Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Chapter 1: Pack Your Shit 

Loona has finally had enough—and apparently, the solution is Hawaii.

“Pack your shit. You’re going to Hawaii.”

Stolas slowly lifted his head from the arm of the couch. He had been lying there for so long that the feathers on one side of his face had gone completely flat, while the blanket Loona had thrown over him that morning had become tangled around his legs. He blinked unevenly at her from beneath his disheveled crest, which spilled over his face. He was evidently trying to determine whether she was speaking to him or had simply begun announcing destinations to the apartment at large.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured eventually. “We are going where?”

“Huh-why-ee,” Blitzø read from the brightly colored brochure Loona had shoved into his hands. He turned it sideways, as though the photographs of white beaches lined with palm trees, turquoise water, and offensively happy human couples sipping multicolored cocktails at sunset might make more sense from another angle.

From the kitchen, Loona released the particular groan she reserved for moments when her father made her regret having working ears and a brain capable of processing what they heard. “Hawaii, dumbass.”

“Yeah, I heard you. I’m asking why.”

“You’re not asking why. That’s what it’s called.”

Blitzø lowered the brochure and frowned at her. “Who the fuck names an island after a question?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Loona snapped and pointed one claw sharply toward the brochure. She refused to waste what little remained of her patience on an argument this stupid. “You’re staying on Oʻahu,” she added through clenched teeth.

“Oh, who?”

“Oʻahu.”

“Yeah, Loony, I heard the ‘oh.’ Who are we staying with?”

“No one. Oʻahu is the island.”

Blitzø looked from Loona to the brochure and then toward Stolas, who had lowered his face behind the edge of the blanket in a futile attempt to conceal his complete lack of interest.

“This whole fucking place is named like a conversation nobody finished.”

Loona had already exhausted whatever patience had inspired her to arrange the trip in the first place. She snatched the brochure from his hands and slapped it onto the coffee table, where it landed over three unpaid bills and the remains of the previous night’s takeout. Blitzø had ordered pizza after deciding that the soup Stolas had barely touched did not constitute dinner and that melted cheese might prove more tempting to the miserable owl currently haunting his couch.

“For fuck’s sake, Blitzø, I’m sending you to a tropical paradise with beaches, volcanoes, drinks served inside fruit, and a bunch of other tropical bullshit, and you’re worried because the names sound like unfinished questions?” Loona demanded. She jabbed a claw at each photograph as she spoke. “Why the fuck does that matter? Supposedly, people go there to relax.”

Stolas noticed how thoroughly stressed Loona had become and remembered that she usually had excellent taste when it came to finding places to have fun. He disentangled one hand from the blanket and cautiously reached for the brochure she was still pointing at. His gaze moved over the images without any visible excitement, although he paused to examine the fine print beneath the photographs. He truly wanted to feel pleased about this, if only for her sake, but he could not see the point.

“And why, precisely, are we going?”

“Because I’m fucking sick of both of you.”

Blitzø recoiled as though the accusation had struck him directly in the gut, and his face twisted as if he had just licked the underside of a boot. “The fuck did I do?”

Loona whirled toward him and abandoned Stolas for the far more urgent pleasure of listing her father’s offenses. Loona was already beginning to regret whatever impulse had inspired her to arrange the trip in the first place. 

“You’ve spent the past three weeks following him around the apartment like he’s gonna shatter if you stop staring at him for five seconds. You watched him eat cereal yesterday.”

“I wasn’t watching him eat. He was holding the spoon weird. I was watching the spoon.”

“I have four eyes,” Stolas interjected from the couch while he kept his attention fixed on the brochure. “I can confirm that he was staring at me, not the spoon or the food.”

“Whose side are you on?” Blitzø demanded.

Stolas finally lifted his gaze from the brochure and fixed all four eyes on him. The faintest trace of a smile appeared at the corners of his beak. It was small enough that anyone else might have missed it, but Blitzø had been monitoring every reaction from the former prince with the vigilance of an anxious mother hen. His indignation vanished immediately, and his expression softened into precisely the same hopelessly besotted look Loona had been complaining about.

Loona waited several seconds for either of them to remember that she was still standing there. Sometimes, the atmosphere softened in a peculiar way whenever Blitzø and Stolas reached a temporary truce and forgot that they remained trapped in an undefined non-relationship. When neither of them acknowledged her, she deliberately stepped between them.

“And you have been haunting our couch for so long that your ass has left a permanent indentation.”

That accusation finally erased Stolas’s smile. He drew the blanket higher around himself and glanced at the shallow depression beneath his hips, as though Loona might have been speaking literally.

“I live here, and this couch is my bed. I hardly ever sit on it, so if anything, it bears the shape of my entire body rather than merely my bottom. Besides, I share it with both of you…”

“Yeah, and you’re doing it depressingly. Stop making excuses, because you know exactly what I mean.”

A small, wounded hoot escaped Stolas. Blitzø was already moving before Loona had finished speaking. He placed himself between the couch and his daughter with both hands raised. Apparently, he intended to defend his owl’s depression with his own body.

“Hey, his entire fucking life was recently destroyed. He’s allowed to be a depressing couch ghost.”

“And you’re allowed to stop treating a grown-ass demon like a baby bird you found dying on the sidewalk.”

“I’m not treating him like a baby bird,” Blitzø protested, although he remained stationed protectively in front of Stolas. “I’m treating him like someone who’s having a shitty time and needs a little fucking support.”

“You cut the crust off his sandwich.” Loona pointed at him and opened her eyes wide, as though she had just presented evidence that should have ended the argument.

“He didn’t eat it last time!”

“I do prefer it that way,” Stolas admitted from behind him.

Blitzø gestured triumphantly over his shoulder. “See?”

Loona closed her eyes and dragged both hands down her face in despair. She had endured weeks of watching Blitzø monitor every damn thing Stolas did or failed to do. She had watched Stolas slowly colonize the couch and allow himself to collapse into a miserable tangle of unkempt feathers and mournful hoots.

Worse, she had been forced to witness the two of them circle each other with all the painful caution of frightened animals. Whenever Stolas woke from a nightmare, Blitzø squeezed onto the couch beside him, wiped away his tears, and attempted to comfort him despite never knowing what to say. Both of them would then spend the following morning pretending there had been nothing intimate about the way they had awakened together. The fucking tension their performance created was always so thick and uncomfortable that Loona could have cut through it with a chainsaw.

“You’re leaving tomorrow,” Loona declared once she trusted herself to speak without screaming. “The hotel is booked, and the two weird, codependent assholes currently ruining my life are going to spend the next five nights sweating on a beach instead of subjecting me to this ridiculous fucking mating dance every day. I expect you to use this trip to fuck, fix whatever the hell this is, or get all your shit in order.”

“We are not codependent,” Blitzø and Stolas replied in perfect unison.

Neither of them addressed her suggestion that they should fuck, although Stolas’s pale facial feathers had flushed scarlet and the unscarred patches of Blitzø’s face had darkened several shades.

“And if we do fuck, you’re not gonna hear about it!” Blitzø added.

Loona’s eyes widened at the idiotic response, and the apartment fell silent. Blitzø glanced over his shoulder at Stolas, who stared back at him with the same startled embarrassment. Loona crossed her arms and allowed the evidence to speak for itself.

“Okay, shut the fuck up,” Blitzø muttered, even though she had not said a word.

Blitzø seized the brochure again because he desperately needed to hide his embarrassment and change the subject. He turned it over in search of a price, a hidden threat, or some indication that the entire trip was an elaborate attempt to harvest his organs. He also considered the possibility that someone planned to hunt them for sport during some fucked-up safari.

“Hold the fuck on. You booked us a hotel?”

“I booked it for five nights.”

“With what money?”

“Yours.”

His head snapped up. “My what?”

“Your money,” Loona repeated without displaying the slightest concern. “I used the human cash from the jobs you keep forgetting to exchange. You had an entire drawer full of it.”

“That was my emergency fund!”

“What fucking emergency could possibly require human cash? That shit is useless in Hell.”

“I was saving it to buy a horse in the human world someday!”

Loona stared at him. “You were going to bring a human horse back to Hell?”

“Fuck yes. Have you seen how huge those things are?”

“You don’t have anywhere to keep one.”

“That sounds like a problem for future Blitzø.”

“You buried the money underneath three expired horse calendars and a gun you thought you lost two years ago.”

“Exactly. It was securely stored.”

“It was collecting dust and probably rat shit.”

Loona reached across the table for her phone. A few quick swipes brought up a reservation under his name—or under the closest approximation that an overworked human booking system had produced after it rejected the slashed, silent final ø and possibly his entire existence. She shoved the screen toward him before he could continue protesting.

“As I already told you, the hotel is paid for, and it’s too late to cancel without losing most of the money. You can either go somewhere with room service and a beach, or stay here and know that I spent your future human horse fund for nothing.”

Blitzø stared down at the confirmation with such a sour grimace that he looked as though he had swallowed one of the lemons from the half-dead plant in his office. Beside him, Stolas shifted beneath the blanket and finally sat upright, which allowed his long legs to unfold over the edge of the couch.

The movement exposed the oversized T-shirt that Blitzø had lent him several days earlier. The shirt had nearly swallowed Blitzø whenever he wore it, but Stolas’s height transformed it into some kind of strangely stylish crop top. A faded image of a mare galloping through flames stretched across the front. Stolas wore it with red sleep shorts, which looked more like indecently sexy hot pants without his usual leggings underneath. 

The entire effect should have been illegal. Nobody had any right to look that profoundly depressed while also resembling a model from some deeply fucked-up Playboy pajama spread. Blitzø made a mental note to buy him the pink striped pajamas that he had caught Stolas admiring during their last visit to the mall.

“You needn’t have done this on my account,” Stolas said.

Whatever fragile amusement their bickering had inspired disappeared beneath the familiar guilt that had haunted nearly every kindness offered to him since his arrival. Blitzø hated watching him diminish himself so completely. The loss of his title seemed to have stripped away the little self-worth he had once possessed. Only a hollow shell remained of the smiling, shamelessly perverted prince he had once been.

“I realize that I have not been particularly pleasant company, but I would never wish to drive either of you from your own home.”

“You’re not driving me out. I’m staying right here.” Loona dropped into Blitzø’s beanbag opposite the couch and stretched her legs into the space between them. “I’m going to enjoy having the apartment entirely to myself for once.”

Understanding dawned on Blitzø’s face. “Oh, I see how it is. This isn’t about us. You just want the apartment to yourself.”

“I want five nights without hearing you two insist that you’re fine through the world’s thinnest fucking walls. What if I want to throw a fucking party? I live here too, and I shouldn’t always be the one who has to leave whenever either of you needs space.”

Stolas bristled with such sudden indignation at being exposed that the feathers along the flattened side of his head nearly corrected themselves. “I beg your pardon?”

“She means the arguing,” Blitzø said immediately.

“No, I don’t.”

“We don’t even—” He stopped, glanced at Stolas, and reconsidered whatever he had intended to reveal. “Not recently.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

The blush beneath Stolas’s facial feathers deepened, and he returned his attention to the brochure with enough determination to suggest that he intended to disappear into the photograph. Perhaps, if he concentrated hard enough, he could become one with the tropical landscape, implode, and allow the earth to swallow whatever remained of him.

Blitzø pointed an accusatory finger at Loona. “You are way too invested in what happens while I’m sleeping.”

“You sleep on a beanbag against the other side of my bedroom wall. Believe me, I would give anything to be less invested.”

Blitzø opened his mouth, but Stolas cleared his throat and spared them both from any further verbal torture.

“Setting aside the sleeping arrangements, which I would very much like never to discuss in present company again, how exactly are we expected to walk freely through the human world? Your crystal may take us there, but it does not conceal what we are.”

Loona’s expression brightened with the unmistakable satisfaction of someone who had prepared for that exact objection. She raised one claw before Stolas could continue and disappeared into her bedroom. A moment later, she reappeared with a large cardboard box, which scraped across the floor as she dragged it behind her. 

The box was large enough to contain a dismembered body, although the smiling human faces printed across its sides suggested a somewhat less practical purpose. A glittering label identified it as the MORTAL ME! DELUXE COUPLES’ CONCEALMENT PACKAGE, while smaller lettering promised effortless authenticity for romantic getaways, covert assignments, and discreet extramarital affairs.

Blitzø stared from the box to Loona without saying a word.

She gave the package a firm kick. It slid across the floor and struck Blitzø’s ankle hard enough to make him double over with a strangled yelp. His cheeks puffed out as he struggled through the pain, while the package continued its journey and came to rest against the coffee table.

“Two human disguises, geographically adapted and guaranteed to last seven days,” Loona explained. “All you have to do is put on whatever’s inside and activate the spell.”

Stolas first bent down to ensure that Blitzø had survived the assault with no injury beyond his wounded dignity. Once he was satisfied, he leaned toward the box with considerably more interest than he had shown in the vacation itself. The strangest things had always captured his attention most easily.

The loss of his title and his access to the grimoire had not diminished the instinctive pull that magic exerted over him. He remained an incurable library rat, which was rather ironic considering that actual rats had once constituted a significant portion of his diet. He ran one claw over the seal and traced the tiny runes printed beneath the manufacturer’s logo.

“I have never encountered this particular company,” Stolas said. “Commercial human disguises are exceedingly uncommon.”

“Neither had I, but you can’t deny that the pictures looked good,” Loona admitted. “Besides, it was on sale, so I killed two birds with one stone.”

Blitzø crouched beside the box. “How much did it cost?”

“That isn’t important.”

“How much, Loona?”

“As I already said, it was on sale.”

He froze with one claw beneath the lid. “How much was it marked down?”

“Seventy-five percent.”

“That isn’t a sale. That’s someone begging you to remove a cursed object from their warehouse.” Blitzø looked at her with unmistakable pride. “That’s my smart, thrifty girl!”

Stolas examined the box with considerably less enthusiasm. “Are you entirely certain this shit is safe?”

“The reviews were mostly fine.”

“How mostly?”

Loona looked away. “Three stars.”

“Out of five?”

She said nothing.

“Loona.”

“Ten.”

Blitzø slowly withdrew his hand from beneath the lid. Stolas, however, continued examining the runes. He had spent the past three weeks without the vast library and magical artifacts that had once occupied his mind, so even the questionable spellwork on a discounted disguise package captivated him. Nevertheless, he inspected every symbol with the methodical care required to determine whether the product was safe.

“The spellwork appears somewhat rudimentary, but it is not inherently dangerous.”

“Somewhat?” Blitzø repeated.

“Yes. Among several other concerns, the label contains a spelling mistake.”

All three of them looked down. Beneath the company’s promise of a completely undetectable human expirience, a golden seal guaranteed a full refund in the event of magical disfigurement, accidental nudity, or what the manufacturer described only as unexpected additional buttocks and ballsacks in inconvenient locations.

Stolas delicately removed his claw from the box.

Loona folded her arms before either of them could reconsider. “Too late. I already arranged everything, and you’re leaving tomorrow morning.” 

“Loony—”

“If you’re still here when I wake up, I’m setting the couch on fire, making you open a portal with that crystal of yours, and kicking both of you through it.”

Stolas looked down at the cushions surrounding him. “Would that not also set me on fire?”

“That depends on whether you packed your shit.”