Chapter Text
It started almost as soon as she walked back in the palace, once her home, now a strange nightmare of cold and ice.
In retrospect Octavia wondered why it hadn’t started before. Why not as soon as her father was banished? Why not during the month when her mother and uncle consolidated their power over what had once been his?
Perhaps she had been an afterthought, less important than changing the servants’ liveries or sculpting the ice that took the place of her father’s beloved plants. Perhaps she hadn’t been on their mind at all until the confrontation had put her there.
Or perhaps they had wanted to be sure she had swallowed enough of their poison before they started.
Whatever the reason, the very next day her mother came into her room. She didn’t knock, She never did (her father always had). She had looked around and frowned.
Via just looked at her, tensed.
“Well, this won’t do.” She pronounced. “You’ll sleep in the Pearl Room while this room will be redecorated.”
Via blinked. “What”
Stella sighed, looking at her with the vague feeling* she always had when doing so. “It clashes so with the rest of the palace now. We are going to paint it in white and blue.”
The young owl stared, her hands balling into fist. “it is my room.”
Her mother snorted. “Don’t be a wimp. That disgrace of your father coddled you too much. Well, it is high time you learn how to be a proper Goetian lady.” She looked askance at her wardrobe, and Via felt pinprick of fear run up and down the quills of her feathers, deep in her skin. “Starting with your room and that fucking horror that is your wardrobe.”
Before Via could even start to speak, a group of new-liveried imps scurried inside, eyes downcast. Her beak snapped closed when she saw one of them reach for the handle of her closet.
“HEY!”
“DON’T YOU DARE RAISE YOUR VOICE IN MY PRESENCE!” her mother’s screech punctured her eardrums. Via was on her feet, still in her pajamas, and she whipped her head toward her mother. Stella had lifted her feathers, and was looking at her with pure fury.
With the corner of her eyes, she saw the servants open the wardrobe and put her clothes in…
Were those trash bags?!
“THOSE ARE MINE!” Via screamed, confusion and bewilderment warring in her mind, her fist clammy, the ice of the palace seeping into her veins. This couldn’t be happening. Those were her clothes!
“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?!”
Something hit her face. Hard.**
Via stumbled, more from the surprise than from the pain, and her feet caught on a pillow on the ground. She fell down, blinking, her eyes focusing again on her mother, towering over her with another of her beloved taxidermy in her hand.
“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAID, YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE MONGREL?!”
Via blinked as the servants went on throwing her clothes away. Her mother looked at her, her beak lowered in an expression of such deep seated disgust she felt something curl in her guts.
Then her mother put the second taxidermy down, and very carefully lowered herself, not to kneel, but just so she could grip Via’s chin with her hand.
It hurt.
Stella’s eyes were seething. “Let it be clear now. You never, never raise your voice with me, you fucking pathetic little girl. You get it?” A shake. “You get it?”
Via swallowed, her heart beating faster than it ever had, cold shivers rustling the feathers in her back, a block of ice low in her guts making her nauseus. She had magic, and her mother hadn’t. And it didn’t matter at all.
She nodded.
“Good.”
Stella straightened herself and patted her clothes, before looking with distaste at the taxidermy she had just used as a projectile and then, deliberately, stepping on it.
Via watched, dully, as the taxidermy her dad had brought her on a shared trip fo Stylish Occult smashed under her mother’s heel.
“Throw away all this trash too. Fucking dead stuff, I don’t know why my ex… Ugh. Well, no more of that.”
Via stayed on the ground, heart pounding, as a scuttling servant reached for the broken taxidermy and threw it in with the rest of her clothing in the trash.
They didn’t look at each other.
*Later, much later, Via would name the feeling as ‘disgust’. But now, she could not.
** Now, if Octavia had been her father, she would have more than enough experience to know she needed to duck. But she was not.
__
Blitzø had been searching for a new flat for a while now.
Ever since Stolas has crashed on his couch, basically. The old one was cramped with two people, but with three it was downright impossible, and the Prince* deserved more space.
With the boom in the business after the trial and once Stolas had picked up a bit on the whole “paperwork” side of the job (the guy was a whiz with it, it was fucking scary really), he just had to sell some of his more expensive horse figurines** to snag a fucking fantastic place.
It was, admittedly, in the weirdest possible location: at the corner between Imp City and the Pentagram, in that awkward place where Imp City itself bordered Cannibal Town and where almost no Imp (or other Hellborn for the matter) wanted to live. There were whispers of people just sort of disappearing and meat appearing in the Cannibals’ butcher shops by like, complete accident, but Blitzø was armed and also had signed the contract directly with the Overlord of the Cannibals so, he was fairly sure he would be fine.
Plus the rent was like, not even half as much as his old hole and it was more than three times as big!
Two rooms, two bathrooms, a huuuge living room with kitchen. This was fucking fancy. Well, imp-fancy, which was not the same as Goetia-fancy, as all of the flat would still fit in Stolas’ old library but it was still better right?
Right.
Plus it was tall enough Stolas could avoid stooping.
And now, he was bringing them to see the place.
“Ta-dah!”
He opened the door, after they had a very nice elevator ride (say what you will of Cannibals, but they kept the place in top shape, not like the other slumlords), Loona yelped in joy.
“Shit dad! This all ours? FUUUCK look it has two front doors! This bedroom has a private front door, this is sick I call fucking dibs!” Loona zoomed in, her tail wagging, looking at the bedroom with the private entry and Blitzø smiled, a warm glow of happiness in his chest. He had given her this, he thought. He was able to give her this.
“If you want, sweetie. It is the smaller one of the two, though! The other is like, twice as big.”
“I don’t fucking care, fuck this has a private balcony too, hell yeah. AND private bathroom! No more sharing with you two gross fuckers, no offence Stolas.”
“None taken, dear.”
Stolas was looking at Loona, too, with something… contemplative in his gaze. He had that look a lot, in the last month or so. It was an improvement over the vast, aching nothingness he had had before that, during their first month together and then in the first month after their last meeting with Octavia.
It wasn’t happiness, but Blitzø would take what he could get.
He took Stolas’ hand in his.
“Come on, Stols, let me show you your room!”
Stolas blinked at him, and smiled, and it was thin and soft it was also true. The door was just on the right of the entry, and the room, if far longer than wider, was also rather big and ALSO had a bathroom!
AND Blitzø had gotten Stolas a surprise.
“Ta-da!” He grinned, again. “I got you a real bed, big enough for your long chicken legs.” He had scrounged it from the trash, but it had been triple checked for bugs and four time sanitized, and it was real wood.
And the mattress WAS new.
Stolas looked impressed.
He was adapting.
“Oh… Oh! Thank you, Blitzø! He went to sit on the bare mattress, and then laid down on it, spreading out like the cutest starfish. The bed was so big, there was space to spare. Blitzø felt proud.
Stolas sighed in pleasure.
Blitzø felt prouder.
“This is so much better… I don’t know how to thank you.”
“No need to thank me, pretty bird. Come on, let me show you the rest of it.”
The bathroom attached to the main bedroom had a shower AND a bath-tub, which was big enough for Stolas, and Stolas let out another contented sigh, caressing the tall tub rimb, when he saw it, which made Blitzø swell to two time his size (though he didn’t understand why you would need a shower AND a bathtub? If you have someone you feel good enough to be in the same room to have a shower while they having a bath, why don’t just share? Fancy people were weird).
“And here is the kitchen and the big as fuck living room with tall-ass windows. This flat has a strange shape, not gonna lie, can’t understand why it makes a triangle there and all these tiny angles are gonna by a pain in the ass to clean, BUT it is a cheap and good, so! It will work.”
Loona was wagging over the view at the tall-ass window, opening one and looking outside with a shit-eating grin on her face. “This is so cool, there is space enough to have some rad parties here, and look, we are the top floor so we get dibs on the roof too!”
“It is a trapezium over a rectangle, I would say.” Blitzø blinked at Stolas who was looking around, walking all around the walls with an interested look, touching the walls. He had no idea what the owl had just said, but saw Stolas relaxing his shoulders and lifting his head high as he passed the doors, and he smiled.
That was more important.
“Yeah, I’ll put my couch there, in this triangle-angle here, and it’ll be cozy as everything.” He said, satisfied, looking as Loona bounded outside to check the promised roof with a paternal smile on his lips.
“Blitzø, where is your room?”
Blitzø blinked at Stolas. “Uh, I just told you I’ll put my couch there?” I pointed at the place.
Stolas frowned. “That is not a room, Blitzø. That is a couch in the living room.”
Blitzø shrugged. “Yeah, so? That’ll be great, I am used to it. Come on, we need to get Loony back and then organize the move…” He took Stolas’ hand and tugged.
The bird didn’t bulge.
He was still frowning.
“Blitzø, you understand I am getting a room and you aren’t?”
“Yes.” Duh.
“Why?”
“Oh, that’s easy. Priorities, birdie.”
Stolas blinked one eye after the other, and whatever surprise he felt made it so Blitzø could move him from the ground and have him, stumbling a little in the beginning, walking.
“Pr-priorities?”
“Yes. Loona. You. Priorities, you see.” A demon gotta have those. “So you can write Via you have a full bedroom now!” That had been one of his best ideas, the real-letter. Stolas wrote some every evening, and they sent them via the palace’s servants every week. Via was, apparently, reading them, though not yet answering them.
When he had learnt that, Stolas’ smile had been so beautiful, it had reminded him of seeing the dawn for the first time in the human world. Dazzling, Moxxie had said. Moxxie was full of fancy words like that.
Loona was jumping down the stairs from the roof, grinning ear to ear and wagging her tail so much, Blitzø wondered with paternal love if she would dislocate it.
“The roof is sick, there is electricity and fucking water there. When can we move?!”
“We start tomorrow, I don’t want to give our current asshole landlord one bloody cent more than we have to.”
“Sick. I’ll start packing my stuff.”
“Blitzø?”
“Yes, Stolas?” Blitzø turned his head up and smiled at the owl.
Stolas was looking at him with the most peculiar look in all four of his eyes. Like he couldn’t believe Blitzø was real. Which was a strange look because let’s be honest, Blitzø was the realest dude ever, right?
“I am not taking the room.”
Blitzø smiled adoringly at his Prince* and squeezed his hand. “Sure thing, Stols.”
“Blitzø, I am not joking, I am n-“
Blitzø sighed and scuttled up the owl. That was, sadly, the only way he could tap-tap his beak shut.
Which he did. With his index finger.
Tap-tap.
“Uh uh. Sure, Stols-Rols.”
Stolas glared.
“You two, go get a room, but not now I have to go back to my own fucking room to pack!”
Blitzø laughed and slid back from the owl, patting his clothes to put them back in order, and tugged Stolas back in the elevator where he did not have to stoop to enter.
Blitzø felt very proud about that too.
*Shut the fuck up, Stolas is and would always been a prince for him, deal with it.
** goodbye Marie Juana, you had been so loved. *sniffs*