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“I think I’ll take a bath,” Stolas says, sitting up and placing his lukewarm tea to the side, and he means it. True, the terrible hollowness that had taken root in his chest ever since the trial has been making itself incredibly known all afternoon, but the movie Blitzø had flipped to wasn’t really holding his attention and he’d also been feeling quite grimy. He could do with a bath about now.
“Yeah, sure,” Blitzø replies, trying to sound casual and failing miserably. His big yellow eyes glitter in the light of the television as his tail wags happily under the blanket they share. Stolas feels his heart wince. It’s shameful how he’s made it that Blitzø gets so excited at his bare minimum. Eating breakfast. Taking his pills. Managing a full day at the office without bursting into tears. Things that you would just expect a normal adult to be able to do day after day, but Blitzø treats like some huge accomplishment for him— and the worst part about it is that, now, it is an accomplishment.
And the praise feels good. Which makes the shame worse. Which makes everything feel harder, which makes Blitzø encourage him more, and the whole thing keeps going and going in fucked-up little loops that leave him utterly exhausted.
Hence, the other want for a bath. Ever since he was small, he’d loved taking baths. The warmth, the scents, and the feeling of weightlessness— something he wouldn’t find anywhere else until he opened his first portal to the cosmos at age sixteen— floating in a miniature sea of sweet oil and crushed fire rose petals. But more than that, it was the solitude. Stella had been disgusted at the prospect of sharing a bed, let alone a bathroom, and even as a fledgling Octavia never came into their room (Could she already tell that he was wrong? That even at his best he’d fail her?). As a result, the bathroom was the only place where he was, in a uniquely calming way, alone.
No one to watch him take his pills. No one to listen to his phone calls. No one to judge or scold or mock, spare for the voices in his own head. Instead, he had exclusive access to the greatest luxury someone so in the public eye could have: privacy.
Security.
Safety.
With Blitzø’s tail still happily thumping against the sofa’s cushions, Stolas wills the knot in his chest to loosen and slips off the couch. The image on the television stills, and Stolas smiles as he turns back to Blitzø, the remote still in his hand. “Oh, it’s okay. You keep watching.”
“Are you sure?” Blitzø asks. “I don’t mind waiting.”
He stares up at him, so handsome and so, so eager to please. He’s desperate to make him feel better, and for a moment it makes Stolas angry. Where was all this before, back when Stolas would have cut out his own heart to be cared about like this? Back when he was a creature capable of reciprocating, rather than a black hole taking up space in his living room, sucking praises and trinkets into an unfillable void? This isn’t the man who he had to fight to get him to look his way, who chased him through his home screaming abuses at his back while he struggled to breathe. It feels like he’s someone else. It feels like he’s broken him. It feels like he breaks everything he touches these days…
Stolas clenches his hands inside the sleeves of his sweater, then relaxes and runs one over his head, grimacing at the dryness of his feathers. Even if falling to tatters in front of Blitzø (again) wasn’t out of the question, he really could use a good soak.
“Yes, I’m sure, darling.” Stolas leans down, tucks the excess blanket around Blitzø, and even throws in a playful wink. It’s harder these days, with the loss of his magic and child hanging around his neck like a noose, but when it comes down to it, Stolas is very good at convincing people he’s okay. He’s had years of practice.
Case and point, Blitzø flushes and snuggles adorably into the blankets and cushions, not doubting him for a second. “Kay,” Blitzø concedes, fumbling for the remote. “Take as long as you need, feathers.”
“Not too long,” Stolas counters cheekily, and with that leaves Blitzø safe and smiling on the sofa as he crosses into the bathroom.
The moment the door closes behind him, however, Stolas feels what little conviction he had falter. Blitzø’s bathroom couldn’t be more different than his at the palace. All that was big, blue, and satin curtains was replaced by quaint, red, and a steadily-growing stain on the ceiling he’s secretly dubbed Edgar. He has to hunch to fit, as he does everywhere these days. Blitzø hadn’t fit in his home, but he seemed so at ease in it, standing on chairs and scrambling up counters like an acrobat, making it work for him. Intellectually, Stolas knows this isn’t the same. He knows that he can’t help being tall anymore than Blitzø can help being small, but it feels like he’s failing.
It’s a feeling that follows him to the medicine cabinet. He still opens it on reflex, selfishly expecting his own things and instead finding Blitzø and Loona’s. Dental floss, hairbrush, horn polish, Lunar Shine©️ Extra-Strength detangling spray for coarse fur. Not a thing made for feathers or a beak, not that Stolas has asked for them. The necessities he’d once thought were so reasonably priced were actually more than anyone on even a decent salary could regularly afford. Even lesser-quality preening oil had the charge for being imported over Pride’s borders. Blitzø had joked once that there must have been some kind of “fancy-pants” gene in him for his essentials to cost more than a month’s pay. Stolas hadn’t thought it was very funny.
You shouldn’t be here, the walls seem to hiss, crushing in smaller and smaller around him. You don’t belong here and you never will.
He sighs heavily and lowers his chin, avoiding looking in the mirror as he shuts the cabinet door and instead drawing his eye to where his products live on top of the toilet, smiling at him from the cute little box Blitzø had found for them. Within it sits a nail file, a wide-toothed comb, his medication (it still feels like a betrayal every time he takes it, but at least Blitzø has stopped looking so scared all the time), and a small jar of coconut oil: the second-best replacement for preening oil he’d found after much unfortunate trial and error. Castor oil left less of a residue, but Blitzø liked the smell of the coconut, so he kept it. The meager collection is supplemented by dozens of bath bombs and candles that Stolas doesn’t remember buying, but does remember Blitzø sneaking a perfumey grocery bag into the bathroom while Loona rolled her eyes fondly from the sofa.
Stolas doesn’t belong here. That much is clear, but here’s Blitzø doing his damnedest to carve out space for him anyway. Affection and guilt collide and coil so sharply inside of him he thinks he might shatter from the impact.
He decides to save the bath bombs for a more special occasion, but takes a few of the candles and sets them up around the tub. He’s always loved candles, but now their purpose is more utilitarian. As it turns out, there are things that he hadn’t thought twice about before that now cost money on top of everything else. Water. Heat. Electricity. Rent, and then additional insurance on top of that in case anything bad should happen. It’s been seeming to Stolas that simply being alive has a price tag to it when you’re poor, or even simply “not rich.”
The shame and anxiety the thought brings is almost enough to send him crumbling, but he shakes it away. Stolas is a burden, but he’s figured out how to at least be a small one. Quickly, he finishes lighting his candles. Then, he turns the water to just lukewarm, lets the tub fill partway, and flicks off the lights before shucking off his sweats and settling into the water.
The effect isn’t as immediate as he would like. His knobby knees jut like mountains out of the water, which is barely high enough to cover his hips and no warmer than the air outside. Edgar stares judgementally down at him from his corner.
“Oh, hush, you,” Stolas chides, and lets the muscles in his back unclench as the gentle heat creeps up his spine.
It’s not his bath, but still, it’s a bath. It’s water and quiet and candlelight, making the tiny, dark room glow like a paper lantern. It’s privacy, and that’s enough.
Stolas settles deeper (well, as deep as he can) into the tub and lets his head list to the side. One of his new candles stares back at him, a violet one in a glass jar with a label that reads “Moonlight Luster”. He chuckles as he reads over the rest of the collection. All of the candles have names like that. “After Midnight.” “Cosmic Dreams.” “Intergalactic.” All swirls of purple and blue, smelling of warm wax and lavender. None of them smell like the real thing, of course. Deep space smells like combustion, like hydrogen and ethyl formate set alight in a frozen vacuum. Notes of bandied raspberries and caramelized sugar under freezing scorched metal and gunpowder. It’s not unlike what Blitzø smells like at the end of the workday, but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi to it. Maybe a scent, maybe it’s just the knowledge, but there’s something there that clings to his clothes when he returns from the stars, something between the cold-burnt smell that tells him he was just somewhere wonderous, terrifying, and vast.
No. Not returns. Returned.
Slowly, as if possessed, Stolas sits up and pinches out the “Moonlight Luster” candle. He feels the hot prick under his finders as the wick hisses out, then he draws his hand back and snaps his fingers.
Then he snaps them again.
Then a third time.
A few months ago, the candle would have lit. Now it just sits there, the half-burnt wick and star-shaped chunks of wax decorating the top mocking him.
It’s selfish to miss his power when he’s lost so much worse already— his dignity, his child, any hope of having a real relationship with the man he loves— but the loss is real and it hurts. There’s a hollow gap inside of him where Magic used to live, and now, in the moments where he forgets himself, he reaches down into it and pulls and pulls, but comes up empty. Where the skies used to speak to him, there is silence. Paper cuts and bruises that would vanish in instants now linger for days. He’s fragile now, and it worries him. He knows it worries Blitzø, too, and without his power there’s not much he can do to put those worries to rest. He can’t watch over him or protect him. Now, he just sits there and tries his best, but still comes up cold and empty.
Cold. An involuntary shudder wracks Stolas’s body, and he suddenly realizes he’s already leached all the warmth from the water.
He leans forward towards the tap, but stops halfway. More heat costs more money. Blitzø can’t afford that right now. He could heat up water on the stove, or even the microwave, he remembers reading about that in some of his period romances, but that’s still using heat. Did all heat cost the same? And either way, it would still be using more water and water cost, money, too. Mortals needed to drink water, something Blitzø had scolded him for not doing often enough. Why did it cost money? Did it cost more than heat? Was a boiler more expensive than a microwave? And wasn’t he taking a bath to get away from all these confusing theoreticals and relax for one damned minute in the first place?
And that’s when it hits him.
He can’t.
The building annoyance in his throat dies in a blast of something cold and his hand falls back into the water, ice creeping up his arms and into his blood and down his lungs, making it hard to breathe. He might have cried if there were any tears left in him, but they were all frozen away.
There would be no more calm or privacy or whatever it was he sought in his life before. He’d lost that right the moment he decided his desires were more important than the safety and happiness of literally everyone around him.
This was his life now. Paying bills and being afraid. And no matter what he tried or what he did to fix it, it was never going to stop.
And it’s at that exact moment that the bathroom door creaks open.
“Knock, knock,” Blitzø says because actually knocking is, quote, “too boring”. Stolas is stuck in place and hopes he looks less like his insides are turning to ice and ash than he feels as Blitzø takes a step in and smiles when he sees the candles surrounding him. Once again, Stolas mentally thanks Blitzø’s kindness and hopes that the mood lighting is enough to hide any flaws.
“Hey, nice little set up you’ve got going on!” Blitzø continues, then jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Anyways, sorry to interrupt the birdbath, but I found some of those weird waters with the bubbles n’ shit you like in the fridge. Thought you might want one?”
It shouldn’t be hard for him to reply to that, it’s a simple yes or no question, but ashes in Stolas’s body have reached his tongue and he can’t speak. Even though the stars have been silent he begs them for Blitzø not to think anything of it, but then he watches his brow furrow and grin falter. Guess he really has been abandoned.
“You okay, birdie?” Blitzø closes the door and moves closer. “You’ve barely got any water in there.”
Stolas opens his mouth and closes it. No sound comes out. He feels like he should apologize, but what for this time? There’s so much to be sorry for. He’s sorry about The Arrangement. He’s sorry it took him so long to realize he was unhappy. He’s sorry he almost couldn’t save him, and that now he’s constantly in need of saving. He’s sorry that his kindness makes him angry. That Edgar is steadily eating a hole through his drywall. That space doesn’t smell like lavender and that water costs money and that there’s a black hole living on his sofa. Above all, he’s sorry that there’s nothing he can do to fix or change any of it. He just keeps trying, failing, and being so terribly, uselessly sorry.
The worry on Blitzø’s face only deepens at his silence, and in an instant he’s on his knees by his side. Stolas watches his large hand reach for his face and he feels those warm red fingers thread between his wet feathers— then feels them jerk away like he’s been burnt.
“Jesus Christ, Stols, you’re fucking freezing!” Blitzø half-slips on the tile as he scrambles towards the foot of the bath. He hisses in pained surprise as he plunges a hand into the icy water and yanks out the plug. As the water begins to sluggishly drain, Blitzø turns the faucet back on, cranking the dial towards the little red H on the tap. It’s enough to finally force Stolas to find his voice.
“Blitzø, no,” he croaks. “The water bill…”
Blitzø stops and stares at him. He doesn’t break eye contact even as he slowly turns the water off. He’s making that dreadful face he does sometimes, the one that happens when Stolas says something perfectly normal about his life or upbringing that, for some reason, breaks Blitzø’s heart.
“Shit…” he breathes out. “That’s-? You’re worried about that?” He shook his head and held his hands up like he was going to touch him again but was holding himself back. “Oh, no, birdie, it’s not gonna kill us if you take a normal bath. I’m mean, I’m covered in blood, like, ALL the time. If anyone here’s racking up the bills around here, it’s your’s truly!”
He chuckles nervously. The candlelight makes his eyes brighter, like discs of citrine, and the desperation in them all the more apparent. Stolas can’t bear to look and lets his face fall back towards the water as he draws his knees up to his chest.
He- they, now- sit in silence for a long moment before he hears Blitzø take a long, fortifying breath through his nose. “Hey,” he takes Stolas’s chin and turns it to face him. The panic in his eyes is still there, but muted, blanketed by the kind of steely reserve Blitzø got when he was about to go on a hit. “Would you let me sit in this cold shitwater?”
“It’s n-“
“Upbupbup!” Blitzø interrupts, raising a Moxxieish finger in the air. “Skip the mental gymnastics and calling me unfair. Yes or no: would you let me sit in shitwater?”
Stolas glares at his stupid, handsome face, but he looks from Blitzø to Edgar to the sad puddle of so-called shitwater he’s sitting in, then back to Blitzø again. The smug bastard is already smirking. Reluctantly, he shakes his head no.
“Ok,” Blitzø sighs in blatant relief, “so, let’s fix that.”
He replaces the plug, turns the tap on to a steady trickle, and Stolas wraps his arms around his legs as he watches Blitzø test the temperature on his inner wrist. Once satisfied, he turns the water higher and slowly the tub refills. He shivers harder as warmth envelops him, the chill in his numb body more apparent now that there’s something to fight it. Blitzø talks the whole time, but Stolas couldn’t bring himself to pay attention. Not when there was no fighting the fact that this was going to cost Blitzø, and that he’s worried him again, and that his bathroom is still halfway across the ring and encased in a layer of unforgiving ice.
“Blitzø,” Stolas murmurs.
He looks at him, hopeful. “Yeah?”
“I want to go home.”
After a long, horrible moment, Blitzø turns off the tap and scoots closer. “Yeah?” he repeats. His voice cracks around the word, sounding like he’d been stabbed in the gut. To be fair, Stolas may as well have.
He buries his face into his knees. “I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be. I- I get it.”
“But I don’t,” Stolas whispers and shakes his head without looking up, because that wasn’t what he meant to say. It’s become more and more clear to him in the passing weeks that he hated his home. The palace was massive and lonely and filled with people who either despised him or would eventually come to despise him. He didn’t miss his home. He just missed the way his home— more accurately, parts of his home— made him feel. Octavia. His plants. His bed…
Blitzø hasn’t said another word, and Stolas can sense his eyes on him. He knows it's going to sound silly, maybe even plain vapid, to say aloud, but if he can’t give Blitzø anything else, he can at the very least give him his honesty.
Stolas sits back up and lets his head rest on the steamy tiles of the wall, and closes his eyes. “I miss my bathroom.”
To Blitzø's credit, he does not laugh at him. “Your… bathroom?”
He swallows the lump in his throat and nods. His eyes open, but he still can’t bring himself to look at Blitzø. He can sense him in his space, also seeming to avoid eye contact with him at all cost. He must hate him now, too, or think him mad.
“I used to call you there,” he blurts. He feels Blitzø look back up again and he shrugs, wiping at his eyes. Guess he wasn’t entirely out of tears. “Sometimes. Sometimes not, and you usually didn’t answer, not back then. Not that I expected you to. But if I needed someone to talk to, I’d call. And sometimes, you did pick up, and we would talk, and I’d feel…
Loved? Happy? Normal?
“...safe. I’d talk with you and I’d feel safe.”
“...From your bathroom?” Blitzø says after a moment.
Half a chuckle escapes from Stolas’s chest, “Yes, Blitzø. From my bathroom.”
He watches the shadows on the ceiling shift, then hears Blitzø sigh heavily. Bracing himself, he dares to look at him. Surprisingly, Blitzø doesn’t look completely disgusted. Instead, he just looks sad.
“I think,” he starts, then stops. He wrings his hands together in his lap, mouth pressed into a tight line before he says, “I don’t think you’ve had a lot of places where you could feel safe.”
Recluctantly, he nods. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Blitzø fold his arms over his stomach and frown at the floor. “That really sucks.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it really fucking isn’t, Stolas.”
He shrugs again. “I suppose not.” It sounds so awful to hear someone else say it aloud. Like giving a name to a storm, like how humans did in the living world. Putting an identity to the tragedy. Hurricane Stolas.
They fall silent again, and when Blitzø doesn’t break it, suddenly it's Stolas’s turn to be worried. It isn’t often Blitzø is the one at a loss for words. He slows down, Stolas has learned, when he gets thoughtful, drifting somewhere between here and elsewhere, where Stolas hasn’t been invited to. He knows it’s unlikely, but he would like to be good enough to be let in there one day. To know what worlds Blitzø keeps in his mind, and perhaps if he can let him feel a little less alone there.
Something he’s also learned is that for all his talk, Blitzø really isn’t one for words. By every meaning of the phrase, he is an imp of action. Case and point: suddenly Blitzø stands, climbs into the tub in his boxers and t-shirt, and wraps his arms around Stolas as though he thinks he might vanish if he lets go.
An undignified squawk startles from Stolas’s throat and he holds Blitzø back to steady him. Water sloshes, threatening to extinguish the candles, and he’s already soaked to the bone. “Blitzø-!?”
“You are safe here,” Blitzø says, muffled but firm, his face buried in Stolas’s chest and voice humming through his bones. “I know things have been so unbelievably fucked up, and I’m so, SO sorry, but I promise you, however you feel, whatever you need to do, nothing bad is going to happen to you.”
His hand comes up and cups the back of his head, like Stolas is something small and precious. “If we need money, we’ll find some. If you need to talk, I’ll listen. And if anybody has shit to say about it, then they’ll have to deal with me. But I don’t let the people I care about feel unsafe. Not in my house.”
Stolas doesn’t know what to say. Between the bath, the candlelight, and the brilliant, wonderful man practically shoving his face between his breasts, it’s like he’s suddenly in a strange parody of their earliest nights together. It leaves him dumbstruck; emotional and confused and very caught-in-the-middle. Part of him wants to embrace it and revert back to then, back when he was still a mess, but happy(ier) and useful and able to respond to anything with more than melancholic acceptance. Another part wants to push Blitzø away, to reject this tenderness he neither understands or deserves.
And then, between the two voices, there is a third: something from deep within, under the pain and the grief and the fear, that still believes that this will not go on forever. It’s the part of him that’s kept him alive, trying and fighting, even after Striker, after Stella, after a lifetime of neglect, isolation, and heartbreak.
The part of him underneath that screams to be heard under the sorrow, that demands for him to believe in a better tomorrow— and, that asks him to trust that Blitzo believes in it, too.
It could almost be sacrilegious, for a demon to hold on to such faith. Luckily, Stolas had always found obedience to be highly overrated.
“Not in your home…” Stolas echoes. Blitzø looks up from his chest and Stolas tries a soft smile. “And does that extend to your bathroom as well?”
“‘Course!” Blitzø holds him tighter with his one arm while the other circles around to cup his cheek. “If this is where you need to go to chill for a bit, then go for it. We’ll buy out Fizz’s whole new bath line if we have to!”
The thought of any more money being spent on him makes him queasy, but he forces himself to stay in the moment. “We’ll need more clients, then.”
“And we’ll get more. Your charm at the front desk? Plus my everything else? They’re not gonna know what hit ‘em.”
“A bullet, I imagine.”
Blitzø stops with a blink, then a slow grin streaks across his face. “Was that a fucking pun?”
Stolas allows himself a coy shrug. “Maybe.”
“Soooo,” Blitzø drawls and sits up on the edge of the tub, unabashed by his drenched clothes clinging to his body. “Not sitting in shitwater is helping?”
Stolas rolls his eyes, but settles into the space Blitzø had left in the tub. The hot water feels gorgeous, soaking between his feathers and down to his skin in a way that makes him feel, for the first time in a while, clean.
“Yes,” he sighs and closes his eyes as he sinks into the water up to his chin. “Thank you, darling.”
“Good,” Blitzø said, stroking through Stolas’s wet feathers. “And anytime. Seriously.”
Despite himself, Stolas feels the smile he’d managed falter. It would have been so easy for things to have been fixed then and there, like in the stories he’s read. For a moment, Stolas can even believe they are. But then he opens his eyes and he’s still in a strange bathroom in a tub that barely fits him with a hole deep in his soul. The only difference is now there’s a small light in the darkness. A “Moonlight Luster” candle on the edge of a bathtub, easily extinguished unless extra care is taken.
“…I think it’s going to take a while for me to get through this,” Stolas says quietly. “To feel safe again.”
“I know.” Blitzø’s face softens, hand still carding over his head. “And I’ll be waiting for you when you come out the other side.”
A hoot of laughter startles from Stolas’s beak. “Corny.”
“What?” Blitzø exclaims, brow furrowed in half-mock offense. “I thought you loved that kind of shit!”
Now, he can’t help but giggle as Blitzø teases and splashes at him. He’s dripping water all over his tiny bathroom floor. They’ll have to mop it up soon, or else risk slipping in the dark or their downstairs neighbor yelling at them about leaks again. Outside the door is a world that is violent and uncertain, but for a moment, he can have a break. He can have warmth and candles and someone who will wait for him while he relearns how to live. And for now, that’s enough.
“I do,” he says, and he means it.
He really does.