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From the age of ten, Stolas knows that he will never fall in love.
They announce the engagement to the public shortly after his birthday. He is, as always, the last to know these things. He meets Stella for the first time the same day, and she throws a fit when they’re directed to sit together for their first royal portrait. She screams and stamps her feet, tears and snot running down her face. She is not beautiful, but she will be one day. That’s what everyone says. She tries to run from the room and rolls her ankle, at which point she is unceremoniously picked up from the floor and plopped into the empty seat beside Stolas.
“Poor thing,” he hears her nanny tell one of the maids. “She doesn’t know what’s good for her.”
Stolas sits quietly and doesn’t speak. He knows what’s good for him. In the stories, bad things only happen to children who break the rules. He learned this lesson early. It’s the sort of thing that only needs to be taught once, if it’s done memorably enough.
Stolas doesn’t break rules. He sits for portraits and reads his books and learns to dance a waltz. He’s easily managed by the household staff.
He is miserably, pathetically lonely.
He begins misusing his grimoire almost immediately after receiving it. There’s no one around to tell him not to. He’s obsessive in his pursuit of magical fluency, spends hours reading spells and decoding star charts. He sleeps in voids between galaxies. He lives on moonlight for days at a time. If anyone notices him missing, the servants or his tutors or the Goetia that sometimes come calling to check his progress at the behest of his father, they don’t acknowledge it. He talks to the stars and they talk back.
He teaches himself scrying mostly so he can watch humans go about their days up on Earth. Their lives are intoxicatingly normal—work, sleep, food, family. He stalks children’s bedrooms to listen to their parents read them to sleep.
He is thirteen when he starts seeking out love stories.
A man bends his head to kiss a woman’s hand in the middle of a city sidewalk, across the world from two little girls on a swingset who link pinky fingers and promise forever. In the same instant, a couple in a small apartment are getting into bed together. Stolas watches them with his heart pounding against his ribs, too big for his body. Later, in his bedroom, he blows out the candles on his desk and pretends they’re birthday wishes borrowed from the future. He knows it isn’t real. He knows he isn’t the sort of child who wishes come true for.
The stars had spoken, after all. They said, Prince Stolas of the Ars Goetia is going to die wondering.
Once upon a time there was a bird in a cage.
Stolas fails at adultery like he’s failed at everything else expected of a married man. His first and only affair lasts a sum total of nine and a half hours, most of which he sleeps through. The rest he spends coming apart at the seams. Clawed hands split him open and his insides spill out like stuffing from a plush toy. He cringes to look back on his desperation that night. Nothing has ever mortified him so much as wanting something.
The next day, Stella takes a pair of garden shears to half the plants in his greenhouse, a kitchen knife to the sheets of their marital bed, and embroidery scissors to the curtains in the master bedroom. She tears pages from his books and portraits from the walls. Their marriage had begun quietly, boxed in by formalities as it was. It ends loud. She screams and he screams. Then Octavia emerges from her room to shout them both down, voice trembling with unshed tears, and they retreat shamefaced to opposite wings of the palace.
It takes him two days to notice his grimoire is missing and a third to find out where Blitzø works. Another to work up the nerve to call him, and an hour more to talk himself into portalling directly into his office. After that it’s a game. Blitzø plays coy, or is it playing? Sometimes Stolas has problems with what’s real and what’s pretend. Regardless, his circumstances are these:
- Blitzø has unlocked a door within him that cannot be shut again.
- When they touch, Stolas’s body lights up from the inside out.
- This very well may be his only chance.
So he proposes the deal. He’s more than a little drunk when he conjures the scrying bubble and dials the number he now has saved in his phone, and he half-expects Blitzø to hang up. It appears he’s being hunted for sport in a forest up on Earth at the moment. To Stolas’s surprise, he acquiesces almost immediately. His agreement to the terms is more irate than romantic, but Stolas has come to expect that from him. It’s his way.
He marks the next full moon on his calendar with shaky hands; twenty-nine days until he can see him again. Too long to wait, but he still won’t be ready when he comes. He’ll run his palms down the expanse of his torso. He’ll curl his fingers around his horns and wonder how it would feel to be speared in the abdomen by a well-aimed headbutt. Unpleasant, he imagines. What comes next? He’s not some blushing virgin. He knows what.
Stolas supposes the feeling nesting in his stomach must be love. He wouldn’t know. He’s never felt it before.
Once upon a time there was a bird in a cage and the bird scraped its beak against the bars until the sound of keratin against metal began to sound like music.
Love goes like this: unlocked doors, open windows, cherished bruises to serve as the only memory of his fleeting presence. Love goes like carving unilateral devotion into his own body where no one will notice the fissures. It embarrasses him. It starves him. He can’t stop. Once a month, his room has the whole world inside it. He will never want anything ever again. It would be asking too much.
Plants watered too often become afflicted with root rot. He practices self-denial because he doesn’t want to die. He becomes an ascetic; he eats little and sleeps less. When he sleeps he dreams. When he eats he tastes Blitzø’s mouth which means he tastes ashes. Love is a dangerous affliction.
He waters himself rarely. Hell is a desert and he stays dry.
He clings to their infrequent meetings, the time between slowing and stretching to fit the monotony of his daily existence. Boredom creeps in and reckless impulse dogs its footsteps. He no longer watches humans up on Earth. Instead, he watches Blitzø. He calls him after difficult jobs and before long nights in shitty dive bars, whenever he’s most likely to pick up the phone and accept an invitation for an unscheduled hookup. Stolas is very good at making himself convenient.
He learns that Blitzø will stay longer if he cries afterwards. The first time it’s an accident. He tries to apologize through the humiliation burning in his throat, and Blitzø just passes him a cigarette, runs his nails through his feathers, and says something about endorphin crashes. He stays all night.
Stolas begins to push himself farther after that. He asks Blitzø to do things he knows will upset him as much as they’ll thrill him. Higher highs in the moment mean lower lows in the aftermath, and lower lows mean maybe Blitzø stays to watch television with him for a few hours. It never occurs to him that he could fake his distress instead.
Blitzø’s world is as alien to him as Earth had been before he’d learned to use his grimoire, and on the rare occasion he sees fit to share it, Stolas hangs onto his every word. He laughs at his stories about unruly clients and daring escapes from the consequences of the business he carries out in the mortal world. He listens carefully to everything he shares about his coworkers, about his daughter—his daughter!—and tries to remember their names. Sometimes, if he pretends to be falling asleep, Blitzø will tell him about his time with the travelling circus.
On one of these nights, he turns the television on to the news station just as they’re finishing up a segment on rising Hellbies cases in the Pride ring. Blitzø curses under his breath.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” He lets out a long sigh. “Gotta figure out how to get Loonie her shot soon, that’s all.”
“I didn’t know imps could get the disease.”
“You—huh?” Blitzø blinks at him. “We can’t. I—oh, shit. Right. Loonie’s a hellhound, Stolas. Not an imp.”
“I thought she was your daughter.”
“She’s adopted,” Blitzø says.
Stolas realizes abruptly that the hellhound he always sees when he watches Blitzø through scrying bubbles is not, in fact, just his receptionist.
“Oh,” he says. For some reason, his heart is racing. “How nice. I thought that only happened in stories.”
Blitzø lets out a startled laugh. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Unbelievable,” he says. His mouth curves into an odd smile, something less smug than it’s pretending to be. “Don’t they teach you anything in Goetia school?”
“I had private tutors,” Stolas says. He feels his face warm. “I don’t know. I learned etiquette. Diplomacy.”
“Sounds like some rich people bullshit,” Blitzø says. He nudges his foot against Stolas’s thigh as his voice takes on a teasing lilt. “You’re gonna have to come down from your tower sooner or later, princess.”
“Later,” Stolas says.
Blitzø cackles and pushes him onto his back again, which Stolas allows him to do because sometimes it’s nice to pretend you do not have the force of an ancient royal lineage contained within your body.
There you go again, the stars sing, ringing in his ears. Always reaching out for more than he can give.
Watching Blitzø’s van peel out of his driveway after the first, worst, and only date of his immortal life, Stolas realizes he may have taken their arrangement too far.
The deal had been a bit of fun, at the beginning. A flirtation. An excuse. He’d thought—well, never mind that. Blitzø doesn’t see it that way now if he ever had, and who could blame him? Stolas had been too desperate to solidify the unnamable thing between them to stop and ask what he wanted. Poor thing. He doesn’t know what’s good for him.
That night, Stolas drinks.
It’s a nasty habit. Inherited, he imagines, from his mother’s side. He never knew his mother, which makes her history ripe for overwriting. In his fantasies, she was a dancer or an actress or a simple governess for one of Paimon’s many other children. The stories he creates are often scandalous and always romantic. It is difficult for him to pretend his father would ever entertain such a thing, but he manages. Children never really know their parents.
He used to ask about her, when he was very young. A visiting duchess once told him that she was a vociferous woman, which Stolas later learned was code for troublesome. He was slow to learn all the social rules and niceties that would dictate his life as a member of the Ars Goetia, but he learned early that people can say one thing and mean another. When adults said he was quiet they meant weak and when they said sensitive they meant difficult.
He tried to mimic them as he got older. He became convinced that if he just learned to play their games like they came to him naturally, he would stop feeling like a creature from another planet wearing his own ill-fitting skin. He would grow into his birthright. He would become what they wanted. The lies he told felt heavy in his mouth, so he taught himself to believe them. It was easy to ignore the desires that made him unfit to marry if he pretended he had no desires at all. The other Goetia called him prudish. Stella called him frigid. He settled into a version of himself that craved nothing, needed nothing.
He rewrote his dreams. He no longer wished to trace back the histories of the cosmos, uncover what his people forgot that the stars remembered. A foolish hobby. Instead, he turned his gaze to the future. He found grim satisfaction in transcribing the skies’ endless repetition of warnings that no one ever heeded into books that no one ever read. Pen to ink to paper to ink again. It became routine.
He was happy enough with this, once. And if not happy at least satisfied. And if not satisfied at least comfortable. He did it all proper, and he paid what this life demanded of him and took what it owed. That much was true.
Truth is flexible in a way reality never is. It’s all in the interpretation, you see.
An example, for the uninitiated:
Stolas would tell you he has never once cared that Blitzø is an imp. This is true on the barest technicality of terms. The reality, however, is that he rather likes that Blitzø is the farthest thing possible from a Goetia. He admits his lover fulfills a fantasy of freedom from the rigidity of his position, that the yawning gap in status between them provides a certain comfort. Blitzø, who doesn’t give a single damn what the world thinks of him. He, who has never been the proper sort of Goetia anyway.
Is that caring?
He wanders through the empty halls, bottle swinging from his fingertips. He doesn’t know where he’s going. His home is a labyrinth, cramped hallways and dark winding staircases, and there are still parts he’s never seen before. In an effort to escape the portraits that line the walls, he finds himself in the staff hallways. They’re smaller, built for utility instead of aesthetics. He stumbles across the imp that brings him his tea every morning, who gives him a look like his presence breaks some unspoken rule of the household. The others he passes increase their pace and duck their heads. He begins to feel like an intruder.
The reality is that regardless of how he sees Blitzø, he has certainly never cared that all his servants are imps. If he’s honest, he’s never thought about it before tonight.
He pushes open a door and finds himself in a kitchen pantry. Across the room, an imp girl startles at his entrance and drops a basket of apples.
“Oh, fuck! Your Highness!”
“No need for any of that,” Stolas says. He attempts to wave off her hurried curtsy, but he’s unsteady on his feet and only succeeds in making himself stumble.
The girl frowns. He thinks she might be one of his scullery maids. “Are you quite alright, Your Highness?”
Stolas means to say he’s fine. Instead, he mutters, “You’re only asking because you have to.”
For a moment, she seems taken aback. Then she says, “So what if I am? Not like you’ve got anyone else lining up.”
He surprises himself by laughing. “I suppose I don’t.”
The girl raises a brow at him, meeting his eyes for the first time since he’d entered the room. Then she pulls out one of the stools from the table.
“Sit down, then,” she says. “Talk about it here if you can’t with the rest of them. I could use a good bit of gossip.”
Stolas shakes his head, but he’s already sliding onto the chair. He can’t help himself. He tells her everything. By the time he’s finished, the apples have been returned to the basket on the shelf, the spice cabinet reorganized, and the cabinets wiped down.
“What do you think?” he asks, when he can’t bear the silence any longer.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She shrugs. “Perhaps you hurt his feelings, Your Highness.”
The idea that anyone has ever hurt Blitzø before seems almost ludicrous. He’s as constant as the sun, and Stolas is fairly certain he was born with armored walls around his heart. Hurt him, really? And yet, his expression back at Ozzie’s, when he’d pulled his hand away…
“I can’t have,” Stolas tells her. Insists, really. “I don’t have that sort of power.”
The imp says, “How convenient for you.”
The alcohol is going to his head. He sets the bottle down, and she swipes it up before he can protest, returning it to one of the many cabinets lining the walls. She has to climb onto the counter to reach them properly. “I don’t understand.”
“You want to know what I really think?” she asks.
“Please.”
“Fine.” She slams the cabinet shut and hops back down to the floor, and Stolas flinches. She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t look at him again. “I think I can’t tell you what I think, ‘cause I like my job and I don’t fancy losing it.”
“I would never—”
“It ain’t the fact that you would,” she says. Her tone is sharp, but it doesn’t cut the same way Stella’s does. “It’s that you could.”
She gives him a half-curtsy loaded with implication. Then she ducks back through the door to the hallway, tail flicking around the corner.
The significance of her words sinks in alongside a wretched sort of self-pity. He wants to shout after her that he never asked for this, but the words get stopped up in his throat.
The next full moon, Stolas cancels. The one after that, Blitzø does. On the third month, days stretching out between them like gaps between planets, he tells Blitzø he can just drop the book off. In a moment of weakness, he adds, But I would like to see you.
Blitzø shows up in his bedroom like nothing has changed. He tosses the grimoire onto Stolas’s bedside table and says, “Take your clothes off.”
Any lingering hesitancy in the air disappears as they fall helplessly back into each other. Binary stars colliding, tired of touchless orbit. Blitzø’s skin is sticky in the summer heat of his bedroom.
In the bed, too earnest, Stolas whispers, “I missed you.”
“Me and my dick,” he replies.
That night, Stolas begs him not to go. Delirious, drunk on exhaustion and adrenaline in equal parts. He clings to him. Stay. Stay. Hold me.
Blitzø brushes a hand through his feathers and says, I’m right here. Then he leaves through the window as Stolas sleeps. Truth. Reality.
Do you understand yet?
Once upon a time there was a bird that fell from a tree and broke its neck upon the hardened earth.
Stolas waits for Blitzø in a hospital room and he doesn’t come.
He spends the month before his last full moon with Blitzø preparing to say all the right things. He will not fuck this up. He will not put his foot in his mouth as he has so many times before. It seems so clear, all of a sudden. All he needs is a sufficiently elaborate script.
Interior. Bedroom. A bird sits on the royal bedspread, legs crossed, hands in his lap. He’s waited for this moment, but now that it’s here, he can’t seem to figure out how to begin.
BIRD Do you have my book, Blitzø?
The bird takes the book and produces the crystal. He passes it to the imp.
BIRD I understand now that our bargain was cursed from the beginning. I wanted you to stay with me, but it wasn’t right how I went about it. I did not realize how cruel it was, to tether myself to someone the way I did to you. I am learning how to make amends. This crystal is part of that. But I want—I don’t want—
Here, he falters.
BIRD The fact of the matter is that I don’t want to live without you. I’m not entirely sure that I can. When you’re here I feel as if I’m a part of you. When you’re gone I think I might find you in myself. My throat, my chest, my gut. You’re under my skin. What could I do but love you?
End scene. Scene open. End scene. He’ll figure it out eventually. He always does.
The imp has no lines because there is a black hole in the bird’s mind where his reaction should go. He can read the future in the cosmos but he cannot read him. Blitzø swallows prophecies whole.
In the absence of anything else, Stolas imagines he says nothing. It makes the script easier to follow. Of course, it was never going to go that way.
Once upon a time there was an owl in a cage and he—oh, forget it. Stop stretching the metaphor. Stolas gives Blitzø the crystal already resigned to the inevitable. Expecting it doesn’t make it hurt any less.
Heartbreak does strange things to a person. Days later, he finds himself out in the gardens with a shovel.
He buries the spade in the grass under the wide branches of the tree he had once sat beneath with his very first friend, a lifetime ago. The leaves are beginning to turn.
His body is unused to labour, and his arms strain with the effort of digging the hole, sweat dripping down his back and cooling in the evening air. The work is methodical, meditative. The world narrows to the burning in his muscles and his ragged breaths.
He digs his grave and then falls down into it. Cradled in wet soil, he imagines roots sprouting from his talons. He imagines himself a tree grown over green. The air is heady with the perfume of the gardens, and he closes his eyes, slipping into the comfortable embrace of sleep.
He dreams that someone fills in the hole.
He’s being suffocated, swallowed up by the unforgiving depths. He opens his mouth to scream, but it’s already full of dirt. He’s done for. It doesn’t matter that Goetia cannot die by natural means. Where has appealing to the laws of nature ever gotten him? Stuck in a grave, for one, unable to move his arms more than a few inches away from himself. A stupid small end to a stupid small life.
He feels the earth above him shift, then, just a little. Sound follows in the form of muttered curses, and suddenly Blitzø is there, hands scrabbling through the soil to unearth his body. Stolas comes up coughing mud, and Blitzø sits back on his heels and waits patiently for him to recover himself. There’s dirt beneath his fingernails.
“Always the melodramatics with you, huh?” He says it fondly.
When the worst of it has passed, Stolas rasps, “I just wanted to rest a while.”
“In the dirt?”
“I wish I were a plant.”
Blitzø snorts. “I think this officially counts as rock bottom.”
“Fuck you,” Stolas says. There’s no bite in it.
“Wake up,” Blitzø shoots back. “Get out. Can you imagine if she found you like this?”
Stolas’s eyes snap open as feeble, watery light begins to push itself through the clouds above, a square window into the morning. He sits up and shakes the filth from his feathers, thanking all the stars that Octavia had not come looking for him. What had he been thinking?
The damp makes him sick. He spends the next week in bed, tended to by servants that do not and should not love him.
One night, after the fever has broken, he wakes to his door cracking open. Small feet softly patter across the room to his bedside.
Via says, “I can’t sleep.”
Time is thin in the small hours of the morning before the sun comes up. He looks at her and sees the child she once was, barely tall enough to poke her head above the side of the bedframe, and he shifts his body to the other side of the mattress, pulling the covers back for her. A wordless invitation. Via crawls beneath them.
“Thinking too much?” Stolas guesses.
“Something like that.”
For a long time neither of them says anything. Stolas begins to slide back into dreaming, but Via’s next words jolt him awake again.
“Can I ask you something? About Mom?”
“Of course, darling.”
She turns to look at him, eyes searching. She’s getting older. He doesn’t know how much longer he’ll be able to protect her from the truth.
“Did you ever love her?” she asks.
The clock ticks away on the wall across the room, too loud. He’s been meaning to get rid of the thing for years.
Stolas says, “I wanted to.”
Such a useless platitude. The words hang in the air, linger in the absence of a dismissal.
“What about him?”
“Him?”
“You know. Him.”
“Oh,” Stolas says. He thinks he might cry, but the tears have gone and dried up inside him. His body has no more left to spare for useless waterworks. “Yes. I suppose I did.”
“I’m not stupid,” Via tells him. “I know we aren’t a normal family. I just…wish we could’ve been, I guess.”
“I’m sorry, Via.”
“You’re not,” she says, which is how he knows he’s failed her utterly. “But I forgive you anyway.”
You want the real story?
There is no cage and there never has been. The cage is the story Stolas sells himself. Tear away the white sheets draped over the hallway portraits and behind them you’ll find a feathered monster in a mildewed basement, chained to the wall with a rusted iron shackle ‘round his ankle. He is dirty and small and malnourished. It’s not romantic but he tells himself it is. He thinks there’s something lovely about a room that hates you enough to keep you trapped within it, a familial sort of affair. But every lock must have its key and every captive a savior. If he pretends hard enough, then he’ll make it true. Believing into being.
The bird in the cage is pitiable enough to be saved but pretty enough to be worth the effort. The thing in the basement is no one’s happy ending. He shuts the door and tells himself it does not exist until the memory of it wastes away to dust.
The day Stolas flicks on the television to see Blitzø chained to the executioner’s block is the day he finally understands what the thing in the basement has known the whole time. No one is coming, and the burden of escape belongs to him alone. All this sitting and waiting is killing him slow.
Stolas doesn’t like change, or choices, but when he decides to blow up his life, he does it in the most spectacularly explosive manner possible. He bursts into the courtroom with no intention of surviving the encounter. He exits having lost everything but the precious life of an imp who carries the brightness of entire galaxies in his eyes.
The stars say, he is insignificant.
Stolas says, not to me.
The thing in the basement gnaws off its own foot and drags itself into the light, bloody and triumphant.
Owls eat lizards, you know. They snatch them up and gulp them down whole. Once, he shares this fact with Blitzø, and he laughs and laughs.
He says, “Stols, you eat cereal.”
They have long since given up on the pretense of the beanbag chair in the corner of the living room. They share the couch instead, the small space a convenient excuse for the way their limbs tangle in the night like knots in silk ropes.
Now, Blitzø is sleeping. Stolas is not.
In the kitchen is evidence of an earlier celebration, plates smeared with icing from the cake Moxxie had made piled in the sink and cans of Beelzejuice scattered across the counter. Imps make up occasions like they’re looking for excuses to throw a party, or maybe that’s just Blitzø. This one had been the anniversary of Loona’s official adoption (different from the day he got to bring her home and the day he passed his first home inspection), and they had spent the night playing games around the dining table. Stolas didn’t know any of them, and he didn’t want to make a fool of himself in attempting to learn, so mostly he just watched. When it grew to be too much, he excused himself to the bathroom to sit on the edge of the bathtub and take deep breaths until the urge to scream subsided, until he felt capable of feigning normalcy again.
He cares for Loona more than he ever thought he had room for within himself. He is beginning to understand that love is not a story with limited page space. But she is not a replacement daughter, and this is not his family, and this is not his home. No matter how desperately he wants it to be.
He never had a reason to grieve before they took away his daughter. Now it seems it’s all he ever does. He’s missed so much of his own life already; college and driving and grocery store checkout lines. He wanted to give her a normal life, to make up for the gaps in his own. Now he’ll never get to see her live it.
Blitzo’s breath is slow, and his mouth hangs slightly open. Before, in the beginning, it had been rare for him to fall asleep before Stolas did. Nowadays he’s usually unconscious before they’ve even turned the television off. Stolas suggests to him once that he’s overworked, and he snorts and tells him he’d worked longer nights at the circus when he was twelve.
Blitzø is always brushing things off like that. Things they ought to talk about. Like the trial, or how he’d rescued Stolas from the jaws of an icy death with no regard at all for his own safety, or the fact that they both know the danger is far from behind them. It would be foolish to think exile would placate Stella and Andrelphus, and every day Stolas remains in the apartment is a risk to both Blitzø and his daughter that they both staunchly refuse to acknowledge.
It can’t go on this way. It wouldn’t be fair to them.
Stolas finds himself mapping the contours of Blitzo’s body with his eyes like it's already nothing more than a memory. He hadn’t done it last time. He’d been ten years old, caught up in small joys; he hadn't known their time was limited. They were friends before they were anything else. He keeps getting stuck on his eyelids, the way they twitch and move ever so slightly. He must be dreaming.
“I’m not so oblivious as you think I am,” he whispers.
He hesitates, watching those eyes and waiting for them to snap open. Blitzø sleeps on.
“I notice you, is what I mean,” he continues. “My medication does not appear in the bathroom cabinet by magic, after all. I notice you keeping this house afloat. I notice what you’ve done to the photographs on the wall. You flinch at fireworks but not at gunshots. Why is that?”
So much of him remains a mystery. Sometimes he clams up in the middle of a conversation, and it makes Stolas want to take him by the shoulders and shake him. Let me know you. Do you think anything you’ve done could make me regret it?
“I think we’re running out of time,” Stolas says. “I never ran out of anything before I met you. I probably would have taken anyone who came up my balcony and called it love, just because it made for a nice story. But I’m glad it was you. Did you know I used to live in stories? It was safer there. Nothing is ever over in a story. But then I wished for you, and you came and pulled me back into the world…”
Real. Not real. The distinction feels fuzzier than it's ever been.
“It wasn’t love then. You were not yourself in my bedroom. It’s love now, I think.”
Blitzø mumbles something unintelligible and rolls over, taking the thin blanket they share with him. He sleeps shirtless these days and Stolas catches a glimpse of his back as he turns. It’s the same back he’s always had. Same old scars. Of course they’re the same. How else would it work?
“I love you,” he repeats, softer. “I love you and I notice you.”
That morning, Stolas packs a bag in the bathroom.
He takes two shirts, one pair of pants, one comb for his feathers, his diary, two pens, his bottle of pills, and the scratchy blanket they leave folded up in the closet most days. He does not take the oil for his feathers Blitzø stole from the drugstore for him, or any of the plants on the balcony. Only the necessities for runaways. He looks into the bag and realizes how little of his life belongs to him now. He never had debts to repay when he was a prince.
Through the door, he hears dishes clattering. No leaving without a goodbye, then. He’s honest enough to admit to himself he planned it that way. He opens the bathroom door and steps out. One foot in front of the other all the way to the front door. If he doesn’t stop, he doesn’t have to think about it.
“Hey,” Blitzø says as he crosses the room. “Where are you going?”
He can’t bear to say it aloud. Instead, he turns as he reaches the door and says, “You’ve done so much for me. I’m very grateful.”
Blitzø’s face drops. He can put two and two together just as easily as anyone else. “Stolas…”
“I don’t want to be a burden,” Stolas says. “Someday they’re going to come for me again. You understand why I can’t stay.”
Blitzø scoffs like that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. “No, I fucking don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he tells him, hand on the doorknob. There’s too much to apologize for; he has no time for specifics. It’s cowardly to wait until he has one foot out the door, but Stolas has never been brave.
“Don’t do that,” Blitzø says. “Don’t make another choice for me.”
Stolas blinks, the momentum that had fueled him this far draining away all at once. Was that what he’d been doing?
“You made the deal,” Blitzø continues, as if he could forget. His voice is steady, but his tail lashes through the air; it’s always been his most obvious tell. On the stove, the kettle begins to whistle. “Then you ended it. Then you threw me out. Now this. How is that fair? Just because you decided in your head how this is gonna go doesn’t mean I need to be okay with it. Do you even want to leave?”
“I’m protecting you,” he tries. “It’s not about what I want.”
“Yeah, okay. You think I don’t know this routine? Hightailing it out the door is a classic but it doesn’t suit you. I’m not scared of some prissy-ass peacock motherfuckers.”
“But I—”
“We’ll figure it out together. Close the door, Stols.”
It's not a persuasive speech, but it doesn’t need to be. If Paimon had ever been right about anything he’d been right about this. Stolas is soft and selfish. He has only ever wanted to be wanted, and he is swayed from the path of self-imposed isolation without further resistance. It’s always been easier when Blitzø tells him what to do.
“Don’t make me beg you,” he says. “I would, but neither of us would like it.”
Stolas closes the door. The bag slips from his fingers and hits the ground with a dull thud. He’s soon to follow, knees giving way to the sudden weight of everything he’d been prepared to leave behind. He’s not ready for it to be over.
The arms that wrap around him do so as much to hold him together as to simply hold him. Blitzø says, “Just stay. Please?”
Stolas stays.
Hands splayed against the wooden floorboards, he thinks you were once a tree and one day you will rot. Nothing lasts forever. He can feel Blitzø’s heart beating where their bodies press together. It’s twice as fast as usual. He hadn’t known he was capable of making someone feel that way.
“I should have been more careful with you,” he says, pulling away only as far as he must to look at him properly. He traces his thumb across the line where smooth skin becomes textured scarring. There, his eye. There, his cheek. There, the corner of his mouth. “I forgot that you were real.”
“Sometimes I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” Blitzø replies. “Cake for breakfast?”
“Is that allowed?”
He snorts. “There’s no breakfast police. We can do anything we want.”
The words take root in him and bloom. Laughter bubbles up in his chest. The room feels impossibly large, suddenly, infinite space for infinite choices. Anything. They can do anything. What an absurd idea.
Stolas kisses him.
The kettle is screeching, and nothing has ever felt so precious and temporary as this moment does to him now. His fingertips are buzzing like he’s plunged them into television static. For the first time he considers his life as more than immaterial, as something made of touch and sound and smell. He’s spent years longing for something he cannot put a name to, but maybe he’s found it here. It warms him and terrifies him in equal measure.
He wants it. He’s holding it in his hands but he wants it still. He thinks this must be what it’s like to be human. He’s afraid he’ll blink and it will all be gone, so he grabs Blitzø’s face with both hands and doesn’t let go. He makes a home there. Somewhere, the skies of Hell crack open and a bird flies up, up, up, beyond the stars and into something unwritten.