Chapter Text
Private journal of Her Serene Highness Princesses Octavia Piamonte Goetia, warded, not for archival or dissemination.
One day since the bastard returned.
Felt weird waking up knowing he’s in the house. I should have kicked him out, I mean I have no legal right to, but I should have been more firm setting boundaries. To know he’s here, sleeping, where? In his old room perhaps? It feels odd. I had it out with him yesterday, made it clear that I don’t, and never will, forgive him for choosing that red dickhead over me, and he seemed to accept that but I have to say, I’m conflicted about him wanting to still work on his stupid little I.M.P pet project. On the one hand… it seems like that red fucker is dead and rotting in his grave, and he’s still picking him over me, but on the other hand… this has been my life. For 100 years, this is who I am, these duties. If he chose to resume them, as I’d feared he would, what then? I just, go back into the fucking closet, like a spare item, waiting for the next time he wants to fuck off and abandon me for a century? Go back to being the precautionary heir, a fucking spare part in the Goetia machinery? He’s spared me that, at least. Perhaps he just doesn’t care about me enough to be hurtful. That what he did wasn’t malicious, like mum always said it was, but he just couldn’t stand this life.
Couldn’t stand me.
Saw him in the halls: I took breakfast in my room to avoid him, but I saw him anyway. I think he was lurking, wating to ambush me. He’s overly familiar, I had to remind him that I’d like to be spoken to with my proper titles in accordance with my rank, and the look on his face… it was weird. He looked pained, but it was gone in a moment, and he said “Of course, your highness.” And bowed. Fucking weirdo. I worked late to avoid him, but that failed because apparently he works late too (I guess we are both owls), saw him portal-ing back from his office with that imp secretary of his. I wonder if he’s fucking that one too.
Uneasy dreams, lost in the palace. The usual.
Five days since the bastard returned.
Caught the fucker snooping around the ruins of the old greenhouses. I’d almost fucking forgot we had those. Informed him (perhaps with a little satisfaction) that if he as looking to re-model, he’d have to wait until the next fiscal year, as the palace decorating and renovation budget was spent for this one. I know it is because I made sure to drain every penny before he got back: didn’t want him commissioning new portraits for himself or, lucifer forbid, a giant statue of Red Dead Dickhead. He took it in his stride, putting down the plant pot he was holding (I’d forgotten the fucking carnivorous plants) and shrugging, saying that if he was going to fix up the garden, he’d like to do it himself. I thought he was bluffing, until an hour later I caught him up to his elbows in muck, trying to build a new raised bed. Fuck, he really has gone native, hasn’t he? Or… or did he always do the gardening himself, with is own hands? That stirs a memory.
Beignet is a stupid name for plant.
One week since the fuckhead returned.
So, the staff are in a panic. To the point I had to get my own bloody tea because no one had filled the samovar in my office. Went done to the kitchens to check what the fuck was going on, and got more tea than I bargained for.
In hindsight I should have seen this coming.
Because you see, Mother and uncle Andy have spent the last hundred years telling the staff that the stupid fucker is some sort of exorcist level, existential treat. That he’s just spent the last century plotting and scheming to bring about our destruction, and that he’s just been waiting to kidnap me to get his power back, and all that. Blamed every slight mishap on him and his plots. I never bought it, he was too big a loser to ever plot, but it gave security a reason to keep the deadbeat away, so I went along with it and now… now.
Now the vengeful angel they and their parents and grandparents were warned about, the boogie man, the arch-plotter and schemer in the shadows, the Mastermind himself, is just sitting in the library reading what appears to be a smut novel of his own authorship, and it’s freaking them all the fuck out. Fuck my life. Ashley can’t go past him without growling, and she’s got the rest of the security detail worked up into a full-on pissfit. Also, he keeps opening portals to his I.M.P. office, so there are heavily armed imps and hellhounds wondering in and out all the time to ask him admin questions and it is very much not helping the situation. Ashley and one of the hellhounds he has working for him (his bodyguard? An I.M.P. assassin? unclear) snap at each other every time they pass in the halls, and he seems utterly, happily unaware of the whole situation. Of course he is.
Still no actual, physical liquid tea, I mean… he offered to take afternoon tea with me in the morning room, but I think if I had said yes Ashley would have puppies there and then. Headache forming from lack of caffeine. Can’t think.
Two weeks since the bastard returned.
Came to a head today over the treatment of my staff.
I had to tell him that the footmen run away and hide every time they see him, that the butlers are living in fear of their lives, and that the hellhounds are about one step away from unlocking the Carmines from the gun cabinet because they think he’s out to get them. He looked up, surprised, and asked “Why the heavens would they think that?” and I had to remind him that most Goetia are not, and do not, inclined to think of or treat imps and hellhounds like equals. That they don’t learn their names and dates of birth and home addresses within one week. That they don’t, when one of the maids is already nervous about serving him, inquire after the health of their sick mother over tea. That inquiring after the health of someone’s mother when filling in the paperwork for your underworld famous assassination business while flanked by heavily armed assassins is normally read as a threat, regardless of one’s social strata. He groaned and buried his head in his hands. I asked him if he was intentionally tormenting my staff out of under-stimulation and/or to annoy me, or if it just came naturally to him. He said he’d not even realised, that he treated all his staff at I.M.P. this way, and didn’t consider the implications. He swore to apologise.
In hindsight, I should have realised he didn’t mean to me, but to the imps themselves, because what happened next was comically awful.
Because the fool immediately went and found Sarah, took her by the hands (If I had been there I’d have hit him) told him he’d never meant it to come across like that and he was only making a genuine enquiry, said “let me explain, and try and make it up to you”, and then fucking portalled her away.
Instant chaos. Ashley and the Hellhounds were gearing up to storm the IMP building by force and rescue her, three staff begged me to just let them quit, and cook locked himself in the walk-in with a shotgun and the cooking sherry and wouldn’t stop crying, before the idiot portalled her back, wearing, and I shit you not, an I.M.P. t-shirt and cap.
He’d taken her of a tour of his office to convince her that I.M.P. wasn’t some sort of evil death cult but just a normal office job, he asked about bringing the palace staff’s befits package in line with IMP’s so her mother would be covered by our insurance and workers comp (it’s his staff now, technically, so he can do as he likes but I’d never even realised we didn’t cover dependents. My bad) and then he’d given her corporate swag. Fucking t-shirts. A mug, apparently. Pens. He’s leaving the portal open, too, so people can just wander over to IMP willy-nilly and see for themselves, which is a new and interesting security nightmare for Ashley to deal with, as if she wasn’t already about to start howling indoors.
And the worst part is, the absolute worst part?
It somehow fucking worked. This lunatic has a natural way with imps it seems, and now rather than crying each time he comes past, people ask if they can get the t-shirts too.
I am truly living in hell.
One month since the bastard returned
Ashley has had a hellhound tail him wherever he goes this past month, out of a genuine fear he might be about to kidnap me: Jarnis. Good chap, steady, admirably paranoid (it’s the border collie genes), dependable. Found him today, being gently but firmly pressured into holding the other end of a tape-measure still for that idiot, as he measured up the greenhouse to get the glass re-fit. Caught one of the footmen in an IMP cap. Burnt it on the spot: dress-code violation, you know. Spotted another one in one ten munities later. Ashley and the hellhound from IMP are still snapping and snarling at each other, but the rest seem to have fully accepted that the bastard and his IMP cronies are a fact of life here now. Embraced it.
That’s it, then: I’ve lost them. The lunatics are running the asylum, and I’m trapped here.
Very bad sleep of late. Disquieting dreams.
Two mouths since the imp-fucker returned.
Meeting with Ashley today. On revising our security no-contact rules.
Apparently, for the last hundred years, there have been strict rules in place that no member of my- of his, staff can have contact with a Buckzo or a Knolastname, in or outside work, to prevent infiltration of our staff by I.M.P. or divided loyalties, which seemed sensible at the time, but given we now have I.M.P. literally wandering in and out of the building at will, and how many of the original I.M.P founder’s decedents work there, she’s informed me that we’ll either have to revise the rules, or fire the entire staff. Temping as it would be (caught Simon in the stupid cap again, if I happens once more I’m using it for owl pellets) I went for the former.
And then the subject came up of whether or not we should also remove the rule stating that none of our staff were permitted to date marry or have “close, intimate contact” with a Buckzo or a Knolastname. I laughed and said that it hardly seemed likely to come up… and then I looked over my desk.
You’d think with the fur it would be hard to tell when a hellhound is blushing, but her ears had gone bright pink, and she was looking at her feet, scuffing the floor and playing with her tail. I audibly groaned, I’m sure I did, I despaired, I may have wept for her: I certainly told her in no uncertain terms that no one with any taste or self-respect had ever been caught dead with a Buckzo (I nearly said when you bed down with the dogs you wake up with flees but that would be too on the nose here), and she’ll regret it like you always do with Buckzos… but apparently that hellhound she’s been snapping at in the halls for the last eight weeks got into a fight with her at a dive bar, and one thing lead to another, and she asked Ash if they’d like to meet up for drinks and/or another bar fight this Friday.
Hellhounds!
And also, I know I don’t do sex as a thing but how exactly does “one thing just lead to another” during a barfight?! Are all allosexuals just this fucking insane, or is there something about me specifically that causes problematical queer situationships to form in my general vicinity? To Buckzos specifically!? One was enough!
That said, I don’t have many memories of her… but I do seem to recall that Loona Buckzo was… not the worst. She seemed okay. I liked Loona, it’s not her fault who her father was (you don’t get to pick, I know that as much as anyone). She was good to me, so if Ashley really wants to fuck her however-many-times removed great -granddaughter, I can’t really stop her, so long as I absolutely, and I made this clear, do not have to hear about it. I’ll allow it, but if there is kanoodeling afoot I absolutely, positively do not want to know about it. Ever.
Two months and one day since that stupid goddam fucking whoremongering asshole pimp returned.
Ashley has a bitemark on her neck, the Buckzo Bitch (Can I say that? That feels like a slur) a matching one, and I caught one of the under-butlers snogging (and having a good over-the clothes feel-up of) one of the million Knolastname’s infesting the place in a library alcove fuck my life fuck my life fuck my actual life. It’s only been one day, one fucking day! They’ll be rutting in the hallways! I’ll have to burn the sheets. I’ll have to burn the… the everything! This is his fault, I know it.
Six months since that fuckwit that impsucker that person his Serene Highness Stolas Goetia returned.
Today was… weird.
I found Stolas at breakfast, and told him that I needed the book today for an event, and he just put down his newspaper, nodded and said. “The harvest Moon Jamboree, yes, I’d scheduled for that, your highness.” And I was taken aback because how did he know… but then I laughed and I said “Right, you did this before me, I forget.” And he paused, crossed his legs, and tapped a foot up and down for a while thinking (also how hard is it to put on some actual clothes at breakfast? You don’t see me slutting around the house in just a bathrobe, cloaca-out for the world to see!) and then said the most ridiculous thing:
“No, it’s just that this is a big holiday for most imps, so I keep it as a paid vacation day for my staff. I’ve wanted to go for a while, actually, a sort of company outing, but I never did because… well. I’d not want to make a scene, or cause any trouble for your security. Of course you’ll need the grimoire Oc- your highness.” And I was like…well… good. I’ll be back late. And then when I was just walking away he fucking hit me with it.
He asked for my permission to attend.
Well, I gave him a piece of my mind, I told him that I’d been doing this ceremony for 100 years, it’s one of my few public-facing duties, and if he was going to try and take this away from me, he had another thing coming.
And then he said no dear, as a guest. That threw me. Why? What’s his play here?
I , loftily and with the grace befitting my position, told him to do as he pleased. He always does, after all.
Big mistake: he almost turned up in a turtleneck and short-shorts. I had to force him to put on his regalia, and remind him that he can make a fool of himself all he likes on his own time, if he is being seen in public with me he must look the part. He said he’d look pretty weird being the only one in the crowd wearing ermine, and I had to remind him that if he did, for whatever reason, insist on being there in public, he’d of course have to be on the stage with me for security reasons. And to prevent public confusion on why there were two Goetia if they weren’t together (we must never seem dis-unified in front of the rabble. Fuck I even hear that in Mother’s voice, all these years later). I didn’t want him on stage, of course, but if he came protocol demanded he be there.
At the back, with the local minister for hog-farming, and the sanitation department director.
The fucker still came.
The harvest moon ceremony has always been a lot for me. The first time, Lucifer, I was so nervous: it was my first public role, before I was even 18, but it’s always meant a lot to me. Something I do that feels… important. And it’s a solemn, quiet, dignified affair.
Or it was until now.
The second he walked on stage, rapturous, and I mean rapturous, applause. I’d either underestimated just how inter-married Wrathian families are, and half of that bloody town was a Knolastname by blood or marriage, or just how famous he was as the long-standing managing director of the first Imp-founded half-billion-dollar company. Both, probably.
So there I was on stage, the roar of voices so loud I could feel it ruffling my feathers, heart sinking, and hit by the sudden realisation that one, there is some pretty poor dental hygiene in Wrath I think there were more people than teeth in some rows which is worse than last year, and two… no, the harvest moon festival is not a quiet and solemn event. It never was: it’s just no one likes the fucking Goetia.
No one liked… me.
I tried and failed three times to start my speech, and I was on the verge of tears, when I looked back angrily at him, to ask if he’s planed this to humiliate me, and I saw….
The fucker was actually proud of me. I could see it in his eyes. Happy to see me on stage, taking the lead. Happy to see me grown to my full power. And when they got too rowdy, he stood and moved to the front with me, and the crowd really went ape-shit at this point, and he tapped the mic just once and said. “Thank you, thank you, but if you could all please be quiet, so her Serene Highness Princess Octavia Goetia can perform the ceremony, and please hold your applause for her? Thank you.” And they… they just did.
And it was then I heard the whispering start. A thousand throats all muttering “She’s his daughter.” And then…
They are usually quiet, but this... they were enchanted. It was like they were hooked on my every word. I had to keep glancing behind me to check he wasn’t casting a glamor on the crowd, but this time this… this felt… different.
Like I wasn’t just performing an important duty… like I was actually important. Me. Myself. I don’t even think the crowd looked up at the moon when I opened the portal, their eyes were on me. It felt… weird.
Good, but weird.
And then as I closed, the fucker, some imp in the crowd, thew something at me. I screamed, picturing a grenade with Angelic shrapnel, a beer bottle full of imp-piss at the best (that had happened before one year. I told them that change in farm subsidy payments was a bad fucking idea…) and it hit me in the chest and… it was a fucking bunch of flowers. Flowers. Like we were at the opera, or something. And there were more. They were throwing me flowers (and thier hats, apparently some form of high honour in Wrathian culture. Weird.), cheering and (the only correct word to describe the various rustic sounds they were making) hollering.
They loved it.
Ashley pulled me off stage at that point, or at least tried to, they were throwing things so she couldn’t guarantee my safety, and there was a loud crack as the crowd barrier went, and then they surged on stage, and as the rest of the dignitaries fled. I was about to use my shielding spell, when he just stepped forwards, and held up his hands and said: “one at a time, please” and the crowd just… just listened and formed a circle around us to just, congratulate us, and shake our hands, or pat us on the backs (or try to, mostly imps, so they could reach lower back at best which was very disconcerting) and when Ashley finally got me dragged off I was near hysterics.
She made me drink something local for my nerves (I have now discovered that I hate moonshine, so that’s an experience) and then when I begged her to get him off the stage before something happened to him, she pointed and said “No need, look” I looked and I told her I couldn’t see anything, he was surrounded on all sides, what if even one of those people had an angelic knife, what if there was a crowd surge and he got crushed? And then she pointed out the people in the crowd with their backs to him, looking outwards. The I.M.P. staff had, without being told, formed a ring about him, multiple layers, and were letting the rest filter through a few at a time so they could watch them closely. There was even that Hellhound girl sniffing people (not the crowd you’d want to do that with trust me) in case of explosives. And he was just there… talking to them, like this was normal.
It was remarkable.
Even 50 years after he’s dead, that red home-wreckers legacy was still protecting him.
Protecting us.
And it made me wonder, if what Stolas had said wasn’t a lie.
If Blitzo really would have loved me, if I’d given him the chance.
The rest of the day was a chaotic blur: every local wanted to show me every large vegetable they’d grown, or each particularly big and ugly hog they’d reared (several were named after me, apparently thinking I’d find it some sort of honour. I nearly laughed when I got told one was a good breeder. An Octavia who’s a good breeder: just what my mother wanted all those years. Shudder.), and people kept trying to gift produce to me, or ask me to curse it for them (and I was not above curse words by that point, I can tell you) and Stolas, the layabout, he just spent the day chatting with the imps like he knew them all (perhaps he did) or going on hayrides with his staff, drinking cider, and eating various horrible deep fried pleb-foods and the like and… I remembered, just for a second, how I used to enjoy cider and hayrides, and funnel cake, and those sort of things. And I tried to remember where from.
Loo-loo land, I think.
So there were the pain-games as well. That debacle: Apparently a Buckzo win this year, quite the upset, caused a small brawl. Not between them and the Knolastnames but a fratricidal one within the various branches of the Knolastname family over the weak showing, until shiny-britches himself gave then a stern talking to and told them to be happy for the Buckzo’s for winning (I wonder if it was that fucking hound, judging from Ashely's interesting ever changing map of hickies I know she fights and bites) as they were as close to kin as was possible between species and rings, and then…
And then second crisis of the day adverted, there were more giant vegetable contests, and then a hotly contested ploughing contest, and a fucking rodeo, and award winning preserves… and rather than being left to just hand out trophies to the winners and medals and commiserations I don’t really mean to the runners up, people kept trying to talk to me about it. Interact with me, Like I understood pumpkin growing or the finer points of jam making or manuring or the like. Make me a part of it. Like… like I belonged there. Like he clearly does.
Horrible. Overwhelming. Tiring. Sweaty.
Sort of fun, tho’… once I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to get lynched by an angry mob. I mean, it wouldn’t kill me (unless they had angelic rope) but I saw what they were doing to the pinatas and I had no desire to join them. Although as it turns out happy mobs are almost as scary, and twice as exhausting as you’re not allowed to just run away from them screaming without it seeming rude. Poor form, and all that.
By the end I was so shot, physically and mentally, that Ashley had to support me with one arm, which considerably hindered her ability to actually bodyguard (as, no doubt, did the cotton candy in the other hand, or the Thing she won at the shooting gallery) so I was was quite relived when someone finally came and took the other arm and supported me, even after I saw who it was.
He was eating cheese on a stick. With hot sauce, of all things. I asked him (sarcastically) if that was another local speciality. He looked at it like he’d never seen it before and said “You know, it probably is by now. Strange how quickly something can go from one man’s quirk to a tradition” whatever that meant. I didn’t need to ask which man. And he asked if I was overwhelmed and wanted to go home. I told him a royal is never overwhelmed no matter how arduous the situation, one is exactly as whelmed as the situation requires, and a royal is always here by tradition to represent the entirety of the Ars Goetia until all the festivities are done. He asked if I’d like another royal to stand in and represent for me so I could get some rest, particularly as he believed that his presence (and I.M.P footing the drinks bill this year) might mean that the festivities won’t actually end until dawn. At least a quick rest until the firework display later.
I said that would actually be quite nice.
He called me a strange name as he helped me through the portal, “Starfire.” Rings a bell, but I can’t think from where. Too tired.
He’s… he’s okay at times. For a home-wrecking sexpot.
Nine months since the return of Prince Stolas Goetia.
Caught him crying today. I asked why.
Apparently, it’s Loona’s birthday.
I didn’t realise he still mourned her. Still… still thinks of her as an adopted daughter. And I’m pissed at him, obviously, and I hate that. Hate that he fucking…replaced me, and not even a decade into his exile! Hate that he chose them over me… Chose her over me!
But… but I also hate that she got to have all those important, formative early-adult things with him… and I didn’t. That I missed out on all that. That he missed out on all those things with me, my eightieth birthday and coronation, my first official duties, my first proper day as a Goetia. It was important, historical even… and he wasn’t there.
And apparently it hurt him too. Maybe as much as it hurt me.
Also, it’s ridiculous to be envious of a dead woman, and what’s more, as much as I hate him for it… I can’t find it in myself to hate Loona. She was okay… and it must be so hard for him, because some of her decedents look so much like her, it must be like watching her walk back into the room, I sometimes have to double-take and check it’s not actually her, here to smoke and role her eyes sarcastically at me.
That must hurt him more. That constant reminder.
I wonder what hurts more: seeing the faces of Loona, and Millie, and Moxxie every day in their decedents… or not seeing Blitzo’s face, in his lack of them.
One year since the return of Prince Stolas Goetia.
We had dinner tonight. I incited it. I may as well. We need to discuss some formal duties, going forwards, if this is going to be a thing. Him and I.
He asked if he could pick where we eat. I told him I didn’t care, as long as it’s not at I.M.P., or in his greenhouse: I don’t need his plants trying to steal my food and or attack me.
He chooses… space.
And it really is a beautiful spot. He picks a nice little planetoid. It all goes well until I open my stupid big beak.
I ask him if he ever took him here. And I know I ask it with venom, although I’m trying not to.
He reminds me he’d lost all his powers during the banishment. Like an idiot, I didn’t grasp that that meant his portals too. The first spell he ever learned. He said that when he got his powers back this was the first place he came… until he realised all the heavens and every star therein wasn’t worth it if he had no-one to show it to.
The old romantic. (Old? We’re the same age, plus or minus 19 years. Nineteen, he really was a fucking baby when he had me, wasn’t he? No wonder he sucked at it.)
I bite the bullet, and I ask him.
I ask him that if he were back there again, if he’d make the same choice.
He is silent for a long time, and the fucker nods. Yes, he would. Because even though it caused both of us so, so much pain, he doesn’t know who he would be without that pain. Says it shaped him made him better: that pain… and that love. Changed him. That if he could have done it differently, kept both me and Blitz, tried something different, he would have, but that if the choice was have me in his life for those years, or let him die that day, that he still thinks he made the right choice.
Needless to say I didn’t stay for dessert.
But as I’m walking away, stars exploding behind me, I do pause.
I tell him if he wants to have a picture of him, a portrait, some fuck-ugly statue of the two of them in the throws of passion, he can. He doesn’t need to hide them away for my sakes. That I’ve noticed the complete absence of Blitzo from the palace, and I tell him I’ve spent the last 100 years in this house being haunted by his ghost as it is, I’m not afraid to see his fuck-ugly scared face.
He actually smiles at that. Says he quite enjoys being haunted by his ghost at times, weirdo. I assume he means figuratively, but I’m afraid to ask at this point.
Still no idea where he sleeps.
He… he thanks me for giving my blessing for him to memorialize the fucking imp, and when he does, he forgets himself, and calls me Via.
I… I chose not to correct him. Just this once. Because I’m pissed at him for what he said, but it will pass.
It’ll pass. It’s nothing. I’ll be fine.
I will be okay. I will be okay I’m just… just not okay today.
I hope he will one day, too.