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Drowning is easy. The water does not care if you live or die. It is just as at home in the ocean as it is in your lungs. Nature abhors a vacuum after all.
Swimming is the hard part. Survival is an active process. An energy investment. And Blitzø is flat fucking broke.
He curls small, and smaller still. The light hurts where it leaks from under the bathroom door. He scrunches his eyes closed as the door creaks open, blocking out the flash of light. He pulls a blanket over his head, a writhing, injured animal, fleeing the implication of a predator.
Of course, it's just Loona, scratching at her ear as she heads back to bed. It's just Moxxie's questions about a plan. It's just the way Stolas laughs about a joke. It's not actually a threat. There is no pain, no danger. But his brain makes its own, grips at it, stretching it into a sticky web, draping it across his skin, his mouth, his fingers. It's rope across his chest, it's water in his lungs. Dulls his mind, sharpening his tongue.
He becomes incapable of telling the difference between threat and olive branch, all words feeling like the equivalent of a barrel against his head.
A barrel would be nothing. A barrel would be welcome. A physical object, an object with a hand attached, something he could break. Something he could target.
All he can do here is claw his way out. To cling to whatever shred of being his brain has on offer.
He doesn't take this lying down. He spits acid and fire, fighting his way from the trap set by his mind and only getting tangled further. Shotgun spray of vitriol, a marksman with a blindfold.
Doesn't even bother with his flintlock, launching himself at each target, gore collecting under his nails, staining his soul and his skin. They call it self destructive, he calls it better than the fucking alternative.
He knows what's wrong. He knows the ropes aren't real, he's not actually underwater. Hand to his chest, lungs free and clear. But he can't prove it. He digs his claws into the meat of his thighs, the sting of pain a focal point. Pin pricks of red light in the darkness covering his eyes.
The pain sparks something in his brain he refuses to let catch.
Stolas hums sad little songs as he tends to the puncture wounds. He moves the antiseptic in broad sweeps, hissing in sympathy at every twitch. The injuries are barely even skin deep, tissue already working hard to regenerate. Stolas wraps them anyway, the clean white fabric a steep contrast against the puckered, pale skin of his scars. It's more symbolic than anything. A visual and tactile reminder that this is not the strategy to rely on. Blitzø picks absently at a raw fabric edge, teasing out the fibers.
It would be easier to run, to bite and claw and scratch until they left. Until every last one of them let him drown. Until he was free to sink into the fetid recesses of his brain. But he's selfish. So fucking desperate for a warm body that he hooks his claws and closes his eyes. He can pretend a little longer.
The first rule of drowning is to never let the victim touch you. They will drag you down, climb atop your corpse, anything to reach a little closer to the surface. Intentions don't matter once you're both dead. It's best to wait until they stop fighting before dragging them to shore. Until they go limp.
He knows when he finally gets out, the guilt will make him sick. Salt water and black blood and bile in his throat. But that's not today. That's the one upside to the water. It lets him delay the consequences. He is trapped in time as well as the imprisonment in his own head.
The couch dips, Stolas sitting by his head, voice soft, humming the same song, but Blitzø isn't capable of recognizing it. The water doesn't want comfort. The water only wants to consume. To take what it is given and wear it down beyond recognition.
Stolas knows this of course. Knows that the feral spitting creature in his arms isn't real. It's just Blitzø.
"Come on darling. It's time to shower."
Nononononono
Blitzø curls into a corner of the shower, water running down his head. The soap smells wrong. The washcloth Stolas runs carefully across his skin feels like tiny needles, salt in the wound. He uses everything left in him to not hiss.
A drowning victim doesn't see you as a savior. The drowning victim doesn't even see you. You are a tool. A means to an end. They will drown you for a single breath of oxygen. It is all they know how to do.
Stolas is not the enemy. Stolas is not the target. Causing harm will not heal him. He chants this to himself when the snarling rage in his chest flares up. It's so easy to hurt. He salivates at the thought. Indulging that sick instinct, burning each red thread tying him to another. To drown the world to keep himself breathing.
Instead, he takes the towel Stolas hands him. He hates the other for making him shower, hates himself more for his own anger. He dries off, hollow eyes reflected back.
He drinks little sips of soup, settled at the kitchen table. It needs salt. He doesn't reach for it.
It's a Friday. Loona cheers as the coin lands heads up, Stolas groaning theatrically. Loona cues up the movie, one ear swiveling towards Blitzø, dropping the volume a notch.
Blitzø doesn't retreat. He doesn't whoop at the funny death scenes. He gets up, walking with slow deliberate steps untill he can settle himself between Stolas and the arm of the couch.
Stolas' eyes don't leave the screen. He doesn't shower Blitzø with praise, nor does he flinch away. He just sits, a warm thigh pressed to Blitzø's.
Later, when Blitzø reaches for him in the night, Stolas reaches back, soothing the unconscious tremors. It hurts that the only time Blitzø can reach out is when he's unconscious but he'll take what he can get.
-----
When Blitzø wakes, alarm grating, the water sit cold in his lungs. The crushing weight has not moved. Neither does he. Stolas does, pressing a kiss to his shoulder and rolling out of bed. Blitzø stays where he is, tracking the way the shadow of the curtain moves across the wall. It's the most productive thing he's done in the last 96 hours.
He doesn't move when Stolas comes back into the room, reacting only when Stolas squats down by his side of the bed. He closes his eyes, cataloging the feel of a warm palm on his cheek. Serotonin sputters weakly in his head, sparking and dying in the beat of a heart.
He knows what's coming. He knows the rule book. He wrote the fucking thing. Sat down with Stolas, awkwardly explaining the bullshit in his head, the way the darkness would steal his tongue, his brain, his hands.
"It's time darling."
Blitzø hisses. The water will not let go easy and he has no desire to fight it.
Thankful Stolas has no such qualms. He physically pulls Blitzø into a sitting position, not letting him return to his nest. "Do you want choices, or do you want me to make them?"
Blitzø stares for a moment, then blinks once.
"Teeth or sheets?"
Those are the rules. He doesn't have to like it. He doesn't have to care. He doesn't have to do it nicely. He just has to do it.
Another heart beat, and Blitzø shakes his head.
Teeth it is then.
Blitzø resents resents resents. Resents the taste of mint along his tongue, the brush forced into his hand, only gripping hold when Stolas moves to push it into his mouth. He resents Stolas for every action, resents the fact he needs this.
His skin feels wrong. It's clean and dry and swathed in fresh fabric but all he wants is to peel it off in strips. Skin himself down to pulsing vessels and organs, visual feedback that he's alive. Hold his heart in one hand, crush his brain between his fingers with the other.
He cries, the water finally saturating his nervous system. Stolas is there but he can't. He's too raw for comfort, in too deep to think he deserves it.
It he curls small enough, bleeds black enough, cries hard enough, maybe the water will forgive him.
-----
The guilt tastes like saline. It tastes like ash. It tastes like every word that feral bitch used his vocal cords to scream.
He can taste the words he needs to say, but the guilt has him by the throat, up against the wall, feet kicking uselessly.
He reaches out one hand and that ugly feeling in his chest rears up at how Stolas doesn't even hesitate to reach back, lacing their fingers.
Stolas shouldn't forgive this. Shouldn't just, take his bullshit.
"I chose to love you." Blitzø starts, too lost in his own self loathing to realize Stolas was speaking.
"I chose to love you." Stolas repeats, words crawling forcefully into Blitzø's brain, wedging themselves stubbornly into the grey matter like weeds. "I chose to be here."
"Why." Blitzø's voice cracks painfully, with emotion and disuse. He bares his teeth, bristled and bruised, not ready to give up the sick comfort of his misery.
Stolas says nothing, just runs a thumb over the back of Blitzø's hand, humming that soft sad song until Blitzø sleeps again.
-----
He's still not sure what's worse. The suffering or its aftermath. He coughs up sea water and strands of black ooze, retching through the realization that he's alive.
He hasn't had to feel in so long that he almost turns tail, retreats, looses himself in apathy and loathing until there is nothing left to retrieve.
But he owes it. To himself, kinda. To Stolas and Loona. To spite whatever is left of his father's memory.
And isn't that a bitch.
That survival does not automatically confer recovery. That dragging yourself to shore - or letting yourself be dragged - is not the end.
He bares his teeth in the mirror, the keratin of his horns chipped and dull.
When he leaves the bathroom he will have to fix what he can, soothe what he can't and earn forgiveness for everything else.
He knows that the forgiveness is already granted. He knows that drive to earn it serves only himself, to assuage the guilt. But he's only a demon.
And the water doesn't care.