hey, Stolas? Stols?”
He cupped Stolas’ jaw and turned his face toward him. Stolas’ eyes were nearly closed, but they must have still held some scant trace of his visions as Blitzo met them, for tendrils of blue and purple wisped from under his eyelids and Blitzo’s core clenched and trembled as he was forced to remember pillars of fire and agonizing ice.
Blitzo jerked away from him and landed painfully on his backside, his right hip crushing his tail against the floor. He wouldn’t notice the bruise until the next morning.
Fire.
Ice.
Screaming.
Burning and freezing so deep and overwhelming that they were identical. Freeze the fire, burn the ice. Freeze the fire, burn the ice. Freeze the fire, burn the…
Oh.
There was only the space of a moment before Blitzo realized. The puzzle pieces in his mind snapped into place and his eyes widened.
Oh!
He knew what his prophecy meant. At least some of it.
Octavia had been right; if anyone else had seen his vision, it would have made no sense to them. It was personal symbolism, yeah, but it had also been memory. He just hadn’t remembered it until now. The stars really had made it for him.
Momma had always known what to do.
Blitzo scrambled to his feet and stumbled over to snatch the Grimoire up from the floor.
“Be good to me right now, baby,” he said to it as he flipped to the page he needed.
Of the four members of I.M.P. Blitzo ranked third in his ability to use the book. Loona was unquestionably the best at it and Millie was getting pretty good. Blitzo was hit-and-miss. Moxxie was utterly hopeless.
That said, Blitzo could usually get the portal to open in the general area of where he wanted. Most of the time. He knew the book wasn’t alive, but he swore that it worked better if he sweet-talked it a little. The same went for his van. The rest of I.M.P. rolled their eyes at him, but he’d be fuckin’ blessed if the van’s engine didn’t purr like a hellcat each time he told her how pretty she was, even if she had been on the sputtering verge of breaking down a moment before.
Blitzo concentrated on the page and felt the air shift as the hole in the sky closed, cutting off the moon’s ghostly light. It reopened in the floor beside his feet with a cosmic growl. He peered down into it and saw Stolas’ bed just a short drop below.
“That’s my sweet baby, good job,” he cooed in breathless relief as he shut the book and tucked it into the front of his suit jacket. He had been aiming for the chaise lounge along the wall of Stolas’ room, but this was even better.
He rushed back to Stolas’ side and dug his arms under him. Stolas made a soft, pained sound as Blitzo gathered him against his chest. There was a mark on his brow where he had hit the desk. It wasn’t bleeding, but even through the white feathers on his face, Blitzo could see the forming bruise. Hopefully it wasn’t worse than it looked.
“Hang on, asshole. I’ve got you.”
He carried Stolas over to the portal and knelt over it to drop him as gently as he could into the bed before leaping in after him.
Stolas grunted at the impact and curled in on himself. Blitzo rolled to avoid landing on him and nearly fell off the edge of the bed. He grabbed onto the bed-curtain to keep from hitting the floor, then hauled himself up to lean over Stolas.
“Hey, can you hear me?” he asked.
Stolas’ breathing was getting worse. Each breath was short and shallow, strained as if sucked through a wet straw.
Blitzo stiffened at the sound of it. Stolas was not just exhausted from his five-day prophecy as he had thought. He really was sick. This was definitely not normal.
“Okay, okay… Just… just wait here. Fuck.”
He vaulted himself off of the bed and ran to the far side of the room and into a short hallway that led to Stolas’ grand boudoir where his massive bathtub lay. He wrenched open the spout. Cold water poured into the basin and Blitzo shoved in the plug.
He ran back past the bedroom, toward the door to the hallway.
“I’ll be right back, I promise,” he called over his shoulder as he exited the room.
He sprinted down the hall and down the grand staircase to the main living area of the mansion. He turned a corner, then another until he found himself in the kitchen.
Blitzo had only been in here a few times, when the morning-after vibe hit particularly strong after a long, aggressive night with Stolas. Still, he knew where it was and bolted for the refrigerator.
He opened the top freezer door and was greeted with a gust of frigid air.
The phone in his breast pocket rang.
He pulled it out. It was an unknown number. He hit IGNORE and searched the freezer for ice.
There was only one ice tray. One. What the fuck? Do rich people not use ice?
There was all kinds of other shit, including a ziplock bag of what appeared to be dead mice. But no more ice?
His phone bleeped to herald a text and he pulled it out again.
Hey, it’s Via. Answer. This is my other phone.
The phone rang again. This time Blitzo answered.
“Why do you have fucking mice in your freezer?” he asked as Octavia picked up.
“I… Um… What?”
“Mice. Like, mousies. Furry little fucks. Gross tails.” He put her on speakerphone and slid the phone back into his pocket.
“ Dad likes them. They’re his favorite… ” she said as Blitzo pulled out the paltry tray of ice. He also grabbed two bags of frozen peas.
She paused before asking, “ Why are you in our freezer? ”
He grabbed the bag of mice to add to the pile in his arms.
“He needs ice. Why are you calling from a different phone?”
“ ...I have a spare for if my parents take it away. Dad doesn’t know about it, either. ”
Blitzo snatched another four bags of frozen mixed vegetables and shut the freezer door.
“I’m not a snitch,” he assured her. “I won’t tell him.”
“ Thanks,” she said, sounding like she truly meant it. She cleared her throat. “ So… is dad done working? Why does he need ice? ”
Blitzo turned and headed back toward the stairs, arms full of frozen goods. “Yeah, he’s done, but he’s got a bad fever and I’m trying to cool him down. It’s really high. Like, really fucking high. Like, he-needs-to-go-to-a-hospital-if-it-doesn’t-come-down high.”
“... Why does he have a fever? What’s wrong with him? ”
“I don’t know. He’s sick.”
Blitzo plowed back up the stairs. He dropped one of the bags of peas halfway up. He snagged it with his tail and kept going.
“ But you’re… you’re going to help him, right? ”
“Yep, that’s what I’m trying to fucking do, Princess.”
Blitzo ran past the bed, barely glancing at Stolas’ unconscious form before heading into the boudoir and dumping the frozen bags into the filling tub. He cracked the ice tray and made sure every cube made it into the water. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
He went back to the bed and pulled Stolas’ robe off of him. He dropped it carelessly to the floor before removing his own jacket and gloves. He rolled up his sleeves and then collected Stolas into his arms again.
Stolas moaned quietly, his brow furrowed. He curled into Blitzo’s chest and shivered.
“Sorry about this…” Blitzo mumbled to him, carrying him over to the tub. “But you’re about to have a really bad time. I know from experience.”
Without further preamble, Blitzo dumped him into the tub.
The effects were immediate.
Stolas’ eyes flashed open and his hands dug into Blitzo’s arms. His narrow back arched out of the water. And he screamed .
The scream was unlike anything that Blitzo had ever heard before. It plowed into him like a bullet and crashed through his ribcage, sending his heart into a horrified rhythm that made the corners of his vision pulse black.
Stolas sucked in a strangled breath and screamed again, struggling against Blitzo’s hold. Blitzo almost pulled him back out of the freezing water, his instincts bellowing at him to make the screaming stop. Because nothing– nothing –in all of Hell should cause Stolas to make that agonized sound. Not Stolas. Not his Stolas.
But he couldn’t. He knew this had to be done. And so, instead of relieving him of the pain that he knew the ice-bath was stabbing into him, he gritted his teeth and held him down.
When Blitzo had been little, he had gotten very sick. Blitzo never really got sick often, even as a kid, so perhaps that was why he remembered it so vividly. Other than when he was recovering from his burn wounds as an adult, Blitzo could not think of a time when he had felt so terrible. So completely sure that he was going to die.
The memory came in alternating waves of clarity and darkness. He could remember laying in his cot, blearily staring up at the ceiling of the tent and watching it ripple from the breeze outside, knowing that something was wrong with him but too afraid to tell anyone.
Papa had stormed in and wrenched him out of bed by his horn, shouting at him for sleeping in so late. He needed to be on stage in less than ten minutes and how dare he be such a useless , lazy little shit when there was work to be done. He had felt so cold and the uncontrollable shivering that wracked him was so violent that his little hands struggled to pull on his costume.
When he’d finally made it to the stage he could barely see the crowd through his watering eyes. The stage-lights had bored into him like icepicks through his eye sockets, but still he raised his trembling arms and delivered the set-up for the new joke that he and Fizz had come up with.
On cue, Fizz had bounded over to join him on stage and delivered the punchline with impeccable comedic timing.
The crowd had roared with laughter.
In retrospect, so many years later, Blitzo couldn’t remember what the joke was about. What he did remember was how the cacophony of cheering and hooting imps in the audience had filled his already-dizzied head with a cold static that made him forget his next line.
“ Blitzo… ?” Fizz had hissed at him out of the corner of his mouth. “ Are you okay ?”
Blitzo had half turned to him and realized that Fizz was staring at him with wide eyes. And then he was suddenly on his back, staring at the ceiling of the tent again, the breath knocked from his lungs as he sprawled on the floor.
Blitzo didn’t really remember what happened directly after that. The next thing he remembered for sure was being in Momma’s arms as she carried him– ran with him. She had been so warm. He had burrowed into her chest as hard as he could, desperate for her heat as she cradled him and told him over and over that he was going to be okay.
But he had been so, so cold and so tired and he knew that he was a big boy now so he shouldn’t cry, but he couldn’t stop.
There had been voices around them, asking Momma questions. Blitzo had heard the familiar sound of water being poured into the metal basin where he and Barbie took their baths. Then there had been other sounds, the cracking of ice and the tense hubbub of stage hands barking orders to one another. He’d heard the word “fever” thrown around a lot.
And then Momma was trying to put him down. He’d clutched onto her just wanting to be held, just wanting comfort in his sickness.
Then he’d hit the water.
The water hadn’t even registered as cold, at first. It had burned . The pain had struck him so deeply that he hadn’t been able to breathe for a moment. Momma’s terrified face had swum before him in a haze, paled from her usual vivacious red to a dusty pink. All the while she had hummed his favorite lullaby with a tremulous quaver, desperately giving him what small comfort she could as he sobbed.
How horrible it must have been for her, to have to hold her only son down into that ice bath as he screamed and cried in feverish hysteria and begged her to stop. But she had been right. She had been able to break his fever, a fever that Blitzo later learned had absolutely been high enough to kill him.
She had always known what to do. Blitzo did not allow himself to think about her often, but in this moment, taking what he had learned from her and using that knowledge to aid someone he ( loved … liked … cared …) gave a fuck about, he missed her so profoundly that he wanted to throw up.
“What are you doing to him?!” Octavia demanded. “ What’s happening? !”
Blitzo had completely forgotten that Octavia was still on the phone with him and was hearing her father’s screams.
“Gotta go, Princess,” Blitzo blurted as he reached into his pocket for the phone. “I’ll call you back.”
“ No, don’t hang up–! ”
He ended the call and threw the phone over his shoulder. Stolas gripped the edges of the tub and tried to sit up, but Blitzo shoved him down again.
“I know, I know it hurts…” Blitzo tried to soothe as another sharp cry loosed itself from Stolas’ chest. “Just a little longer.”
“I’m s-s-sorry…!” Stolas slurred, his voice quaking as he shivered. “I don’t know w-what I did, Stella, but I’m sorry! Please!”
The knife of fear and sorrow in Blitzo’s gut twisted, but now it was heated with sudden anger. He and Stolas had never really talked about it, but he knew what kind of abusive bitch Stella was. It spoke volumes that even though they had been separated for months now, she was still the boogieman in his nightmares. The fear in his voice could not be ignored.
“Hey, hey, it’s Blitz.” Blitzo said, trying to sound as gentle as possible as Stolas continued to fight against him, desperate to get away from the freezing water. “I’m not Stella. It’s Blitz. It’s just me.”
Stolas groaned and tossed his head to the side, eyes shut tight. “No, no… J-just… Please… I need to check on Via. The baby is crying…”
“Via is fine, Stolas. She’s fine.” Blitzo raised a hand to press it to Stolas’ brow.
“No… No, I heard her. Please…”
“Stolas, you’re sick,” Blitzo tried to tell him, petting damp feathers back away from his face. “You have a bad fever. You heard Via because I was just on the phone with her.”
“You c-can’t just leave the baby in a crib all day…”
Blitzo frowned. “…I think you’re hallucinating. Via’s fine. She’s a fucking grumpy-ass teenager, Stols. Not a baby anymore.”
“She… n-needs me. She’s so s-small…”
Stolas’ boiling brain was clearly locked on to some past anxieties and Blitzo decided that now was not the time to break him from them. He changed tactics.
“Yeah… Yeah, I know. I, uh, I just checked on her. I… changed her diaper and fed her. She’s sleeping now.”
Stolas stilled a little, allowing himself to lay back in the water, exhausted from his illness and his struggle. “You… you did?”
Blitzo forced on a smile and beamed down at him. “Yeah! She’s doing great. Took down a couple of those freaky mice like a champ, then passed out in a food-coma.”
Stolas’ head rolled against the back of the tub and his eyes closed again. “Did… did you chew it for her…? She’s too little for s-solid food…”
“Oh, fucking gross , dude,” Blitzo muttered to himself, then raised his voice so Stolas could hear. “Of course! Chewed that shit right up. She loved it.”
Stolas hummed out a relieved sigh. His body was still tense and trembling from the painful freezing of the water, but he wasn’t struggling anymore. Blitzo knew that it wasn’t because he felt better, but because he was too tired to keep fighting.
Over the next two hours, Blitzo watched over Stolas, scooping handfuls of cold water over him and caressing his fevered brow. Stolas passed out at some point. That was a relief, as for the first forty-five minutes or so he’d sporadically start trying to get out of the tub again, spouting nonsense. Each time he freaked out, Blitzo did his best to calm him, but as his temperature finally started to drop, Blitzo allowed himself to find some humor in the unhinged shit he was saying in the grips of his hallucinations.
Most of the hallucinations seemed to be about his concerns for Octavia, but as time wore on he just started mumbling random things to himself. Off-hand comments about his prophecies, or grievances about his father, or soft ramblings about Blitzo himself.
Blitzo’s favorite quote of the night–which he would absolutely bully Stolas with later–was something along the lines of: “I didn’t even know that I had a g-spot until Blitzy found it for me. It was maaadness...”
When Blitzo was finally satisfied with the level of warmth that he could feel radiating from Stolas’ forehead, he pulled him out of the tub and dried him with a towel that he found in the laundry basket in the corner and hefted him back to the bedroom.
Blitzo was wet and tired and his hands were so cold that the muscles were cramping. He flopped into the bed beside his lover. Stolas’ fever was broken, but he could still hear the cracking in his chest as he breathed. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, but he was getting there.
He closed his sore eyes and let himself drift off, feeling Stolas’ still-damp body shiver against his side.
____________________
Stolas opened his eyes. The red-pink morning of Pride cascaded through his bedroom window, washing his room with light. He scrunched his eyes shut against it, a deeply penetrating headache stabbing swords into his skull.
He felt terrible. Worse than terrible.
He tried to sit up, but a hand caught him by the shoulder and pulled him back down.
“Nope…” a sleepy voice mumbled. “Lay down. Via’s fine. Go back to sleep.”
Stolas looked over and saw Blitzo curled beside him. He looked half-asleep still, but one bloodshot eye was cracked open and glaring at him.
“...Blitz?”
Blitzo jumped a little, but then smirked tiredly. “Heyyy… you recognize me now. That’s gotta be a good sign, right?”
Stolas didn’t say anything. He was confused. The full moon had passed; Blitzo shouldn’t be here. Not that he minded, of course. Everything just felt so strange. He felt like he was floating and his mind was struggling to focus. He was shivering.
He tried to ask what was going on, but when he took a breath to speak his lungs gurgled and he found himself in a violent coughing fit. He rolled onto his side away from Blitzo and hacked painfully into his hand. He felt phlegm and fluid tear from the sides of his lungs and he choked on it, for a moment unable to breathe.
Blitzo’s warm hand appeared on his back, patting him as if he were a child.
It felt like an eternity before he was able to get the coughing under control, and by the time he did he was light-headed and trembling from the agony in his chest and head. Stolas clenched the damp sheets to his breast and forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. He felt Blitzo sit up behind him and lean over to press a gentle hand to his brow.
He grunted, not sounding happy.
“The fever’s coming back. It’s not as bad as it was, though. We’ll need to keep an eye on it.”
Stolas rolled halfway onto his back so that he could look over his shoulder at Blitzo. “Fever…?” he rasped. His voice was hoarse and his throat felt raw as if he had swallowed a set of knives.
Blitzo sighed. “Yeah, fever.” He let his hand linger on Stolas’ face a little longer before pulling it away with a frown. “You’ve been pretty fucking out of it.” His frown deepened and he eyed Stolas suspiciously. “You might still be fucking out of it. I can’t tell yet. Are you with me? Are you really awake?”
Stolas’ muddled head thought that was a very strange question.
“Um… I think so?”
“Prove it! How old is your daughter?”
“S-seventeen…?”
Blitzo flopped back down onto the bed and rubbed his face. “Oh, thank Satan . If you had asked me to check on the baby one more time, I was going to throw myself out the window.” He heaved out a sigh and turned back to Stolas. “Welcome back, fuckface. You– we –had a rough night.”
“I… what happened?” Stolas finally asked. “I don’t understand…”
The exhausted imp sighed again, then rattled through the details of the previous night. Stolas had a hard time keeping up with him–his sickness making things foggy and disjointed–but he did feel a stab of horror and guilt when Blitzo said, “...and then you splooged a prophecy-wad into my brainmeat and that fuckin’ suuuucked.”
Stolas tried to apologize, but ended up in another coughing fit and Blitzo waited patiently for him to stop before continuing the tale. Stolas watched his face as he spoke, absorbing the remembered fear that he could see knitting his brow. Cold and sick and shivering as he was, he felt his heart kindle and burn to know how hard Blitzo had worked to care for him.
“...and I defrosted some mice for you,” Blitzo finished when his story was done. “They’re still in the tub, but they’re probably still good.”
The thought of eating anything made Stolas’ over-starved stomach roll with both nausea and gnawing hunger.
“I doubt I could keep anything down at the moment,” he said honestly.
“Yeah, well, you haven’t eaten anything in days, so I’m going to force it on you in a little while, whether you like it or not. Probably some more water, too.”
The fire in his heart burned brighter and he pulled himself closer to his lover, his savior, his protector, and pressed his face against the heat of his chest.
“Thank you, Blitz.”
Stolas felt Blitzo take a sharp breath and heard his heart flutter beneath his sternum.
“...You’re welcome, I guess. Just don’t do it again.”
Neither of them said anything else and Stolas started to slip off to sleep. He drifted in the spaces between waking and dreaming, like the voids amid stars in constellations. The dark amidst the light.
Distantly, he felt Blitzo pull him closer and rest his chin atop his head. Stolas had never felt so safe or cared for.
He let the darkness take him, but knew that there was light nearby when he needed it.