Work Text:
“Kiriona! My lad!” God exclaimed, pink-cheeked and sprawled on the floor, clad only in his sweat-soaked jorts and cheap-ass jandals. “You’re just the Prince I was looking for!”
“Don’t lie to me, Dad. You passed out on the floor after another one of your old man orgies, didn’t you?” Kiriona sighed, picking up her father in a princess carry and depositing him like a sack of potatoes onto the bed which he had broken in half.
“Nuh-uh!” John Gaius replied, still droopy and half-drunken. “I was merely looking for you on the floor of my bedroom… where you always are. Like an ant.”
The Prince of the Nine Houses stayed silent while she straightened up her father’s bedroom. The vomit-stained bedsheets could be washed, so she tossed them in a pile. Whatever was beyond repair was thrown into the garbage chute leading to the Erebus’ furnace, including the bed frame itself, leaving her father sprawled out on the mattress on the floor, making snow angels with the remaining bed sheets.
“I’m very sad, Kiriona,” John Gaius slurred, black eyes wide and open at the ceiling. Prince Kiriona didn’t make a response, so he continued, “You want to know why I’m sad, Kiriona? Well, I’ll tell you why. All my friends are dead, I owe a blood debt to Prince Ianthe, my protege went M.I.A., and I lost my favorite shot glass!”
“I moved it right here, you dingus,” Kiriona said, pointing to the heart-shaped shot glass on top of the dresser. When her father tried to make a floppy grab for it, probably to lick whatever residue was left at the bottom, Kiriona kept him at bay with a polished white boot pressed to his bare, emaciated chest.
“Gimme! Gimme!” God commanded like a petulant child. “I need it!”
“For what? You’ve consumed the entire supply of intoxicants onboard the Erebus!”
“Hah,” the Lord Undying whispered to the side, speaking to his shot glass like it was a secret confidant. “She doesn’t even know about the secret stash I keep in my Cow Room!”
“What Cow Room?”
“Abort! Abort!” John drunkenly shouted, pulling the sheets and blankets over his head, as if that would protect him from his child’s grasp. When Kiriona’d finally succeeded in extricating him from his make-shift blanket-fort, he was snivelling and snot-nosed, clutching Kiriona’s arm like it was his only anchor in a storm.
“You’re like… my best friend, Kiriona,” he whispered. “Thank me that I found Gideon’s corpse and resurrected you. I can’t imagine living without you. Everyone I love left me, and the rest only barely tolerate me because they think that they can use me. You’re the only one who listens to me anymore, the only one who cares. ”
“Sure, Dad,” Kiriona said, rolling her golden eyes as she tried to wrest her arm out of John’s grasp. But, for all of his sniveling misery, John Gaius was still one of the strongest beings in the universe, and she had no hope of breaking his grasp on her.
“I’m being serious!” Her Dad said, the stench of alcohol on his breath. “I have made you my successor, the heir to my Empire and all that I built, the only one who can kill me. When you stab that sword into my heart—” He pointed to the longsword in its scabbard “—I only ask you make it quick, my love. So that I do not suffer over-much.”
“I’m a revenant, Dad,” said Kiriona Gaia, rolling her brilliant eyes again. “My body’d literally fall apart like one of your shitty pairs of jorts without you fixing me up. Why would I want to kill you?”
“Because you will turn against me. You all do eventually,” John Gaius stated like it was a simple fact of the universe, like gravity or taxes. “All I ask is that when you open that Tomb and put an end to me, you do it without pain. It’s not how the Saints would’ve wanted me to go.”
“Mercymorn and Augustine tried to drag you into the stoma, if I recall correctly! They plotted your demise for centuries.”
“Oh, but they loved me. They loved me so much that they couldn’t bear to see me fall so low,” her Dad sobbed over-dramatically. “You will most certainly succeed where they failed, and when you do, I sincerely pray to Me that you have a good heart surgeon on the other side of it.”
Before she could pull away, he reached inside the toothy hole in her chest, and squeezed. She felt the thin flow of thalergy which kept her alive suddenly stop, and her eyes went white with nausea as she felt like she was about to throw up.
“I’ve been nothing but loyal to you, Dad,” Kiriona managed to squeeze out of her teeth. “I’ve cleaned up all your messes, just like you asked me to.”
“And that’s why I’m warning you, my little Prince,” John Gaius whispered into Kiriona’s ear, hand still inside her chest, “that I am a jealous God. When I die, you’re going to be coming with me. Is that understood?”
Kiriona nodded and John let go, causing her to collapse to the ground, immediately throwing up all the bile and stomach acid she could through the hole in her chest. She laid there like that for over an hour, waiting for her revenant-soul to come back to its senses. When it finally did, she cleaned up the mess that she’d made, and left the door unlocked for her Dad’s next old man orgy.