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“Once upon a time there was an ugly little duckling with a beautiful heart. She was kind to everyone she met, but since she was ugly, the only ones who appreciated her kindness were the animals on her farm. All the villagers in town were afraid of her ugliness and treated her very cruelly.”
“Despite their cruelty, she loved everyone around her. She had seen that when she hid from their sight they could be kind too. They could be kind to one another, to the animals, and even to the plants in the gardens. But because she was ugly, they were never kind to her.”
“That’s so mean!” The toddler on Stolas’ lap chirped. His imagination had gotten away from him, and once Octavia spoke, he was away from that small feudal village and back in his daughter’s bedroom with the little owlet sitting on his lap with the rocking chair by her plush little nest swaying back and forth as she snuggled against his brooding feathers.
“It is. Don’t you want to hear how the story ends, though?” Stolas asked.
Octavia’s look mirrored Stolas’ lack of surety. The story was a traditional one, necessary for education, but the young girl was only three. He wondered if she was ready for the tale and if he would ever feel she was ready.
“Yeah, I guess,” she said, settling back against his chest feathers.
“There was one boy,” Stolas continued, “that the girl loved more than all the rest. Keeping out of sight behind a tree, she saw a very pretty little boy she had never seen in the village. His feathers were rich blue, and the color he wore was the most vibrant purple she had ever seen. On top of his head, something reflected the sun so brightly she was blinded by it. The boy sat at the edge of the river skipping rocks with a sour look on his face. For a long time, she was afraid to approach him, but she desperately wanted to know what that shiny thing on the boy’s head was.”
“Oh, I know. It’s a crown!” Via interrupted.
Smiling at her precociousness, Stolas kissed the top of her head. “It is, my smart girl!”
Stolas flipped the page of the picture book with a swish of his hand.
“When the girl approached, the boy was frightened by her appearance and threw one of his skipping rocks at her, but the girl was used to having rocks thrown at her. She grabbed the rock right out of the air and continued her approach.”
“‘I just wanted to know what that thing on your head was,’ the duckling said.”
“‘This? This is my crown. I wear it because I’m a prince.’ the boy said proudly.”
“He was impressed by the way she snatched the rock from the air, and so he grew to like the ugly little girl as he explained the crown and what it meant to be a prince.”
“That day the boy agreed to meet her by the water at the same time next week. Every week for many years they met by the water and talked. She spoke about her love for the farm, and the boy talked about his boredom at court.” Stolas made an exaggerated yawn which earned him some chuckles.
“Over time, the girl’s love for the boy grew and grew, and one day, by that same river, she confessed she was in love with the prince.”
Stolas felt a gentle tug at his feathers, Octavia’s method of getting his attention when he was a slave to his thoughts and imagination.
“Yes, owlet?”
“What does that mean, in love?”
“It means she loved him the most. She wanted to kiss him like adults do.”
“Ew!”
“It’s a very special thing. You’ll understand one day when you’re older.”
“What did the prince say?” Octavia asked.
“The prince was young and foolish.”
“He said, ‘You? You’re ugly, and you’re not even a princess. I couldn’t love you.’”
“What a jerk! This is a bad story,” Octavia said.
Stolas sighed. “You’re right. It’s not a very nice story, and I will warn you it does not have a very nice ending. It is simply a tale all Goetia must learn. We all must learn what it means to be in love as a Goetia.” Stolas used magic to set the book on the night table. “You’re right, though. I think this story can wait.”
“No, I want to know what happens to that jerkface. I’m old enough.” Octavia squirmed in his arms, reaching for the storybook.
“Alright. I’ll read you a nice story after this one, but no more interruptions, alright?”
“The girl had been told worse, and she forgave the boy easily. He had not meant to harm her with his words. In fact, as more time passed, the boy realized he was in love with the girl. Despite her outer appearance, she was beautiful on the inside. The boy realized what he said was foolish, and by then, he felt he was too ugly inside to be with someone so beautiful.
“More years passed, and the girl grew beautiful. She discovered she was not a duck but a beautiful swan. No one would object to the prince marrying the most beautiful girl in the land, but the prince kept his feelings secret. The girl had found feelings for another man. A man who was strong and brave, but who turned out to be very cruel. Because she was used to cruelty, she could not recognize that he was one of the cruelest. Worse, she believed beauty could save her from being treated cruelly, so she never expected it.”
“She grew in love for the man until one day a bright red string of magic from her heart wrapped itself around her finger.”
“Do you know what that string is, Via?” Stolas asked.
The little owl shook her head.
“That is the string of a pair bond, a sign of fate that she would never love anyone besides that cruel man.
Octavia’s eyes welled with tears. “That man? Not even the jerkface prince?”
“Yes, this is what it means to be in love as a Goetia. If we love too much for too long, we form a pair bond, and magic and fate will make it so we are never in love with anyone else.”
Little tears spring from her eyes.
“Hush, hush.” Stolas wipes her tears and clutches her tight to him, petting the feathers of her nape. “It’s not all bad. A pair bond can be a very special bond, but it is also dangerous if you pair bond to someone like the cruel man. Are you sure you want me to go on?”
Octavia pushed away and wiped her tears with determination.
“Yeah.” She sniffles. “I wanna know what happened to her.”
“Okay.” Stolas’ unease turned his stomach, but if he stopped then he knew she would have more questions and confusion.
“When the prince saw the red string on her finger, he was sad to know she would never love him, but he tried to be happy for her that she was so in love with someone else. However, the prince did not know the man was cruel. That man did not reciprocate her feelings, and he would not cut the string. He was a horrible man who kept the string because he enjoyed her pain. The string was tied to her magic power and her heart, and the longer the bond went unreciprocated the more it stole her magical energy and hurt her heart. That man enjoyed pulling on the string to hurt her. She became very sick as he tugged and tugged, and her illness went on for a very long time.”
“The prince was so alone when the girl, a woman now, stopped meeting him by the water, and he was furious when he found out why. He discovered the man’s cruelty, and he was very angry but mostly very sad.”
“The princess laid in bed for days and days with the string squeezing around her heart until suddenly, the string was cut, and her illness disappeared all at once. She was completely restored except for her ability to love. No magic could bring that back, but the string was gone except for the little red bow on her finger.”
“Have you ever seen anyone with a red magic bow and no string?” Stolas asked.
“Grandma has a little bow.” Stella’s mother had a pair bond who died long before she married Stella’s father and before she trapped her daughter in the same sort of loveless marriage she was confined to.
“That’s right. It means that person’s pair bond has passed away. One reason you must learn this is that it’s best not to ask about, okay?”
Via nodded. She had sobered, and her tears turned to quiet sadness.
“The man had died in a hunting accident, and though she did not want him to die, he could not hurt her anymore.” According to the story, the prince had the man murdered when he found out about what he was doing to the woman, but Stolas did not want Via to learn to use violence that way, not at this tender age. Growing up in hell, she would learn the ways of violence and cruelty that far outmatched the fable, but rotted by the experience of encountering cruelty too young, he could not help but retain as much of her innocence as possible.
“With her health restored the woman continued her life on the farm. She was never in love with another, and she never married. However, she had the love of her animals, and she could love the prince as a good, kind friend. No one else was ever cruel to her again, and she lived happily for the rest of her days.”
“The prince held onto his love for her for his whole life, he never formed a pair bond because the only one he would have bonded to was taken by another. The prince died many years later, having married a woman he did not love. All he wished for was that the woman could have loved him and that he could not have been so young and foolish to mistreat her simply because she was ugly.”
Stolas flipped to the last page with the words “The end” printed in big florentine calligraphy.
“Daddy, will that happen to me?”
“Of course not!” Her pointed question made him laugh. “No one could resist loving you.” Still, his gut churned. He knew that the love of a father, especially one as intense as his own, could blind. “Even if they could somehow, I would come to them every single day for thousands and thousands of days and give them a new reason why they ought to love you, and I would never run out of reasons why.” In truth, he would kill them to protect her, the same as the prince, and he would not feel a shred of remorse.
Octavia looked away, seeming content, and then right back up at him, “Why don’t you and mommy have red strings?”
He lied the lie he had been prepared to tell since the beginning, “Mommy and I love each other, but not the way the swan loved the cruel man or the prince loved the swan. We love each other because we made you but not in that way.”
“So… what happened to the girl won’t happen to you someday, will it?”
Stolas laughed, “No. Of course not.”
~⁂~
Stolas spent six weeks open in the extent of his affections. At first, Blitz met him with noncommittal gestures. After a while, Stolas was lobbed with annoyed glares. Finally, when Blitz seemed to run out of tolerance, he hit Stolas with rebuffs that left an awful taste in his mouth like he had been gnawing on lemon rinds. Stolas had never uttered the word love again.
He learned love is truly like falling, and Blitz had no interest in stopping the fall or plunging alongside him. Blitz would watch as he fell and bark from the safety of a cliffside for Stolas to keep his shrieking the fuck down.
A week ago, he and Blitz had faced one another with the blankets bunched in a nest snug against their sleepy cheeks while they woke with gentle smiles and the ghost of daylight haunting the bedroom. In that serene moment, he lifted his hand to Blitz’s face and saw the string of red magic tied to his talon with the other end tied loosely around Blitz’s finger, the mark of a pair bond that he knew would never be reciprocated. Not being an Ars Goetia, of course, Blitz had not been able to see it. For a week, Stolas resolved to smile and pretend to live in a reality where Blitz could love him.
Yet again, he had let a Blitz-centric fantasy get away from him. He indulged himself past the point of any return, and this time his pining would cost him his ability to love forever. He could pretend just a bit longer, just until the pain grew too much. He spent the week pretending and basking in Blitz. He could solemnly accept the end before his unrequited bond became stronger and the magic thread squeezed into his heart tighter than he could bear.
An ugly part of him wished to somehow use the thread to trap Blitz in his orbit, but since replacing the Grimoire with an Asmodean Crystal, Stolas learned his lesson. He could not trap Blitz. Birds like himself can be caged; Blitz cannot. To be chained to Blitz was right. This is right for a bird demon, he reassured himself. He can fight and free himself of the gilded cage of the aristocracy, but this chain, this red string of fate and love, he could not escape. And perhaps that is only because he did not want to escape. At least as the string drags behind him while he moves through near-immortality, Blitz will be with him always, even if only in emptiness and absence. He is as ready as he is ever going to be to move on to that part of his existence.
“Darling, I’m afraid I’ve pair bonded to you.”
Blitz stares, dumb and so very cute.
“I know you haven’t…” Stolas continues, “I mean, I know you don’t feel the same way as me, but I’m afraid by now I don’t have much of a choice. I worry, as much as I enjoy spending time with you, the longer I endure this unreciprocated bond, the more harm will come as a result. I need something, Blitz. Truthfully, I need to end this. The thread will be cut as soon as you will it and I will be… I won’t be able to see you anymore, my heart can’t bear it, but you will be free to love who you wish.”
Blitz’s eyes glow in their wideness, as big and bright as the moon in the sky behind him. Then they narrow into slits. Stolas has gotten better at reading Blitz’s expressions. Once he realized he had never truly paid enough attention to anyone to understand his fickle lover's emotions, he studied Blitz’s expressive face with moderate success. Shock and horror give way to disgust and rage on Blitz’s red, almond head.
“Please, don’t hate me,” Stolas hears the begging strain in his voice.
Blitz is back to shock and horror. Then, back to disgust and rage again. The most valuable lesson from Stolas’ studies: with someone as mercurial as Blitz, reading expressions is useless.
“Isn’t that my line?” Blitz says. “I don’t wish to love anyone, and they don’t wish to love me. You should know that better than anyone.”
“I do not know that!” His heart squeezes in his chest in a way he isn’t sure is the pair bonding or simple pain at how unloved Blitz seems to feel despite Stolas’ best attempts. “I am here because I wish to love you so much that I have done so without your consent or reciprocation for so long, for years, for maybe my whole life since the moment I saw you swing down onto the stage when we were children. If this doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what possibly could.”
They frown as the bugs in the garden chirp wildly into the warm summer night.
“I love you because I wish to. And I could never stop even if I wished to.”
“Octavia told me about pair bonding. She said she’d hate me forever if I did that to you.”
Stolas sighs. “She will, but I did this to myself. Perhaps she’ll understand when she’s older.”
“I don’t want to cut it.”
“Do you hate me that much?” Panic sets in to take place of the hurt.
Goetia cannot die even of magical wounds, but the result is still gruesome. The sane ones tend to off themselves to avoid it. Stolas wants to believe Blitz could never be that cruel, but he knows Blitz can be cruel, especially when he is insulted. His affection is regarded as an insult, and he does not need to read Blitz’s face to know it. He has been clear in his rebuffs. The tears drip down Stolas’ face while his breath rattles from him in a cacophony.
The sickest part of him wishes Blitz would simply stab him with a blessed blade now and run off with his money and his useless things so this can be over. Instead, the thread cuts deeper, and he swallows down the taste of iron that percolates up the back of his throat.
“I love you. I want you to be happy. Please don’t do this to me.”
Before Stolas realizes what he is doing, he wraps Blitz in a smothering hug against his chest fluff. He cannot listen to another word. If he is lucky, Blitz will end him. He shatters into sobs, resting his forehead against Blitz right between his horns.
Blitz manages to get his mouth free from the plumage. “I hurt you so much. You probably think I’m a monster. You can’t want to love me even if you do somehow.”
“Fine, then. Hurt me.” Stella’s voice rings in his head — pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. She has less effect on him now, and he has never missed her more. She would have prevented this pathetic groveling. “Hurt me by not loving me. Steal from me. Break everything I own. End me. Turn me over to Stella’s goons before I do it myself or end it with a blessed blade and your own hands! Anything but this!”
Blitz’s claws dig into Stolas’ sides and push him away. Only because Stolas has promised not to trap Blitz again, he lets him go and breaks down on his knees to cry into the palms of his hands.
“I don’t want to hurt you! Fuck!” He can hear Blitz begin to pace over the balcony tiles. “Don’t you get it? I do this to everyone, to everyone who cares!”
Stolas gathers himself enough to look up. Blitz’s nimble tail flicks in irritation.
“I hurt them, and they say they can bear it. I hurt them more until they say they want it. I hurt them more until they…” Blitz lets out a sob of his own. “They hate me and themselves. Every fucking time.”
Stolas’ chest squeezes tighter, and his sob comes out with a small gurgle of blood that he swallows down. “I just want you to love me, but every time I try, I think you hate me more.”
Blitz growls. Sadness morphs into more disgust and rage. Blitz’s anger flips like a light switch, the tail flicks one way turning to anger, another turning to despair. “That’s the thing! I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you to hate me, but fuck you!”
The screaming shocks Stolas into nothing more than quiet sniffling and rapt interest.
“It’s fucking insulting that you think I’d spend so much time with someone I hate. It’s fucked that you think I’d hurt you like that. I hate you for it, but I shouldn’t because I would. I do hurt you like that. I will hurt you like that. I hate you sometimes. The more I love you the more I’ll hate you and the more I’ll hurt you. Fuck! And at some point, you’ll hate me too. They always do. Fucking always.”
Blitz kicks a nearby chair hard enough that it bounces against the back wall and the wood cracks.
Stolas flinches. However, the chair is aimed away from his face, and that is an important distinction. Blitz is not Stella.
‘The more I love you…’ Stolas replays the words in his head.
“I don’t understand,” he whispers.
Blitz sinks to the floor with his knees propped up casually in front of him and fat tears streaming down his face. His anger is drained out by the kick, he looks Stolas in the eye with nothing but tiredness. “This is how I treat the people I love, Stolas.”
Stolas holds his breath.
“I love you.“ Blitz takes a heavy breath. “I love you and then I hate you. And then I hate myself. And I’ll hurt you until you hate me too and you hate yourself for ever loving me.”
There it is. Stolas has fantasized about this moment so often. This confession of sickness is so dissonant from his fantasies that he doesn’t believe it, and perhaps that’s why he should believe it.
“But, you do-?”
“I hate you right now, so don’t ask.”
Despite this, Stolas’ heart swells, the string seems to have let up a little.
“Why are you fucking smiling?” Blitz asks.
“I… don’t really understand, but I still could never hate you.”
“You just asked me to kill you!”
The bugs beneath them continue their choir, and the toads have joined them. With the pain in his chest subsiding, Stolas realizes how tired his body is from the stress and how much his knees ache against the ground. Stolas takes his time to answer the question as well as he can.
“Maybe you love me so much you hate me sometimes. And maybe I love you so much that I want you to kill me sometimes.”
Blitz laughs bitterly, and Stolas feels his smile pulling wider.
“That’s fucked,” Blitz says.
Stolas scooches up next to him, overlooking the setting moon. “I’m fine with that, you know.” He lays his hand with the red string as an offering between them.
Blitz leans up against his side but ignores his talon. “I think I hate you less than the others.”
“You mean that succubus bombshell.” Stolas’ smile is gone once he thinks of her, of anyone Blitz has touched before him. He still has not forgotten her curvacious figure and raw sensuality nor the way she so cruelly tore into Blitz.
“Verosika’s a whore and a sloppy drunk, and yeah, her. I really do hate her now, though.”
“Does that mean you-?”
“Ew, no. I’d spend the rest of my life sticking my dick in freshly-murdered corpses before I’d ever stick it in her again.
Stolas laughs the ugly uncontrollable laugh that only Blitz can pull from him.
“With you, sometimes, I feel like we’re friends who just happen to be in love. But then, it’s like a switch flips.”
So he had not been imagining the way Blitz’s hate switches like the swish of his tail, and despite the terrifying implications, he feels grounded in sanity at the confirmation.
“Why?” Stolas asks like a child before he can stop himself by considering all the adult ramifications.
“Yeah, and like that, I hate you again.”
“Sorry.”
“Ugh! It’s that! You’re so…”
Stolas’ eyes well anew. He expects the same insults he has endured from Blitz: annoying, stupid, ridiculous. Or worse the ones from Stella: insufferable, pathetic, and unlovable.
“Soft. Sweet,” Blitz finishes.
Still, the tears come streaming down Stolas’ face again.
“I would hurt you worse than I’ve ever hurt anyone because you’re… you.”
“You think you’d rot me…”
Blitz nods. Stolas is a bit shocked that he understands so immediately. He doubts Blitz understands what a metaphor is, but Blitz slides into this one as though he has breathed it for centuries.
“But, I’m damaged goods already. Can’t you tell? Isn’t that why you don’t want me?”
Blitz initiates the hug this time, wiping his tears against Stolas’ shoulder. “No. I make you feel that way. Stop it. Just fucking stop.”
“No, darling. I have always felt this way. If someone ruined me, it wasn’t you.”
“I hate this. I hate it, but I love you, okay? I just… can’t do this again.”
“But I’m asking you to. There’s no turning back for me. A pair bond is forever, and I don’t want to give it up even if I could. I love you. I want to love you forever. Please. If you don’t want me, then cut it, and I’ll never love anyone else. That’s fine with me, but the pair bond is dangerous if you leave it as is and you can’t love me. I understand why you don’t want to… I’m rotted already.”
Blitz takes his hand then, tracing over the string unknowingly. “Stop. I want to. You’re not rotted.”
“I want to make love to you,” Stolas says into the night air.
“If you wanna fuck, you just had to say so.” Blitz wipes his tears and laughs in an empty way.
“I want to make love to you,” Stolas reiterates. “For so long I’ve wanted to ask, and I was so afraid you’d hate me more. Does it?”
Blitz breathes out beside him, his warmth grazing Stolas’ arm.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done that before.” Blitz nuzzles his cheek against the feathers. “I could try.”
Stolas grasps Blitz's horn with his talon, loving the way the red string drapes over it. He pulls Blitz’s head back and leans down to place his beak against Blitz’s soft lips. They are both wet with tears and hesitant, and their tongues mingle in wetness and hesitancy for a while until Stolas scoops that small, hard body into his arms to take him inside.
He places Blitz on the velvet divan. His long fingers work over Blitz's buttons while they kiss and bring one another to nudity. Stolas breaks them apart to pull off Blitz’s pants, but he returns immediately to the spotted red skin to peck kisses up his leg, ankle to calf to inner thigh, and all the way up to the base of his penis. He guides his mouth to make meaning against the hot skin. Gratitude for how beautifully they fit together leaks out through his heady breaths. They lock eyes as Stolas licks his way up to the fleshy crown there. They are getting better at words, but they have always preferred communicating their emotions this way.
Blitz looks ravenous, but his posture is stiff. Stolas needs him to loosen, to melt a little so that they can meld into one another’s bodies with ease and warmth.
“Darling, I need you so badly,” Stolas whispers.
Blitz smirks. He seems to gain confidence and pliancy from the words. His tail pulls Stolas up so Stolas is kneeling before him. The tail works like heated metal, curling in on itself in a sort of heated despair before finally wrapping around Stolas’ wrist. Obedient to unspoken demands, Stolas parts his thighs, and a mild chill teases against his soaking cloaca. Blitz traces over his hole in just the way to make him shiver in want: up and down along the sides of his dripping heat before continuing right over the middle, dipping in delicately to make Stolas hurt with craving.
“Fuck,” Stolas breathes the word out. “I need you inside me. I want to take this slow, but I need you so badly”
Blitz leans back against the sofa and pulls Stolas over him, tail wrapped around his waist this time.
He spreads his thighs over Blitz while his hand pumps over his cock and guides it to his needy hole.
“You’re so perfect,” Stolas says.
The feeling of Blitz penetrating him has always been indescribable. Hot euphoria rushes through him, and in a pseudo-religious revelation, he reaches transcendental sublimation, bodies becoming heat and pure pleasure. Blitz inside him, the fill hurting just the slightest bit as his cock makes room for its thickness, feels so good, but mostly it feels so fucking right. Stolas bites down on his talon to hold in his gospel and keep this a quiet, ineffable affair.
Stolas grinds down over the fullness inside him rhythmically. He is pushed to heights he has never imagined before, and the part of his brain not overcome by this indescribable lovemaking is focused on not cumming or moaning like a tawdry sex worker. Mercifully, Blitz is the first to moan, deep and masculine.
“Can I scratch you?”
“Please,” Stolas whispers.
“I wanna hear your voice. Sing for me, my pretty songbird.”
Blitz grasps his back tenderly and digs his claws into Stolas’ body so slow and intimate the prince’s heart swells past fullness. He breaks in a new, delicious way, a fantastic geode shattered to show all its inner glory.
“Oh! Oh, Blitz!”
“Shit,” Blitz whispers. He takes his time clawing deep lines down the center of Stolas’ feathered spine.
Stolas’s hips stutter through the perfect mix of pain and ecstasy. His pussy is all there is left of him, and it pulses in orgasm.
“Stolas, fuck.”
Blitz wraps his tail around Stolas’ middle and pushes him up and down with force through his orgasm. The amazing brutality and vicious sensitivity bring tears to his eyes once again.
Hips still, and both quiver. Stolas wilts, a limp flower leaning toward the sun. When he realizes what has happened from Blitz’s crooked smile and bright blush, he wraps his arms around his thin shoulders.
“I love you. I love you so much, darling.” He rests their foreheads together. Blitz has cracked him gorgeously and holding the imp in his arms, that broken geode of himself is kintsugied back together sturdier and more beautiful than ever before.
Blitz is heaving breaths around Stolas’ fluffy chest, but he manages, “I love you too.”