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manicpixiefelix · 11 months ago

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head, heart, hand. {Felix Catton/Reader/Oliver Quick}

Part 8.

Summary: The fallout of arguing with Oliver, not fighting with Farleigh, Felix hooks up with your not-girlfriend, and so you provide comfort to his sort-of-ex.

{ masterpost }

Need to Know: They/Them. Explicitly NB Reader. FWB!Reader/Felix. Reader is from a well off family but has pretty much been adopted by the Cattons.

Warnings: someone makes a move on the reader while they're very very drunk and the reader is far more sober, but it doesn't go past kissing, if that's something you're possibly concerned about.

A/N: 5424 words. welcome back. this one goes many different places in the span of one night. the farleigh of it all. the annabel of it all. im worried this one might feel OOC so id really like to hear if there's anywhere i could improve on my characterisation, what worked, what didn't?? as always unedited, and as we're nearing the end of the term (in the fic) we only have a few chapters left at oxford before we get to go to saltburn!! LOVE YOU ENJOY!!

TAGLIST IN COMMENTS!! // TAGLIST ALWAYS OPEN ! (just message or comment to be added)

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"Didn't have to do that," Felix sighed from his desk, head bent low over his textbook. It's the first thing he'd said since Oliver left. You, still on his bed, picking through a textbook for a class you both share, found half-shoved under his bed, look up.

"Do what?"

"That thing with Michael What's-His-Name's file," it almost sounds like guilt in his voice, but he still isn't listening to you, "you could get in real trouble for having that."

In swift movements he stands, and you catch the sight of his scowl despite how he doesn't turn it upon you. Once again he's sitting on the floor, back to the foot of the bed, lighting up another cigarette, legs crossed in front of him.

"I'll put it back tomorrow." You're not used to Felix disapproving of you, it's a kind of discomfort you want to shake as quickly as you're able to. After a moment you add, "I know it's not really Ollie's fault, I shouldn't have -"

"I don't want to talk about Ollie right now." He's focused on balancing his ash tray on his knee, watching it with such intensity it's as if he's trying to define life's secrets from it.

"Should I go?" Murmured, almost like you're afraid of anyone hearing it, even Felix. It hangs, golden in the hazy heat of the afternoon.

"'m not the boss of you," Felix mumbles softly, head low, again his words coloured almost with guilt. You know he will never shake the quiet shame he sometimes is hit with when he remembers the way people often perceive the relationship you two share; too close, too loyal, too imbalanced.

But you've never cared; you will never treat him differently, never want for anything but his happiness, never beat the canine allegations. One day you hope you'll convince him that's okay.

So instead of leaving, you close the textbook and stretch yourself out across his bed, laying the on your belly with your head resting at the foot, by his. Your hand rests on his head, running your fingers through his hair.

Felix breathes out a lung full of smoke. He doesn't look at you. He leans into your touch and closes his eyes. The moment is a quiet one, tension thick and choking and full of things neither of you can talk about.

It's the strangest afternoon you share in a long while, one full of silence and the slow, mind numbing sound of pages being turned and the scratch of pen against paper.

"I'm gonna get ready to go out tonight," you say softly, finally breaking the silence when the courtyard outside is every shade of gold and orange in the sunset. Felix just hums in acknowledgement from his desk, "Fi?"

"Yeah," he huffs, dismissively, still looking at his notes. You've got the file in one hand, doing up the buttons of the shirt you'd forgone in the afternoon heat of his dorm room, but had to wear back to your own.

"You want me to text Oli?" You watch him grow tense at the name alone.

"Yeah, maybe, I don't know," he mumbles, almost forcibly nonchalant, despite the hard line of his shoulders that hadn't been there moments ago. Then, as if to clear the moment, he sits up straighter, turning to you in his desk chair with a look of determination in his eyes, "India still into me do you think?"

"I know India's still into you," you can't help but snort, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"Would you be totally cut up if I -" he doesn't even need to finish before you're rolling your eyes.

"She'd be thrilled," but your smile softens a little, even as you shake your head with exasperation, "she's all yours, Fi."

Perhaps it's the fondness with which you acquiesces to his arguably selfish request that makes him take in the full exchange that had just passed. Felix takes a moment, tension and expression dropping as he turns pensive for a moment, unable to look you in the eyes. After a beat, you turn to the door, fully intending on letting the moment pass, but you hear Felix stand.

He doesn't say anything as he approaches you, still wearing that rather grim, thoughtful expression, but he wraps you up in a hug. He holds you as close as he's able, and after a beat of surprise, you gently drop the file to wrap your arms around him in return.

I love you. I'm sorry. All the tension from the afternoon drains away in this hug, in him pressed against you, leaning into you, breathing deep and even and steady. Pressing your face against his shoulder, you give him a brief kiss against his warm, golden skin, and hope he can feel your smile too.

The hug breaks, but still he holds your face for a long moment. He's smiling again. I love you. Thank you. He kisses your cheek quickly.

"I'll catch you at the King's Arms, yeah?"

"'course, Fi," you assure him with a warm smile of your own.

Back in your own dorm, that single moment of warmth unfortunately can't overwrite the entire afternoon of sickly tension. Looking at Oliver's name in your contacts, you frown. You should text him, invite him, Felix told him he would -

"Yeah, maybe, I don't know."

You don't text Oliver.

Annabel also isn't at the King's Arms that night. Of course you know why, the answer sits across from you with his arm around your not-girlfriend, but part of you still kind of feels bad for if the sweet redhead ever finds out.

"What are you sulking about?" Farleigh's smug voice in your ear, Farleigh's arm around your shoulder, Farleigh's cigarettes you keep stealing, Farleigh who you've tucked yourself up against for the night.

"'m not," you try insisting, frowning at the lighter that's clearly out of fluid and refusing to relight your cigarette. He gives your shoulder a squeeze.

"You sure, Peter Pan? Where's your shadow?"

"You don't give a shit about Oliver," you snap a little too quickly, both frustrated by the situation you're trying to ignore, and the useless lighter, but Farleigh reads right through it and practically cackles. Still, he wraps his other arm around you and squeezes you against his side with glee, even as you try to protest.

"Ooh~" Farleigh teases, poking your side with a wide, fond smile, "trouble in pauper's paradise?"

"That's fucking mean," you rib him none too gently, but he actually snorts with laughter. The lighter still won't bloody well start.

"I feel like you're fucking edging me with that lighter, fuck," Benji, from Farleigh's other side, smacks your lighter out of your hands and holds out his perfectly working one.

"Thank you, Benny, that was pissing me off," Farleigh says with a satisfied smile, his laughter having died down. You, finally take a draught on your cigarette, grateful for the warmth, and the nicotine as it hits.

"Could kiss you, Benj," you finally let yourself smile, "someone remind me to get a new lighter," you add, leaning across Farleigh without hesitation to plant a kiss squarely on Benji's lips after he'd wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, teasingly at you at your comment.

"We'd fascinate psychologists," Farleigh chuckled, but his voice is warm and fond, and Benji turns back to his conversation with Alicia and Jake on his other side once the moment had passed.

"Probably," comes out distracted, however as your teasing mood drops and you look to your phone. Should I have called Oliver? But when you look up, across the table, you see warmth and fondness in the way Felix looks at India, enraptured by whatever story she's telling. With one arm around her shoulders, he lets her distractedly play with his other hand, leaning into her, all attention on her. Making her feel like the centre of the universe, the way only Felix knows how to do. India glows in a way you've never seen before, lighting up under his direct affection, beautiful and elated, maybe even a little bit flustered.

There's not even a hint of jealousy at the sight of them. All you know is how much you love your friends, and how happy and beautiful they look together in this moment. There is contentment, satisfaction, like a job well done... Farleigh might have a point about the psychologists.

Speaking of - Farleigh grabs your chin and tilts your face to look at him. Immediately you smack his hand away.

"Stop that! What is that? What are you doing?" You squawk at him immediately. Again, he grabs your chin, frowning, intent upon gazing intensely into your eyes. This time you let him.

"I'm figuring out what this is," he mutters like he's deep in thought. You let your gaze roam for a moment, hoping he gets whatever this is out of his system. You wiggle your chin in his grip, and it's enough to prompt more of an explanation, "if you're not sulking, then I don't know this -" rolling your eyes, you smack his hand away.

"Fuck man, I'm not sulking," you insist, remembering your cigarette and taking another puff, glad it hadn't gone out.

"You've been weird lately; angry - ranting," Farleigh made sure to stick to your cover story despite having seen through it the minute you'd tried out the other week, "you and Felix have had some weird vibes," he takes the cigarette from you, and you settle yourself against him further.

"Fi and I always have weird vibes," you pointed out with a little smirk, keeping your voice as low as he was, glad he didn't feel the need to publicise this discussion too broadly. Farleigh snorted, but shook his head.

"You, sure," Farleigh conceded, handing back the cigarette, "but," he leans in, leans into your with a knowing, dangerously sharp smile, his hand coming to rest on your thigh, "Felix has been weird about you," his voice slides along the word weird as his hand slides up your thigh, as if to prove a point, before sitting back. Giving you a moment to recover, Farleigh sits back up like nothing happened, letting go of your thigh and taking a drink. He gives you a squeeze, arm still around your shoulders, "or hadn't you noticed?" Back at regular conversation levels like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Across the circle of your friend group, Felix's gaze momentarily flicks to you as India's in the middle of some kind of enthusiastically rambling. Gaze briefly passing to Farleigh, he then looks back and raises an amused eyebrow in silent question. The smile you give him is instinctive and warm, a silent answer. He mirrors the smile for the briefest moment before his attention returns to India.

Of course you'd noticed the change.

"Of course I've noticed." Your gaze dips; you become fascinated with your drink for the moment, trying to brace yourself for whatever comment you knew Farleigh had coming.

"Surprised he hadn't put you on a leash."

You elbow him hard in the ribs. He retaliates by flicking you repeatedly in the forehead. Its a blurry mess of frustration and elbows after that, pulling hair and wet fingers in ears and trying to sink nails into each other's soft sides, all squabbling and cursing and insults not made for polite society.

"- you put your fingers near my mouth I'll bite them off!" You holler even when he's got his arm around your neck in a kind of choke hold, which is around the time the two of you are pulled away from each other.

The rest of the table is staring at you both, while you and Farleigh straighten yourselves up, a little flustered at the many incredulous stares you were getting.

"The fuck was that about?" Felix, of course, is the one to voice the question the others all had. You look to Farleigh, his expression mirroring yours; no malice, no frustration, like nothing had happened.

"Bit of horseplay," you shrugged easily, meeting Felix's eyes, tone bright and chipper. He looked unconvinced.

"Just two dudes being guys," Farleigh's tone was light and breezy as he settled back into the booth, and you alongside him, letting him once more sling an arm around your shoulders.

"Guys bein' pals," you agreed with a nod. Farleigh pats your head for emphasis. The group thankfully decides that they've had enough of the weird moment to go back to their own conversations. Felix was the last to focus back on the conversation he'd been having with India and Alicia, narrowing his eyes as he looked between you and Farleigh.

Before turning his attention entirely away, his gaze fixes on you. There, in the very slight tilt of his head, the look in his eyes, the way his jaw tightens, you see his concern for you. You lean your head back on Farleigh's shoulder and let yourself relax, let yourself give him a genuine, reassuring smile. It's enough.

Farleigh clears his throat.

"It was either that or tell him you said that," you explained under your breath, to which Farleigh nodded in understanding, hand running up and down your shoulder idly as he reached across the table for the communal fries, bringing the basket closer to you both.

"And you don't want to tell him because you know I'm right," Farleigh is back to smug, but at least this time you can join him in his amusement.

"No, but I'm humouring you because I'd like to talk about how good I'd look in a collar," picking up a chip, you eat it with a grin as Farleigh rolls his eyes. After a moment, however, he comes back with this contemplative look, still amused, but eyes narrowed and searching like they had been earlier. You eat another chip and tell him to put his eyeballs back in his head, "seriously, quit looking at me like that, Farleigh -"

"He has been weird-weird," Farleigh says like he's agreeing, though you tell him you have no idea what the fuck he means. Taking a deep breath like he was ramping up to something, Farleigh looks across the group to Felix, before looking back at you with a kind of put-upon smile, "I say this only as someone who's know you for like, more of my life than I'd like to admit -"

"I love you too, go on."

"- so I kind of think that it might not look that different to anyone else, like they don't know it's not your usual brand of weirdness," he wets his lips, giving you a look like he's not even sure if he's meant to be saying this, like he might be letting you in on a secret you're not supposed to know, "he's been really hot and cold with you."

Of course you'd noticed.

"I slept with Oliver."

Beside you, Farleigh appears to go through all five stages of grief at once.

"You make it very hard to be friends with you sometimes," he says, shaking his head. You, however, are focusing on how many chips you can eat in a rush rather than think too much about the topic at hand.

"That mean," you tell him flatly, mouth full of potatoes, "you're being mean again."

"You chose to sleep with Oliver, that is a choice you made; I'm gonna be mean about it, you've earned it, you know you have -"

"Remember," you gave him a shit-eating grin, "how the next time we went drinking after that costume party, you spent a full half hour in the beer garden ranting about how stupid you thought Ollie's costume was," you ate another chip while Farleigh narrowed his eyes at you with barely concealed contempt, but you powered on, "and it turned out that you thought the costume didn't do him justice, which then -" your grin grew wider, "became you ranting about how his eyes are too blue, and why does he dress like that when we can all see his arms, imagine if he wore a shirt that fit!" You gleefully recounted, even as Farleigh's mouth flattened into a thin line, like he's bitten on a lemon, but he couldn't look you in the eyes.

"Hey, that's not what I -"

"And then -!" You spoke over him, "you forgot where you were and tried to take an angry nap in the bushes."

"I don't -" a flustered Farleigh squirms for a moment in his seat, unable to look at you, "remember that, and," he turned a faux serious look upon you, "if you tell anyone I said that, I'll tell them you're lying."

"I'm just saying," you shrugged, "don't act like you don't know part of the reason why I slept with him."

"Fine," Farleigh rolled his eyes, allowing his flustered frustration to ease. After a moment of contemplation, of watching Felix, he hums quietly, thoughtfully, "that can't be it, right?"

"What can't be it?"

"If Felix was going to start being jealous it wouldn't be over Oliver."

"See, that's what I thought."

"So he is jealous?"

"I don't know," you say quietly, still not quite sure how to feel about it; Felix had taken the news fine when you'd told him, he hadn't seemed any different, but of course there'd been a change. Why now?

"That's really stupid of him," Farleigh finally says, dismissively.

"It is, isn't it?" As you try and laugh, your heart's not in it. You look at your phone again, another wave of that strange discomfort that you'd been feeling lately washing over you again. You can't stay.

Everyone's surprised by your early departure as you say your goodbyes. You cite the need to study hard tomorrow, giving hugs and kisses as you start the short journey back to your dorm. Felix murmurs that he loves you and a cheeky thanks in your ear and you know he's talking about India. You kiss his cheek, and then you head off.

Nothing had seemed off when you'd told Felix.

"You look like you're about to burst into song; what happened to you?"

"Something happened!"

"Am I meant to guess?"

"No, no- I mean, like how nothing happened between me and Ollie a few months ago; something happened!"

"Something happened between you and Ollie?"

"The something that didn't happen last time -"

"I don't remember last time, Y/N, you're being so cryptic, I love that you're excited but -"

"Yes, Ollie and I slept together. Finally!"

"Oh."

"Oh?"

"No, good 'oh', promise!"

"Didn't sound like a good 'oh', Fi; is everything alright?"

"Yeah, of course, sorry Y/N, I promise, I'm just... I don't remember you being this excited about a hook up... and I don't think I was excepting it to be Ollie, you know? Was he really that good?"

"Let me put it this way, it was the kind of good that none of our other friends would believe if I told them."

"Fancy that, Ollie knows what he's doing; good for you."

"Great for me."

It wasn't particularly vulgar or explicit, you'd had far more in depth conversations about your various hook ups, Felix had seemed as happy for you as he always did with these kinds of stories. But he'd started looking at Oliver different, you'd noticed it. That too is when he became the clingiest. Farleigh was right; on nights out with Oliver around, Felix threw out any pretence of subtlety or person space. Felix acted like your boyfriend.

But then, any other night, any other group situation, it was like any other day. Sometimes he'd barely even glance at you. Hot and cold.

You're so in your head on the walk home that you barely register someone sitting at your door until you all but trip over them.

Annabel.

She'd been crying.

"Fuck you." Is how she greets you.

"What are you doing here?" A twinge of pity, a twinge of guilt, to see her obviously distraught at your doorstep. She gets unsteadily to her feet, swearing at you again. Reaching out to steady her, she surprises you by lunging at you, grabbing you.

"You were there, weren't you? With the rest of them," Annabel's gripping your collar, makeup smeared with tears and eyes red-rimmed, "with him," lips still inches from yours, her gaze unfocused but searching, "I can fucking smell it on you- you- you and rich boy-" but she stops for a moment, expression falling to confusion, "Farleigh?"

"Annabel -" you ease her hands off of your collar, partly confused, but mostly pitying.

"Why do you smell like Farleigh?" She sounds almost like a lost child, refusing to let go of your hand as you pulled out your keys. God she looks so helpless, tears still welling in her eyes, vodka bottle mostly empty by her feet.

"Why are you so good at telling what Farleigh smells like?" You countered with, swinging the door open. At this, some of the righteous indignation fires up in her again, flouncing into your room.

"You all went to the same boarding school, you've all got these same habits, and same but different scents you cling to," she's scowling at your dresser as you picked up the vodka bottle and brought it into your room, shutting your door. You watch her for a long moment, see how she analyses everything you have there, perfumes, colognes, makeup, skin care, little bits of paper rubbish - she picks up a bottle and flicks off the lid, not caring where it landed amongst the rest of the things there. When she sprays it, she seems to almost relax amongst it's mist. Of course. It's Felix's favourite, Felix's scent as she'd so aptly described it, for when he'd spend the night.

"Of course you have his too," she says faintly, almost derisively.

Allowing your attention to finally drift from her, you start getting ready for bed, heading to your closet to hang up your jacket.

"You all need to mark your territory," she spits, out of your peripheries, you see her move away from your dresser and pick up her vodka again, "need everyone to know who you own, who we all belong to -"

"Anna, that's not -" you sighed, unsure of where any of this was going, but not liking it either way. As you search your drawers for pyjamas, you felt her gentle hands on your hips. Jumping at the sudden touch, when you spin she braces herself against the drawers with hands either side of you, while your hands become trapped, the last bit of resistance between her chest and yours.

"I smelled like you both for weeks," she murmurs, gaze roaming your body, almost hungry, landing back on your lips, "you remember that? I should- I should- should have been fucking sickened," she admits, voice a low whisper, the hunger turning needy, turning into almost a whimper, "the things I want you both to do to me make me sick to my stomach," her lips inch closer to yours, shared breath, heat in the air, "of course I know what the fuck you all choose to smell like, I can't get it out of my fucking head," you should lean away but there's something intoxicating about her rage, her desperation, her desire, "Our Annabel, that's what he'd called me, what you'd -" and she kisses you, vodka still wicked and bitter on her tongue, all but panting into your mouth as her hands find your hips again.

But it can't continue, you can't let this go on. As you lean back to free your arms, to hold her back, she takes advantage of the opportunity to slide her hands beneath your shirt, cold and nimble against your belly -

"Could've been my Felix -" she mumbles, as if in a trance, eyes hazy and full of both tears, like she was looking into a memory. The minute her fingers find your fly you grab her hands firmly. It takes you a moment to regain your composure, to remind yourself that she wasn't in her right state of mind, that she probably didn't even know what she was doing or saying -

My Felix flares bright and hot and possessive in your mind. My Felix.

"Ow," Annabel's noise of pain brings you back to reality, but thankfully it seems the shock to her system brought her back too. Looking down at your vice-like grip on her wrists, she looks back at you as you let her go, embarrassment in her eyes as she perhaps realises some of what she'd been doing.

"I'm not sleeping with you tonight, Anna," still, your voice is gentle. She huffs an embarrassed little laugh, starting to sniffle again. Again, you remind yourself that this poor girl just got her heart broken by your best friend, and decided to deal with that by drinking an entire bottle of vodka. You'd committed to showing her some compassion tonight.

"I know." The tension drops, and she just leans her head forward to rest her forehead on your shoulder. You can't help but hug her, feeling the heavy way she sighs as you're giving her a reassuring pat on the back. The two of you stay like that for a very long few minutes until you hear her start crying again.

"Do you wanna borrow some pyjamas?" You ask softly, and feel her nod.

The rest of the night is quiet after that, taking care of this distraught young woman who got her heart broken by your best friend. It reminds you of nights you'd spend with Venetia back at Saltburn.

Annabel sits on your bathroom counter patiently, ankles crossed, watching the way you focus as you wipe off her makeup with meticulous care. When you take off her necklace, you coil it delicately on top of the nice clothes she'd been wearing, now sitting on top of her shoes by your door. At first she tries to wave you off when you offer to brush out her hair -

"There's -" she hiccups; the full bottle of vodka has finally hit her, but still she tries to shake her head, "too much hairspray, it'll be a hassle -"

"I'll be gentle," you told her softly, assurance in your eyes and a warm smile on your lips, "if you'll let me." Annabel melts under that gaze, sitting in borrowed pyjamas, face clean, cross-legged on your bed in the lamp light. You treat her with the gentlest care, brushing out her hair while you can still hear her occasional sniffles; she sits as primly as she's able, only apologising once at the start for it's length. You assured her it's fine.

"You scare me sometimes," Annabel mutters into the quiet, voice watery. For a moment, you pause.

"Me?"

"Both- both of you. You and Felix," she sniffles again, "and Farleigh too now, I guess," you can tell she swallows thickly, voice catching in her throat. When she tries to dip her head, she can feel the way you're still holding gently, still working, and she apologises faintly. Carefully, quietly, giving her space to organise her tipsy, upset thoughts, you continue to brush out her hair.

"Never met anyone like you, you know? Didn't think people like you guys existed. You're always everything; the most without even trying," she takes a deep breath, but it's undercut by a faint sob that's almost a chuckle, "I kind of think you don't even know what I mean- you especially, you know?" You... don't.

You brush, only giving a faint apology, but all she does is fidget, the words spilling unrehearsed from her, things she's clearly been bottling for far too long -

"Felix is everything everyone wants, and you're everything everyone wants him to be," she says it so forlornly, "the sun and it's fucking warmth," then, almost disgusted as she spits it under her breath, "I think about how he's never going to fuck me the way he looks at you while he's shitfaced, how sick is that?"

With a few more strokes her hair is brushed out, and without even thinking you start to braid it. Annabel's dissolved into tears again, her face in her hands, but you're just careful not to tug on her hair too hard as her whole body shakes with them.

"He never gave a proper shit about me, did he?" Annabel sobs as you're tying off the braid. The minute it's done, she turns and throws herself into your arms, sobbing against your chest, "I'm just another fucking girl to him!"

"He still loves you as a friend, I'm sure; you know how Fi is-" you pet her shoulder carefully as she clutches your shirt for dear life.

"I don't wanna be his fucking friend! I gave him my fucking heart and now he's probably got his dick in that slag India, who said she was my friend!" Spitting her words with fury, with venom, she looks up, but only sees a look of pitying apology in your eyes; she's probably right. Lip curling, she throws herself back on your bed, hands covering her face once more, "he doesn't fucking care," she groaned, fury turning poisonous with resignation, "I know he doesn't care; if I thought he truly cared I would have fucked Oliver -"

"What?"

"- Felix is so fucking fickle, god, seems like he doesn't even care about Oliver anymore, I should have- should have -" she continues on, but breaks down crying again. Getting off the bed, you leave for the common room for half a moment, filling it with water.

"Drink this," you instruct, sitting next to Annabel on the edge of the bed. She scowls, but follows your orders easily, even if she can't properly look you in the eye. The water seemed to have at least helped, as her crying quiets down as you refill the glass in your bathroom sink.

"I feel like shit," she mumbles, watching you come back into the room and place the cup on her bedside.

"Well you look pretty," you tell her teasingly, trying to lighten the mood even a little as you gently pinched her cheek. She does not appear to find the humour in the moment. Still, you turn off your lamp and climb over her into the bed, "please don't throw up in my bed or on my floor."

"I know where your bathroom is."

The two of you kick off the neat duvet but pull the thin, luxurious sheet over you both.

"Thank you..." it sounds begrudging as she says it. You tell her it's no stress, sitting up for a moment in order to open your window a crack, let a breeze in overnight, but still hear her when she says, "you're a bad friend."

Still sitting, you take a deep breath, sighing as a silhouette in the moonlight.

Annabel is more astute than you possibly gave her credit for in this state; amongst all her felt injustices, she'd never once asked about how you felt about Felix fucking India, your well established not-girlfriend. Because somehow she knew, perhaps even that you gave your blessing. You'd never been a cruel person as long as you could help it, but you'd made peace with your priorities too long ago to start apologising for them now. So yes, you'd taken Annabel in for the night, but she knew in her heart that you were partially at fault for her despair in the first place. You both knew.

Enabling Felix was never really about making anyone else happy.

"I know."

Something about your admission seems to be enough for Annabel, however. When you lay back down beside her, she curls up against you, tucks herself all along your side, arm around you, head on your chest.

The next morning, Annabel moves silently around your dorm. When you wake up, all that's even left of her presence is the empty cup of water on your bedside. No kind of note, no text, she'd made sure she didn't even wake you before leaving.

Fucking Christ, what a bloody week did yesterday feel like, is all you can think as the mid-morning sun slashes through your barely parted curtains and paints your chest with light.

You consider sleeping in, consider that you'd definitely earned it after yesterday, but then your phone starts ringing. It's Felix. He sounds grim.

"Hey, can you get over here? We need you."

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snugglebug-mj-blog · 7 months ago

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STAYING IN TWISTED WONDERLAND

Y/n signed as she paced around her living room, stressing about the meeting with all of her friends this afternoon. {flashback to monday} Crowley had finally gotten off his lazy butt and found her a way home, “I'll give you until next monday to decide, and to say goodbye” Crowley said as he waved y/n out of his office. As y/n stood outside his door, her mind was racing so many thoughts ran through her head, she had just been adopted by crewel only a few days ago and she hadn't told anyone yet. Y/n slowly walked to her fathers classroom, even though it's her choice and she has her heart set on one answer she would still like her fathers opinion. After a few minutes y/n had found herself infront of her fathers classroom door, before slowly reaching up to knock on the door. “Enter” her fathers voice said behind the classroom door, which she slowly opened the door and stepped in before shutting the door behind her silently “ah hello pup! I was going to track you down after I got done grading these tests, I want to take you shopping!” Crewel said with a smile as he looked up from the paper he was grading, y/n pulled up a chair “papa i need to talk to you about a conversation Crowley and I just had” y/n said as she sat down “ Do i need to get violent with a crow?” crewel asked putting his pen down, y/n laughed slightly before shaking her head “not today papa” y/n replied Crewel turned his chair to face his daughter he gently took her hands in his “what’s wrong pup?” Crewel asked his voice filled with concern y/n took a deep breath before speaking “Crowley found a way for me to go back to my world, he’s giving me until next monday to decide” Y/n felt Crewel freeze up she looked up at her father to see his gray eyes wide and started to fill up with tears. Crewel lowered his head “the choice is yours i’ll be happy for you no matter what.” Crewel spoke with a shaky voice. “Dad I have a week to decide I'm not going to tell my friends until Sunday but-” y/n started before leaning and whispering into crewel's ear. Crewel gasped tears falling from his eyes before hugging her tightly. {end of flashback}

The week went by like normal y/n went to unbirthday partys, Spelldrive tournaments, helping out at the Mostro Lounge, helping jamil prepare for parties kalim threw, suffering with epel as Vil rants as rook chuckles behind them, gaming with Idia,Ortho and Lilia, Pranking sebek with ace and grim, falling asleep beside silver under a random tree, and late night walks with malleus. Sunday had finally came around faster than y/n was ready for but today was the day so y/n had gone around to all of her friends telling them to come by the ramshack tonight at 5pm, telling them it was very important and EVERYONE needed to be there.

Grim yelling y/ns name had brought her out of her thoughts “y/n! Henchmen someone at the door!” grim yelled y/n quickly went to the door and opened it seeing everyone heck even Idia was here in person “Yall came!” y/n smiled as she opened the door wider as she stepped aside welcoming everyone in “of course shrimpy!” Floyd said as he picked her up and brought her in for a tight hug y/n laughed as floyd carried her to the living room as everyone else followed in close pursuit. Soon everyone was seated in the living room looking at y/n who was standing in the middle of the room “so child of man I’m happy to be included, but why have you called us here all of a sudden?” Malleus asked y/n sighed “ok i have something important to tell all of you but i need you all to promise to stay quiet until i am done ok?” y/n said looking at all her friends Everyone nodded agreeing with her terms y/n took a deep breath before looking at all her friends before starting to speak “so on monday crowley called me into his office and he had told me he had found a way for me to go home and he gave me until monday aka tomorrow to make my decision” everyone froze and stared at y/n with wide eyes “I didn’t want to stress anyone out so i didn’t tell anyone about it, i wanted this week to be normal.” y/n had sat down beside a tearful grim “and i wanted you all here to hear what i had decided” y/n said looking at her friends everyone was looking down ready to be heartbroken “I’m staying here” y/n said with a smile “WAIT WHAT?!” Everyone yelled y/n laughed “Professor Crewel and I had this conversation on Monday grim and I will be living with him because he had adopted me last friday.” y/n said hugging grim “i already wanted to stay here i guess i just needed more of a secret push from you all” y/n said ace got up and walked over to her “You jerk! You worried everyone!” ace growled as he punched y/n in the arm y/n just laughed. Everyone was happy y/n was staying, everyone took turns hugging y/n. She was staying in twisted wonderland because of them.

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sylenth-l · 7 months ago

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Hi hello, I love your art so much LIKE MY BROTHER. IT'S SO YUMMY, THE SHADOWS THE EXPRESSIONS, I love how you draw Timur , Felwinter and Osiris together 🙏 little bird with his two funky adoptive parents. I stare at your art like , I'm always ready and hyped to give traditional art another try ✨

If I was to go back, any tips for which watercolours to pick? I so far got only aniline colours.

Aah, thank you so much!! 😳💙

Hmmm, the thing is, I use fountain pen inks almost always for painting. I don't use watercolour much, so I can't really suggest anything in particular… I have a selection of colours from different brands, of course, I know quite a lot about pigments, and I like using watercolour from time to time to add some special effects to my works. For sketching outdoors it's also the easiest to use among all other paints, probably. But painting a whole artwork with it……… I try doing it sometimes, but every single time I end up thinking "God, I wish I used inks instead, I hate this so much, why is it so BLEURGH". I guess watercolour just isn't my medium 😂

I can share my thinking process when building up a palette though, I use it with all mixable mediums I use, be it inks, watercolour, gouache, etc. I found it to be the most effective (and money-saving, lol) approach for me.

So what I want for my main mixing palette is to have 3 sets of primary trios. All colours also must be as smooth as possible, with no surprises or unwanted colour separation. For watercolour - not granulating ones.

(my camera tends to make all colours brighter and also fails to see the subtle difference between some shades, but you can still get the idea)

The first trio is extremely vivid, consisting of bright cool colours - lemon yellow, cyan, magenta-leaning pink. It gives you access to all the bright, open colours.

Second is the classic they teach in all art schools (probably, from what I've heard, I never went into one alkjdshfk) - sunshine yellow, bright warm red and ultramarine blue. This gives you a huge selection of warmer, natural colours, like all shades of golds, eggplant purples, olive greens, etc. It also allows some nice selection of wood browns.

Third is my personal favorite, the muted trio. You kinda can get similar colours from the previous trio, but I prefer having these separately, because of how often I use them all. It consists of golden ochre-leaning yellow, dark bloody red and dark indanthrone blue. It gives you the most beautiful browns, beiges, blacks and other rich, deep colours.

On top of that I also like to have at least one decent black (in my case it's Quink Black ink, I cannot live without it). And these 10 would be my essentials. Other colours I add to my mixing palette are basically shortcuts to the shades I find myself mixing the most - like a few browns and violets. There are also a few inks that I need for some very specific purposes - like, I have a very vivid cold magenta ink to mix a certain bright cold shade of the Void, and also a fluorescent orange for adding shiny Exo LED lights. And etc.

(Actually I'm currently in the process of re-organizing my main palette and also considering making a few small sets for painting some characters specifically)

I also have a separate selection of chromatographic inks, which can probably be compared to granulating watercolours… But not quite. A few examples:

Here I don't have any special notes or advices, just get the ink you like and enjoy it. Some of these I use so often that I always keep them in my main palette, and others I only get out for some special occasion. These are also mixable btw - I constantly add other ink in Quink Black to get different shades of it.

However, I must say that not all of the ~special effects~ inks are polite and well-behaved, some will agree to work only on some specific paper after a significant amount of coaxing, and others will straight out say "fuck you" at the most crucial moment, even if they worked perfectly just a moment ago.

Btw, when working with inks, I really recommend to put it into smaller bottles with a dropper, so you don't have to open the big bottle each time. It's both easier to use for you and much safer for inks!

ANYWAY, I hope this post was of some use for you 🌈

#ask #art tips #inks

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jumpywhumpywriter · 3 months ago

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Villain's Coffee Shop part 6

Warnings: bleeding out, gravely injured Villain, stab wounds, corrupt Superhero

"Now you know why I spent my days fighting people like you," Villain snorted bitterly. "It's the only way I can make enough to stay off the streets and survive. By stealing and killing."

Hero's gaze grew distant, thoughtful, before there was a sudden flash of furry motion off to Hero's left that sent her springing from the chair, daggers in hand ready to attack the threat.

"Wait! Don't hurt him!" Villain barked frantically.

"'Him'?!" Hero squawked, but his words made her hesitate long enough to realize that it was... literally just a cat. Embarrassment flushed Hero's face as she sheathed her blades and sat back down. She stared at the scruffy cat, which had black fur... and it was missing a whole front leg, along with a large chunk of one ear.

Hero gawked at the feline as he bunched his hind legs and hopped up onto the table next to the couch, giving her a quizzical look. "You have... a three-legged cat. I am both surprised and somehow unsurprised at the same time."

"Somebody has to adopt the unwanted critter," Villain shrugged. "Like me. Unwanted. Only I'm not adoptable," he added quickly when he saw Hero winding up to make a snarky joke about it. "His name is Mocha."

"Seriously? You named it after a caffeine drink?"

"It's a cat that lives in a coffee shop, Hero. Mocha is an appropriate name," Villain argued defensively. "Apparently Mocha got into a fight with a loose dog, and no one wanted to adopt a mangled cat, let alone one that also had black fur. They're often considered bad luck. But I took him before he could be euthanized."

"That's... actually kind of sweet of you," Hero said, gently stroking the cat's head. Mocha purred loudly, an oddly raspy kind of purr like a broken motor, and climbed into her lap, kneading her leather suit with his remaining front paw and arching his back happily.

"Mocha is the sweetest cat you will ever find, you just have to look past all the scarring." Hero was taken aback by the fondness in Villain's face as he reached a weak, trembling hand toward Mocha, who instantly abandoned Hero to hop onto the couch and settle down on Villain's chest instead, still purring madly.

Villain sighed heavily, petting Mocha's curled-up form gently. Hero would have never guessed him to be capable of kindness, given his violent reputation.

"...Would you be willing to consider switching sides?" Hero asked softly. "Be a hero instead of a villain like you are now?"

Villain's eyes darted over to her, surprised. "I'm pretty sure it's too late for that," he rasped quietly. "I've killed too many people. I'm not worth your time."

"Maybe so," Hero agreed solemnly, "but you can always give it a try. I have connections, I could get you on our Hero team where you can use your powers to save lives instead of take them. And you wouldn't have to show anyone your face, either. We can design you a new mask." She bit her lip nervously. "...It's up to you in the end, but I get the feeling you've got a lot more good inside you than you're willing to admit." She put a reassuring hand on Villain's shoulder, and he flinched hard, disturbing Mocha who meowed in protest before settling again.

"Just... think about it for awhile, Villain. Can you promise me that?" Hero glanced around and snatched up a notepad and pen, scribbling something down and tearing off a page to hand to Villain. "This is my personal number if... you'd like to reach out." Villain stared numbly at the paper in his hand.

A chance. He'd said he'd needed a chance. Just one. And now he held that chance on a thin piece of paper. "...Thank you," he murmured after a brief hesitation. "And not just for this, I mean for... listening, I guess, and saving my life." Villain cleared his throat awkwardly, fumbling over his words.

But Hero smiled playfully, standing up and ruffling Villain's hair. "I look forward to hearing from you."

Villain scowled and ran a hand through his hair to flatten it back down. "I'll let that slide because I'm in so much pain I can barely think straight, but try that again when I'm at full-strength, and I'll destroy you," he grouched.

Hero laughed as she headed toward the back door. "Heal up, Villain, and then we have work to do."

Villain smiled faintly at Hero's back as she left, darkness in his gaze. Oh, he had work to do indeed… Hero was in way over her head dealing with him. He grinned down at Mocha, who affectionately nuzzled into his hand. “What do you say, Mocha? Should I cause some trouble?”

---The current, ominous end.

UPDATE: due to popular demand, I continued this storyline further!

⏪️ Back Next ⏩️

Masterlist

@scoundrelwithboba @lumpofsand @isikedmyself878 @iamheretohurt @fleur-a-whump

@ay5ksal @otterfrost @sausages-things @i-don't-know-sal @togzy

@whump-till-ya-jump @cravesunconditionallove @whumpwritinglover222 @watermelons-dont-grow-on-trees

@federthenotsogreat @everynameistakencarrots

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sissytobitch10seconds · 5 months ago

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Ozzie's

Fandom: Helluva Boss Summary: Blitz is desperate for a job and just happens to get one that gives him more than he bargained for. It's the best thing that ever happened to him, even when it puts his body through the second hardest thing he's ever been through and squeezes every ounce of love into his heart. Warnings: Mpreg, pregnancy, trans Blitzo Buckzo, graphic childbirth, mentions of parental death, mentions of massive disfigurement, sex work, and mental health issues Word Count: 26,345 Ship(s): Asmodeus | Ozzie/Blitzo Buckzo

Archive link!

A/N: So this fic was a direct request from my mutual based off of a roleplay that we did. Which is why Satan and Ozzie are both children of Lucifer. I did change a couple things from the roleplay so that it was easier for other people to understand. If you have any questions about my headcanons for what happens post-fic then I'd be happy to tell you all! Stay sissy and bitchy everyone <3

Part One: The Meeting

Out of all the jobs that Blitz had applied for, he hadn’t expected to get an interview for a club as prestigious at Ozzie’s.

After the final straw at his last job, he had scrambled to get his resume out into the realms of Hell so that he could get another source of income as quickly as possible. He had a shitty apartment in the outskirts of Ransom in the Greed Ring, but the landlords down there were harsh when it came to getting rent in on time. Sometimes they would even evict their clients for not having the money ready to go up to a week before it was due. While Blitz had absolutely hated working in Loo Loo Land, the degradation of being forced into a mockery of clown makeup to perform in front of screaming kids and asshole parents was going to make him destroy the entire thing one day, he knew that he should have stuck with it while job searching. He had never been more stressed than he was with homelessness hovering over his head for the second time in his life.

It had been a breath of fresh, non-smog air when he had finally gotten the call from one of his potential new employers to inform him that they were willing to see his work and considered him as an actual applicant for the job. So, Blitz had broken into the local gym so that he could practice all night before it opened so he could be prepared. He hadn’t had money for a proper outfit to perform in or his own silks, which was why he’d had to break into the gym.

The interview had gone really well, though. Blitz had always been really good with the silks and hoop, his mother had shown him how to do it in the Lust style as that was where she was raised before she was adopted by her mothers. She had loved getting to share that bit of her culture with her children and so nothing that Cash said had ever discouraged her from doing it. It meant that he was able to do the drops better than anyone else as he had been doing them since he was a very young child. He thought that he was out of practice when he arrived, but by the time he had seen some of the other performers auditioning he knew that the job was meant for him. He was able to adapt his favorite routine to what the interviewers requested of him and flew through it to the beat of the music that they were pumping through the speakers.

Blitz was so grateful for his mother doing that for him now that he was standing in the center of his apartment with the confirmation that he had gotten the job being spoken into his ear.

He scrambled for a paper and pen, writing down the time he was supposed to arrive and the closest approximation of the name he had been given to check in with down. “Fuck yes!” he cheered as soon as the phonecall ended and he was left in his apartment. He rushed around the place as he got his things in order, mostly just grabbing the remnants of his makeup and a waterbottle since he didn’t trust whatever the club was going to be providing him with.

He had to leave more than an hour early to be able to make it to Lust in time. The infrastructure of Greed was far worse than the rest of the Rings because of the nature of the Sin that ran it and the Overlords that controlled certain cities. None of them wanted to spend their well earned money on something that would benefit another person, only themselves. While houses were ornate and expensive, driveways paved so that they almost sang when a car was driven over them, the roads and office buildings looked as though they were a sneeze or two away from turning into dust. There were also very few street signs that could be followed because many of them had been stolen and then melted down so that the lower demons could earn an extra dollar or two. Both of those things combined to make it an absolute nightmare to drive all the way from Ransom to the car-equipped elevators so that he could go to Lust.

He arrived quite a bit more frustrated than he had been before, but those thoughts were almost immediately wiped from his mind when he remembered that he got to perform again. He had wanted to go back to performing almost as soon as he had gotten kicked out of the circus, it was something that he knew and was thus comforting. He had tried to do that at Loo Loo Land but apparently Mammon thought that clowns other than him deserved to be splattered with tomatoes and chastised when they didn’t land a joke just perfectly. Blitz had always been a better acrobat than a clown anyway, so this job was going to fit him far better.

He parked his car in the parking space that was allotted for employees and then gathered his things. He walked to the back door, still glancing down at the sheet of instructions that he had been given, and then knocked. He only had to wait for a second before a tall succubus with pale green skin and two large bat wings clinging to her shoulders opened it. “Can I help you?”

“I’m the new aerial dancer,” Blitz blurted out at once. “I was told to meet someone named Starla?”

“She’s the choreographer for the club, I’ll show you to her office,” the succubus said. She moved away from the door and then walked further into the club.

Blitz had spent a lot of time in bars when he was recovering from the fire and even before then, when he had been made to go and pick Cash up from wherever he was drinking that night. Ozzie’s was different than all the bars he had been in before. It was a club with a lot of sex, first of all, and secondly it was a lot classier than those bars had been. The walls all had high quality wallpaper covered plaster on them, instead of poorly painted cinderblocks or bricks. The floor wasn’t sticky in the slightest and every step on it made it become evident that it was also real hardwood. The lighting in the back hallways was white and bright so that it was easy to pass by all of the doors, each one of them with a name and a picture of the person that got to occupy it. A couple of the doors led to offices instead of dressing rooms, those being propped open or with a window in the wall next to the door so that the person working inside could be seen from the hallway.

“I look forward to seeing you in rehearsal,” the succubus that had led Blitz through the halls said as she gave him a small wave. She seemed to be actually friendly with him instead of just trying to get into his pants. Something that no one had told him about the Greed Ring when he was a kid was that people just kind of took what they wanted, even from other people. All the hookups that he’d had since moving there after the accident had been very forceful. Some people refused to even take no for an answer and had to be smashed upside the head before he seemed like a low enough investment that they wouldn’t pursue him any further. Lust didn’t seem to be like that even though the demons up here had the magic to seduce hellborns and humans alike.

“Thanks,” Blitz said awkwardly late as he watched her go down the hall. He turned around and then opened the office door so that he could poke his head inside.

“Hello? Are you the new hire that I was told about?” the demon behind the desk asked. She was a stout sinner with green fur that was smoothed back around her face so that it came to a lazy point on her cheeks. She had a pair of cat ears on her head but her fingers were very human, with the exception of the long nails that were at the tips. She was dressed in a pantsuit made of silk and the same color purple as the walls outside.

“Uh, yeah,” he nodded. He had been so much more eloquent in the interview, but he was nervous now. It was so much easier to pretend that he was someone cooler than life and better than everyone else when he knew that there were basically no stakes. A lot of the jobs that he applied for he was barely qualified to do, so he had been a little loose when it came to being interviewed. He was good at this job and had secured it, so he didn’t want to lose it by being too much himself during his first rehearsal.

“My name is Madame Purrs. I know the pun, I believe that was why I was given this form. Now if you would follow me,” the woman said as she motioned with one hand. They walked down more of the perfect hallways until they got to another dressing room. The door had a piece of paper taped onto it with the name that Blitz had given them when he had interviewed, but the actual plaque and picture were both empty. He hoped that he would be good enough to get the same treatment that everyone else had one day, it had been his hope for as long as he could remember thanks to his father.

She opened the door as she said, “Each of our performers gets their own dressing room. This is because everyone employed by Ozzie’s is given the go ahead to earn extra money by sleeping with guests and thus you need a private space with which to entertain them. It’s advised that you keep your makeup and costumes here so that you can change quickly when you’re scheduled to be out on the floor. If one of the customers that you’ve previously slept with begins to harass you in your dressing room or even out on the street, please inform management so that we can handle it. I’ll see you down the hall on the main floor once you’ve changed into the outfit we had prepared for you.”

Blitz knew that he had put his measurements down on the application that he had filed, but he hadn’t realized that they already would have gotten him something to wear so that he could perform that night. He thanked Madame Purrs and then stepped into the room so that he could get ready. The door swung shut behind him, heavy and likely sound proof so that he wouldn’t disturb the people that were passing down the hall if he had a customer back there. He wasn’t expecting to be given such a large space when he had just started out, but the entire thing was beginning to become more exciting the longer that he delved into it.

His eyes flicked over every single part of the dressing room. There was a large curtain set up over what he assumed to be the closet, and when he opened it he was confirmed on that suspicion based on the singular costume inside. Next to the closet was a screen where he could change quickly and privately even if there were other people in his space. There was a massive vanity against the wall between the door into the dressing room and the closet, with lots of lights that had a variety of settings labeled on the switches next to them. Across from that was a couch, plush and the same deep velvet color as the walls outside. There were a couple throw pillows and even a blanket tastefully arranged on the back. Along the walls were a bunch of empty picture frames that Blitz assumed people could keep posters in from their past advertised performances.

He set his bag down on the table and then unpacked it. The makeup took up a laughably small section of the massive vanity. He knew that he would fill it up once he had a reasonable wage instead of the bullshit that Mammon had been paying him for the backbreaking performances he had put on for snot nosed kids.

Blitz set out a breath to calm himself and then got to work. He removed his street clothes and left them in a neat pile on the vanity before he did his makeup so that his features would show when he was up in the air and the disappeared out of the door. He found the rehearsal room and was quickly acquainted with the people that would be working around him because the first night of performances that he was doing were solo.

---

Blitz had been rehearsing for hours and knew the choreo like the back of his claws. He knew that he could do this, and yet there were still nerves grasping at his stomach like they were trying to drown him. He had been performing for his entire life and he had never been that scared beforehand. He had been thrust out in front of people more times than he could count only to embarrass himself by fucking up a trick or landing on his head or making a horse that had no legs. He had never been scared of being on stage during that time, only what would happen to him when he got off.

He supposed that might have been part of the reason he was so scared to go on stage now. The clientele was expecting something erotic and mystifying, something to watch in the background while they let hands wander all over their partners or got their dicks sucked by floor workers. Blitz had never done work like that before and he was scared to try it for the first time. He was also so excited that he felt like he was going to swallow his own tongue once he actually got the chance.

The person performing after his was over gave his hand a gentle squeeze of encouragement when the current host of Ozzie’s introduced Blitz’s stage name. It felt good to be called by something that he had picked for himself instead of something that was given to him because it was marketable or easier to say when drunk.

Blitz hurried out onto the stage when all the lights in the club dimmed. He hooked his hands through the top of the silk after wrapping it twice around his wrists so that he could be secure. He then draped some of the red fabric over his chest to hide his outfit as he leaned back. The spotlight came on at the same time as the music, letting him know that the performance had finally started.

The music that they had picked had a deep base and a sultry voice attached to it. He knew that the pop star Verosika Mayday often performed at Ozzie’s since the sin that owned the place was her patron, but he hadn’t expected one of her songs to be so openly sexual given what she usually played for the majority of Hell. He supposed that it made sense since they were in a sex club and she was a succubus, but it still surprised him every time he heard that voice singing those lyrics.

He writhed forward so that the silks draped off of him and onto the ground. The costume that he had gotten for this performance was a piece of sexy lingerie that clung to his body in all the right places. The bodice was a corset with thick black wire that ran over his body in three inch increments, cupping his small tits to bring attention to his dark nipples. They were matched to panties, which clipped onto a pair of dark black garters and stockings that had the same lace pattern as the rest of the outfit. He had forgone the mask that they had offered to him to keep his identity more secret since he didn’t care much about that.

He moved back and forth with the beat of the music, forming the splits before the silks began to pull him upwards. He swung around in a lazy circle so that everyone could get a good view of his outfit and it was obvious that he was held onto it by bound hands. He felt weightless as he was pulled up slowly into the air. As soon as he reached the top, he pressed his legs together and then wound the fabric around his calves and ankles before he freed his wrists and then fell down backwards.

He was hanging upside down as he rotated slowly, showing everyone the majesty of his body while they gasped and awed at him. His entire body felt charged with the attention that they were giving him and he knew that this was going to become addictive. He got more into it as things went on, enjoying himself with every reaction that he got from the crowd gathered in the bar. He could feel a pair of eyes boring into him from one of the private boxes where the high paying customers spent their time, so he knew that he was more likely to get a visitor at his dressing room when his performance was over.

He gave a grand bow when he was finished with the song and sauntered off the stage. There had been clapping and whistling for every single one of the performances since what they were doing was very challenging, but he noticed with a decent amount of haughty pride that his was loudest.

Giddy excitement flew through him and made him feel like he was vibrating or like he was still twirling around in the air. It made his fingers and toes tingle and his cheeks hurt from smiling so much. It had been so long since he had felt like that after a performance that he almost felt drunk on it. There was something so tantalizingly wonderful about being the subject of someone’s arousal, and he knew that he was because that was the point of the club. Blitz had always been fascinated by sex and being the object of someone’s desire. He liked being able to get that feeling going in someone by doing something provocative of flirting in just the right way. Having a job as a sex worker gave him exactly that because he was able to forgo the normal social constructs that sex was somehow something holy or that should only be shared between a certain set of people. He could have as much sex as he wanted without people thinking that he was a somehow debauched or that there was something wrong with him, because it was his job and he was working in the Lust ring where that was easily accepted.

He could still feel the silk pressing up against his body through the lace and on the bare parts of his body. He could still feel the eyes from the special guest in the upper box boring into him and watching every minute movement that he made when he was twirling around the stage with his hands roaming over his body. The clapping and cheering and whistling and smell of arousal was heady in Blitz’s head as he closed the door to his dressing room.

He sat down on the bench in front of his vanity and took the makeup wipes that one of his coworkers had gifted him when they had ended rehearsal to open up the show. He was going to clean up and then head home for the night, excited that he was earning the salary that was going to allow him to search for a better apartment.

A knock on the door sent a shiver through his body unlike anything that he had ever felt before. Before he got up to answer, Blitz checked himself in the mirror and swore that he saw his mother. He knew that he looked like an imp, like his father, but he could see so many succubus-only features oozing out of him in that moment. He almost had the same magical aura that she had always had when she was performing in the circus, before she got sick.

Blitz shook his head to rid himself of the thought before he stood up and answered the door. He let his eyes stay down at the floor for a moment as he got the door all the way opened and then leaned against the frame. He was putting his body on display for the customer that had been enthralled enough by his first performance to come and enquire after him. He knew that the more private shows were a secret that was kept very poorly, to prevent the more famous stars from being overrun with fans that could violate boundaries.

“Hello there,” he greeted. “I take it you’ve come to sample the goods instead of just ogling them?”

The demon on the other side of the door was a touch taller than him, the usual height for pure concubus instead of a hybrid like himself and his sister. They had dark blue skin that was complimented by the black lipstick and eyeliner that they were wearing for makeup. Their horns were tall and curved inward and out, the thin white lines in between the black glowing a faint blue to show their arousal. Their hair was styled back in neat braids, bright blue in color and hanging around their face and shoulders to bring attention to high collarbones and sharp cheekbones. Their outfit was a blue and white striped corset over the top of a fishnet top, complimented by a pleated black skirt that fell all the way to midcalf and kitten heels. It was a cross between the modern punk movement that humans were bringing down when they became sinners and the traditional fifties era American housewife and Blitz couldn’t get enough of it.

“I was hoping that I would be allowed to. What do you think, beautiful?” the incubus asked. Usually Blitz wasn’t able to tell if someone was one of the three, but it was easy to tell with the demon in front of him. They radiated energy that made Blitz want to buckle and be consumed, something that he hadn’t gotten in so long. He felt good as something inside of him bloomed with warmth, similar to how he had felt on stage but different in a way.

“Depends. Are you gonna share a name I can scream out while you’re pounding me into that couch? I haven’t actually had a chance to break it in yet,” Blitz tried to give his best bedroom eyes. The last time he had attempted that, his partner had laughed and it had killed the mood immediately after.

The incubus stepped forward, leaning down so that they were a hair’s breadth apart and that was like drinking pure H8, something he never wanted to forget. “My name is Asmodeus, but if you’re inviting me in then you might as well call me daddy.”

He should have been scared by that. He shouldn’t have been so turned on by the idea of riding the King of Lust and Prince of Hell’s cock, but he was. He knew that it might be a bad idea to get involved with royalty given what had happened last time, and the fact that he was still technically owned by the Duke Paimon and his son, but he couldn’t think about that in the moment. He couldn’t think about how he might lose his job and be out on the streets again, or how this could tear his world apart at the seams.

Instead, all he focused on was the feeling of desire that was coursing through him and making him feel powerful. He was drunk on the feeling, clinging to it with both hands like it would run away from him if he loosened his grip in the slightest.

---

Part 2: The Pregnancy

Over the past three months, Blitz began to notice peculiar changes in his body.

Some of them were good and very easy to explain. His chest and face filled out when he was getting the proper nutrients, something he likely hadn’t gotten since he was a very young child and the circus was doing exceptionally well due to his mother. His skin had also cleared up and evened out now that he was using the proper equipment to take care of it, thanks to some of the people that he worked with at the club. He noticed that he was also building muscle in his back and legs from the work that he was doing. It was nice to see his body taking the shape that his mother’s had been when she was around his age, at least from the pictures that he had seen of her.

Some of the other things that he was experiencing were strange. He began to crave fruits and vegetables something fierce, which meant that he was eating in Sloth and Pride a lot more than he had been before. Lust had a fair amount of fruits, but almost all of the foods that weren’t really expensive were the ones said to bring someone’s libido up or make them aroused. Pride had a lot of fruit thanks to the king preserving the orchards that the native people had planted there back before the fall. Sloth had vegetables because they were slow to grow and easy to produce. A lot of the staples of the diet that were shipped around were grown in Wrath, but they were overproduced and not as sweet because they weren’t able to get the nutrients from the soil like the foods produced in other rings were. It was a bit more expensive to source so much of his diet from rings that he didn’t live in, but it was the only thing that he could do to make his mind shut up about those types of foods.

While the skin on his face had begun to even out with the use of the beauty products offered to him by his coworkers, he noticed that he was beginning to develop some zits and bumps near his horns and around the spines on his back. It was uncomfortable and not something that had ever happened to him before, but it was pretty easy to excuse as his body reacting to the change in substances since he was using new products and working out far more than he had before.

Something that was far harder to pass off as nothing was the way that his clothing was beginning to fit. He had expected some things to begin to change when he began to build muscle from working out every day. He hadn’t expected the size of his hips to continue to widen with every passing week. He had to take his costumes to be tailored by the club seamstress almost every week, he could tell that she was growing very fed up with him by the end of it. No one had commented on the way that his body was shifting as he worked, especially since he was able to complete his job despite it.

He did notice that was beginning to get more difficult. He was tired all the time, for one. All he wanted to do was curl up in the big comfy bed in his apartment, the mattress now elevated off the floor and free of the bugs that had been on it when he had found it, and sleep for the duration of the day. He found himself sneaking backstage between his performances on days where he was appearing in multiple different routines so that he could pass out at his desk. He was glad that the sinners had updated the technology in Hell so that he could have a phone to wake him up if that was going to be the case, at least. Something that the new technology could not help him with was the fact that his center of balance was all out of wack, causing him to have to overcorrect when he was doing drops at certain times.

There was one thing that had changed that he knew he couldn’t ignore. One symptom that pulled all the others together in a neat little bow so that they were blowing up in his face, telling him the path that was laid out ahead of him was going to be a terror to deal with. It was so serious that he had been unable to look it in the face and accept that it was even there.

Throughout his entire life, Blitz had always had spotty menstrual cycles. His mother functioned as the nurse and midwife for the tribe, so she had been the one to inform him that as a hybrid, his body wasn’t as up to par as it might have been if he was entirely imp or concubus. He had longer cycles than other demons did because imps had a period of fertility every other month, regardless of their gender while concubus mirrored humans after the ten thousand years that they had spent going up to earth and seducing them into the sin of Lust. It meant that his cycles came about every forty five days and that was incredibly hard to keep track of, especially when he wasn’t getting enough food to have his body’s systems working as they usually should.

It had been three months since he had last woken up to bleeding between his legs.

He had been able to brush it off during the first two months as his body figuring things out now that all of his needs were being met and he was being more active than he had been before. There was no ignoring it now that ninety days had passed by without even a tiny cramp.

So, he rose early on the day that he had late afternoon rehearsal and popped down to the store at the end of the street from his apartment. Everything in Greed was marked up as high as the shop owner could get away with and still sell something, so the pregnancy test took everything in his pockets and a bit off his card as well. He was glad that he was able to pay for it in majority cash so that his bank wouldn’t have a trace of his panicked suspicion on it.

He returned to his apartment and fled to the bathroom, tugging down his pants while opening the box with his other hand. He hadn’t been this scared for a test result to come back since he had taken a pregnancy test with his mother as a teenager. He and Fizz had just been fooling around back then, before Blitz had caught feelings and then begun to run himself in circles. That had been when Tilla had examined him and determined that his cycles were just going to be a little off for the rest of his life thanks to the way that his body had been made.

This was a lot more serious. He had all the symptoms that he had learned about while he was studying the later half of her job, on top of missing his period for three months. He knew that it was possibly he had conceived even though he had assumed that his awkward menstruation was going to make it really difficult to do so. He should have been more careful so that he could have just brushed this off and not even thought about it. Instead, he had raw dogged the King of Lust and now his womb might have signed his death warrant.

Blitz tried to get the thought out of his head as he finished peeing. He set the test down on the tiny counter of his bathroom and began to scrub his hands after replacing the cap. It was hard to not just stare at the little window for the result to show up and tell him if he was properly fucked or not.

He let out a little snort at the pun that he had made in his own head, which eased the anxiety that was swirling around in the pit of his stomach. That feeling flared back up tenfold when he realized that it was possible he was feeling morning sickness for the first time. He had to run his hand over the base of his horns and back of his neck to ground him, something that his mother had done frequently when he was upset about something.

The hybrid finally reached down for the test, his claws shaking slightly due to the anxiety that was coursing through him. If he was pregnant, then there was a chance that he wouldn’t be able to keep his apartment because the landlords in Greed were always looking for a chance to take their property back. He could also lose his job, not only because it was harder to do silks when pregnant but because he was pregnant with the boss’ baby.

“Don’t panic before you know what you’re panicking about, dickhead,” Blitz reminded himself. He held the pregnancy test, with the little window down, for what had to be another five minutes before he finally got the gall to flip it over. He had splurged for one of the ones with the digital screen that said the word ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant’ depending on the level of HCG detected, that way he didn’t have to worry about the whole process of trying to figure out how many lines and what color meant that he was pregnant.

He felt his heart stop, start again, and then sink low into his gut as he read the result that was staring up at him. All the signs had been there and if he was more confident in the abilities and knowledge his mother had given him, he would have assumed that he was pregnant already. This was just the confirmation that he needed so that the information stuck and felt like it was well and truly real.

Blitz placed the test down on the counter like he had before and then looked at himself in the mirror. The fuller face could be a symptom of the pregnancy, he knew that plenty of people began to gain weight all over their body in preparation for breast feeding when the newborn was actually there. The tiredness but lack of bags under his eyes made sense now too, it took extra energy to grow another human inside of his womb. The off balance was the thing that scared him the most, especially since he was a twin.

He placed his hand on the bottom of his shirt and then pulled it back around his waist so that it was entirely taut. He turned to the side and then felt his breath hitch in his throat. Before, his stomach had been almost concave since he had been nothing more than skin and bones thanks to his frugal food budget. Now, it was domed out. He hadn’t noticed right away because everything in his body was changing as his body bulked up. Now, it was screaming in his face that it was the beginning of a bump. It didn’t even look like the bloating that he got before his period, it was already forming into the teardrop shape that came with the second trimester.

The fear that was gripping his nerve endings was enough to make him force it out of his mind and not think on it any longer. If he kept going over how much time he had left to get all his affairs in order before his life collapsed around him then he was going to have a breakdown. He didn’t have time for another breakdown, the panic over his pregnancy had already eaten up all the time he had before he had to drive to Lust for his work.

---

Blitz was glad that his mother had taught him so much before her passing when he was seventeen. It meant that he was able to watch for any signs of danger in his pregnancy without splashing money he didn’t have out on a doctor’s appointment. The insurance that he had with Ozzie’s was pretty good, but he knew that if he went to see an OB then they would have to report it back to his work.

He was showing pretty significantly now, the bump that he had noticed after taking the test expanding just a little bit with every day. He knew that his boss and coworkers had to notice that his body was changing more than it would have just because he was taking care of himself. A bit of pudge on his belly, or even a gut for that matter, was going to look a lot different than a baby bump. He performed in basically no clothing, which meant that it was impossible to hide his belly when he was at work. Despite that, no one had said anything to him and were simply just treating him a bit differently. He never had to get his own water bottle during rehearsal and he was always given a bit of the baked goods that were brought in before everyone else was. Something else that made him uncomfortable had appended at work, which was that he had begun to get some rather excited customers that spent most of their time worshiping his stomach due to it. He was turning more people away from his dressing room, which was again made easier based on the fact that his coworkers were oddly protective over him.

Still, them knowing that he was pregnant was different than the boss at the top of the club finding out that he was expecting. He had tried to go through the employee handbook on his own to figure out what the stance on pregnancy and parent employees were, but the words were too much for him. He had struggled to read Impish when he was a child due to the fact that the letters would jumble themselves around in his head, but he struggled to read the common language of Hell because he had taut it to himself and his glass eye sometimes made him have a headache when he was attempting it. So that had been a futile waste of an afternoon and another reason why he decided that he wasn’t going to be able to go to a hospital to get his pregnancy checked out.

Instead, he just checked himself over. Before every single show, he would lay back on his couch and palpate his belly to try and find the location of the baby. His womb was firm and malleable, allowing him to feel the head or bum of the baby when he pressed down in just the right place. That, on top of eating and sleeping better than he had before let him think that things were going pretty well with his pregnancy.

He kept pushing on for the next month, until he felt those eyes boring into him from that private box again. He was in a group performance this time, which was one of his least favorite ways to perform now. He liked it when he was twirling around on the stage and drawing the eyes of the crowd to only him because he was the only thing that they could look at. It was harder to do when he was a background performer for Verosika’s special shows or when he was performing with some of the larger names that drew bigger crowds to the club.

It was strange to be hoisted up into the air, wrapping the silk around his feet and legs to support him as he went, and feel the eyes on him. He knew that a few people that liked the way his body looked, growing heavy with child, were going to be paying attention to him over the others, but this was different. The presence watching him was wrapped around his body like the silk, though it was warm instead of cool on his exercise-feverish skin. It made his insides feel as though they had been melted down into soup, it made him feel special and cherished again despite the fact that he wasn’t doing much.

He stumbled back to his dressing room when his night was over, trying to keep his knees properly supporting him. He felt almost drunk on the attention that he had gotten when he was out on stage. He hadn’t felt like this in months, not since the King of Lust had stopped coming to the club and watching him perform. He collapsed down onto the couch in his room, his hands immediately going to his stomach as he began to palpate to locate the baby and make sure they were still safe.

A knock on the door to his dressing room brought him out of his motions. He knew that he couldn’t just call for them to come in since it was after a show and that might mean it was a customer. If he invited a customer into his room, it was far harder to get them out than it was to slam the door in their face to let them know that they really weren’t wanted and needed to stop pushing. Blitz’s stomach growled as he hoped that it was another one of his coworkers with something sweet to eat.

He opened the door and then his breath was sucked from his lungs as it had been all those months ago. He was met again with Asmodeus, the King of Lust and the Prince of Hell. He was dressed in a pinestripe suit, a belt around the waist to bring attention to the natural curves of his body. Everything else about him was exactly the same as it had been back when they had first crossed paths, which made Blitz irrationally angry.

The anger was there for a couple of seconds before it drained out of him and all he could focus on was the panic of the situation that he found himself in. He had kept the pregnancy a secret specifically so that it wouldn’t go to the upper management of the club and get him in trouble, but now the other father and the owner of the entire ring was standing in front of him like it was no big deal. “Anything I can do for you, Your Sinfulness?” Blitz asked. He could hear the warble in his voice that gave away how scared he was, but around that he was able to get everything else out as naturally as possible.

“I think that you can, friend,” Ozzie replied. He bowed his head towards the rest of the room and the message was clear. This wasn’t a conversation that either of them wanted to have out in the open hallway like this, it was a private matter and should be treated as such.

Blitz stepped backwards and let the Sin enter his room before he shut the door securely behind him. He grabbed the robe that was hanging on the edge of the vanity mirror and wrapped it around his body so that he wasn’t as exposed as he was before. He didn’t know what it mattered, the king had been inside of him four months ago and had seen his mostly naked body out on stage only ten minutes prior. It wasn’t like there was anything that he needed to hide or could hide anymore.

The two of them stood in the dressing room in silence, neither of them daring to speak the secret that hung in the midst of the two of them. “Is it mine? Is that why you didn’t tell me?” Ozzie asked, his voice slightly broken when it finally sliced through the space between them.

“It is, the baby is yours,” Blitz said, shaking his head so that he could correct himself before a misunderstanding could get him smote. He wasn’t even sure if Sins could do that, but he knew that they all used to be angels, or at least most of them were. He hadn’t learned a lot of history outside of what the tribes had done to help Lucifer when he had fallen. He knew that the youngest of the Sins, Wrath, was born in Hell and had an angelic form but was different than the others had been. He was fairly certain that Ozzie was an angel that had been born from Lucifer in Heaven, but he wasn’t certain.

Regardless, he knew that he was deep in trouble now. The other being had likely thought that he was using protection when they had sex together, so he hadn’t even suggested a condom. Blitz was the one that was stupid enough to think that he couldn’t get pregnant when he was also half succubus. He should have known better and yet he didn’t, so he was standing in a stuffy dressing room with his womb swollen with the future bastard of the Lust Ring.

“I’m going to have a baby,” Ozzie whispered. His black-blue eyes widened with shock as he sank down onto the couch where said baby had been created.

“You don’t have to,” Blitz said as he touched his stomach. He robe did manage to do a decent amount to make it less obvious, but he felt like he was already huge despite being only four months into the process. “I-I mean, I don’t want to have an abortion but given that you’re the King it’s not like I can really say no to you. If you let me continue with the pregnancy then I promise that you’ll never hear anything from either of us. I won’t make you pay child support and I’ll keep it a secret. You won’t have to do parenting or take care of me or anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

Blitz knew that he had been rambling, but he was fairly certain that the words coming out of his mouth made more sense than didn’t. He closed his jaw so hard that his teeth clicked uncomfortably in his mouth, but he could barely even think about that. He took a step back from the Sin as he said, “You didn’t ask for this and I’m not going to baby trap you.”

“I may not have asked for this, but it’s happening. It’s also not baby trapping if you didn’t have sex with me with the intent of getting pregnant so that I could never leave your life,” Ozzie replied. “Do you know why they call me the weakest of the Sins?”

“Uh, no,” Blitz shook his head. He thought that it might help soothe the royal’s ego if he were to say something about how he didn’t think that Ozzie was, but in truth he knew barely anything about the royals outside of how abusive they were to the people that they viewed as beneath them. He didn’t really feel like admitting how shit the education in his circus had been at the moment, though, so he left it at that.

“Lust is not something that is damaging, it is something that creates and flourishes when it is nurtured,” he beamed. “It’s not like the other Sins, where something has to be taken or forced. It is something that is shared between two, so it seems less powerful but is actually more because it takes two souls for one action. Lust, in its purest form, is something that must be done between two people and granted with want from both. If it’s not, then it’s greed or pride or wrath. What we did was fall entirely into lust, and sometimes children are created through that.”

“So what are you saying?” Blitz asked. As much as he loved the husky sound of the sin’s voice, he did want to get to the bottom of the situation. He was exhausted and wanted to go home so that he could sleep on his much improved mattress, even if it was still more uncomfortable that the couch in his dressing room. His eyes flicked over to the aforementioned piece of furniture as he began to debate whether or not he could get away with sleeping there when he wanted.

“I’m saying that I’m going to take responsibility for lust, as it is my sin. I want to help you raise this child if you will allow me to,” Ozzie beamed. He was so pretty when he smiled, it was like his entire body was radiating the light and beauty that he carried inside of him. Blitz knew now why the sins had been produced in Heaven before they had fallen. He began to wonder what actual angels, the one that lived to God’s standards, looked like if this was the ethereal being that had been cast down first.

He fidgeted for a while, toying with the end of the belt on his robe. “I do. I want to be able to give this kid their best shot at life and I’m not totally confident that’s going to be with me. Every kid also deserves a chance to have both their parents in their life so that they don’t have to worry about what they did to make said parent hate them enough to leave,” he was letting a lot more of his trauma show than he thought he would. He shook his head to remove the tears that were welling in the corners of his eyes and took a deep breath, “What I mean, outside of these stupid fucking pregnancy hormones, is that I will totally do the coparenting thing with you.”

“Wonderful!” Ozzie beamed. He held his arms out and asked, “Is it alright if I hug you?”

“You have been inside of me, why do you care about consent for hugging?” he laughed. It was strange to think about the fact that a part of Ozzie was still inside of Blitz, a being that was half the Sin and half the hybrid. He wondered if his child would be mostly concubus or if they would be a forth of Blitz’s parents and half angel.

Ozzie’s hands dropped down to his lap and his beautiful brow creased with stress. “Blitz, just because you consented once doesn’t mean that you’ve consented to every time after that. You are a person and your body is yours to control. It’s why I wouldn’t have been upset if you had aborted the fetus.”

That made something inside of Blitz release and relax. Ozzie trusted him to go through with the pregnancy or terminate it based on what he wanted his body to go through, he didn’t want to terminate because the baby inside of Blitz’s womb was going to be his bastard. Maybe the Sins didn’t care as much about that as the Goetia families did. He sniffled as he tried hard to hold back tears, really not used to people caring for him like that.

“You can hug me,” he finally managed to get out, his voice wet and drowned in a sob.

Ozzie reached out and wrapped his arms around the hybrid, bringing him into a warm hug. It made that feeling inside of him bloom and burst out like a flower that had finally gotten enough water to reveal all of its petals to the sun instead of just enough to form the reaction within its stem. He felt more like himself and more like a stranger than he ever had in his entire life. He could almost taste the nervousness rolling off of Ozzie in waves, but there was an undercurrent of trust and excitement as well.

He pulled back from him after a minute or two, when he had finished crying. He pulled himself up and pulled his clothing bag out. He said, “I kinda need to go home so that I can continue to bake the kid, but I want to keep talking about this. Do you think that you could give me your number or something? A burner is probably fine too, just so that I have a way to text you dates of appointments or when the kid is here or something.”

“If you think that I’m going to leave your side when you’re giving birth then you’re stole cold wrong. Unless you don’t want me in the birthing room, in which that is entirely your choice,” Ozzie said as he pulled out his phone. He pulled up his number and then handed it to Blitz so that the hybrid could write it down in his own device.

Blitz didn’t have the energy to process what he had said, so he immediately put it out of his mind and then said, “Thank you for not firing me. I don’t know what the club’s policy is about pregnancy, but I’m not even sure that fucking thing would apply to me seeing as I went right up to the top.”

“You’ll get paid leave until you’re fully healed and back up to performing. We don’t like it when people are being physical while their bodies are injured,” Ozzie said. “Goodnight, Blitz. It was wonderful to see you perform again.”

---

Blitz slept for almost twelve hours when he finally got back to his apartment. It was the best sleep he’d had in a long time, since he knew his job was secure and his kid was going to have one stable parent in their life.

When he woke up, he dragged himself to the bathroom and then got some breakfast. It felt nice to be showered and fed, especially after also being so well rested. If someone had told him what pregnancy would do to his ability to take care of himself he would have laughed in their faces, but he honestly felt better now than he had since he was a teenager and working for his father in the circus.

He didn’t even mind when his phone chirped as Ozzie texted him. He picked it up and scanned through it before his stomach sank down into the black pit inside of him. The King was asking about when his next appointment was, which meant that he had to admit that he hadn’t been to a doctor yet.

After about ten minutes of writing, editing, and deleting, he had finally come up with the message. He explained about the training that his mother had given him when she was alive and how he had been using that since he didn’t want to alert anyone about his pregnancy lest he get in trouble at work. Surprisingly, the Sin was very kind and understanding about the matter. He and Blitz talked for a while longer about the medical plan that they wanted to pursue during the pregnancy and eventually worked out that Blitz would start seeing an OB now that the pregnancy wasn’t something that would get him in trouble.

That was how they had ended up where they were.

The waiting room for the obstetrician that the king had suggested was a nice enough place, certainly better than the hospital in Greed that Blitz had been to when he was a kid. The walls had some tasteful paintings of mothers with their babies, thankfully all the beings were different than each other so that it didn’t feel like the clinic was meant for one type of demon and not others. The receptionist was across from the double glass doors and had been very nice when Blitz had approached her to check in. There were plush chairs and couches spread all around the waiting room, each of them a different height to accommodate the different demons that would come to visit.

Ozzie was back in his incubus form, a good way to keep his real identity from the people around him and a better way for him to fit in the buildings meant for smaller beings than his sin form. Something about that form also brought a great deal of comfort to Blitz and made him feel like more of a person than he had in a good long while. He was able to lean against the other being for comfort whenever the doors opened. For some reason, being out in public in a place he had never been to was really unnerving for him.

It felt like he had already been there for an eternity when the doors into the back of the clinic finally opened up and someone called his name. He was on his feet as quickly as he could be with the heavy weight of his womb sitting against his hips. It had only been about two weeks since he had told Ozzie about his pregnancy, but he already felt like it was far more real than it had been when he was keeping it a secret. Blitz may have been more agile that most pregnant people were due to his job and the natural form of his body, but that didn’t mean he was a spry as he had been with twenty or so less pounds of fluid and baby inside of him.

“If you two would just follow me back this way,” the nurse said as she lead them through the maze of halls to a little alcove. It had two chairs, a scale built into the ground, and a basket full of all kinds of things that Blitz wouldn’t be able to name despite his medical training. “We need to take your weight and a couple other vitals before we get started, just so that we have a good baseline of where you are so we can watch for things like high blood pressure or increased heart rate. Are you alright with that?”

The nurse was far kinder than any of the medical staff had been after the fire, which put Blitz at ease. He knew that he had to get medical assistance during his pregnancy and Ozzie felt most at ease with this hospital since it was one of the many that his Aunt Belphegore founded, but he was still fighting off the memories that night had left him. “Uh, yeah, that’s fine. Do I need to take off my shoes or jacket or anything?” he asked. He hadn’t even realized that his hand was resting on his belly until he had moved it to his jacket and suddenly it felt like he was even more exposed than he would’ve been if he was naked.

“Unless you’re carrying a dictionary or rocks in your pockets, you should be good,” the nurse replied as she nodded her head to the scale.

Blitz glanced back at Ozzie and then felt the tension in his shoulders melt away when he saw that warm, reassuring smile on the king’s face. He stepped onto the scale and didn’t even flinch when the nurse moved around him so that she could press the button to take a snapshot of his weight. She wrote down the number and asked, “Could you sit in the chair and take off your jacket? We need to take your blood pressure and heart rate.”

“Right,” Blitz nodded as he sat down heavily in the chair. He removed his jacket and handed it to Ozzie, who took it and folded it up like it was a priceless heirloom and not the most beat up thing that hadn’t come out of a dumpster in all of Hell.

The nurse slipped a heart monitor onto his finger, the one that allowed his claws to rest comfortable on the other side of it while it was snug on his fingertip. The blood pressure band went on his upper arm and he had to turn away while it was inflated. He hadn’t realized quite how much it was going to stress him out to be back in a hospital situation after so long being outside of it. He knew that he wasn’t totally over the fire, given that it had only been about three years, but he had stopped having nightmares about it a long time ago. He thought that it would be easy to replace the bad, foul memories with new ones centering around the King and his baby.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Ozzie soothed as he crouched down next to the hybrid. He could have sat down in the other chair, but it was easier for Blitz to see him like this. Even when he was in his incubus form, he was still a bit taller than the other being so if they truly wanted to be the same size then they had to make some adjustments to where they were in space. “Just breathe with me, okay? I know that this is hard.”

His voice was even and steady, that deep rumble that spoke to something deep inside of Blitz and made him feel like he was whole and real. The hybrid watched as the king took in a deep breath and then let it out slowly. He followed the movements himself, taking breaths so deep and whole that they filled up his lungs before he let all the air out at once.

He felt more grounded to the time around him and less lost in the past that he had run from. It was easy for him to finish that part of the appointment and walk to the room where the OB would actually be seeing him. He had taken his jacket back from Ozzie by the time that they had gotten there, though he didn’t need it. The sun from the ring nearby was streaming through the window and heating up the room so that it was a pleasant temperature for anyone that was not a living, breathing incubator the way that he was.

“Do you think that everything’s okay?” Blitz asked. “I mean, you saw the way that the nurse looked when she was writing shit down in my chart. What if I already have hypertension or some shit? It’s way too fucking early to induce me into labor.”

The longer that he spoke, the more anxiety he could feel rising inside of him. He had been pretty good about making sure that the body of the baby was still where it had been before, but it was hard to palpate his own abdomen after so much time had passed. He had been able to see the babe growing in his womb, but that didn’t mean that everything was right. While it was the best that they had in the circus, since they couldn’t afford a portable ultrasound or doppler machine, the humans and Sins had created a lot more new technology that could monitor pregnancies more intimately than that. If he had scheduled an appointment with the OB before Ozzie had caught him, then he already would have had at least one ultrasound and the viability of the pregnancy would have been checked as soon as the test came back positive. Instead, he had let fear dominate his choices once again and had forgone all of that until someone else had pushed him into it.

Before he could spiral too much further into his own mind, Ozzie said, “Nothing is going to be wrong with our baby. You’ve been doing a really great job taking care of yourself and I’m sure that’s extended to the pregnancy too.”

Blitz nodded as he took in the words. He had been eating right, sleeping often, and making sure that nothing was ever too hard against his stomach. That had all happened as soon as he had found out that he was expecting, so it was unlikely that he had done any substantial damage to the little baby inside of his womb.

The door then opened as someone poked their head inside. “Is now a good time?”

“Uh, yeah,” Blitz nodded when he realized that both of the other beings around him were waiting for his consent. He wasn’t quite used to being the center of attention in that way, usually when all eyes were on him it was because he was performing or because he had done something that no one liked.

“Wonderful! My name is Dr. Layla, and while I am a sinner I can assure you that you are in the best of hands with me as I was certified by Queen Belphegor’s counsel and the Sin herself,” the doctor said. The door clicked shut behind her so that they were in the privacy of the office. She was speaking quickly and clearly, like it was something she’d had to say a thousand times over to drill it into the heads of her patients.

“I trust you,” Ozzie said. It made sense, since the sinner in front of them was in Sloth and not somewhere like Greed or Pride. Sinners would be deposited into the ring that represented the sin they had been tempted with most when they were alive, which was why there was such a large quantity in Pride. God apparently liked to say that anyone who didn’t worship Him enough was prideful, or at least that was the explanation that Blitz had gotten as a child when he had asked about it.

“Me too,” he said. “I mean, I work with a couple of sinners so you can’t be too bad.”

She chuckled, “Thank you. May I ask who we have supporting you?”

“This is, uh,” Blitz stopped. He wasn’t sure if he should call Ozzie by his nickname or by his full name, given that he was in a smaller form so that he could protect his identity. It was going to come out eventually that the King of Lust had bedded someone hard enough to knock them up with a definite parentage, but that didn’t mean that the information had to come out right now.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to despair for too much longer as the incubus smiled warmly at the doctor and then stuck out his hand. He said, “My name is Ozzie, I’m the other parent.”

“Nice to meet you. Given the wording, I’m assuming that the two of you aren’t together romantically or queerplatonically?” Dr. Layla asked. Her voice was free of all judgment and criticism, which was something that Blitz hadn’t realized how badly he needed. The idea that a couple needed to be married was a very human idea, brought about by something that God had told one of his prophets on earth. Given that God wasn’t one of the deities that controlled and was worshiped in Hell, by beings other than the sinners, nothing that he decreed really applied to them. Within the tribal community, though, it wasn’t common for a child to come from two people that weren’t courting at the very least. Blitz hadn’t been back to visit his tribe since the fire but he still held their possible judgments very close to his heart.

“No, we barely know each other. Kid was a happy fucking accident,” he snorted a little bit at the pun and got an affectionate eye roll from Ozzie. For a brief moment, he wondered what Fizz would have done if he had been there in that moment to see what was happening between the two. Fizz was the only person that Blitz had ever longed for a family life with throughout his entire teenagedom and dating experience.

“Alright, just wanted to make sure so that I didn’t make anyone uncomfortable,” the doctor nodded. She shifted on her stool as she continued with the actual part of the visit, “Now, I’ve noticed that the last visit you had at a hospital, at least that we have on file, was when you were around nineteen. Does that sound about right?”

“Yeah, I’ve never really been one to do the whole ‘checkup’ thing,” Blitz explained as he rolled one hand over itself to dismiss the idea entirely.

“May I ask why? You don’t have to answer if it’s too personal, but if the reason has to do with a fear then I might be able to help you through it so that you have a more comfortable pregnancy,” Dr. Layla explained. One of her eyes blinked before the rest of them did, which was a little distracting from the question.

He glanced over to Ozzie and then back to the doctor. He decided that he was already deep enough in the situationship with the king that disclosing his true status wouldn’t be that big of a deal. After all, the king was spending time with him because Blitz was knocked up with his children instead of because he was dating him, so it wasn’t like it was that big of a betrayal of trust. He took a deep breath before he let the entire thing spill out of his mouth, “Well, I grew up in the circus. We were one of the last remaining imp tribes from before the Fall so it was a way for us to stay together, travel the usual roads, and make money so that we could interact with what Hell has become. It’s not really traditional for tribal imps to go to the doctor at a hospital or to even be near one of them every single year so that we can make appointments. The elevators cost money now, kinda.”

The sinner nodded, blinking at him again. “I can understand how if it wasn’t usual for you to go to the doctor when you were a child then you wouldn’t have done it when you were an adult. I was also unaware that there were imp tribes before the Fall, but I suppose that it makes sense. Thank you for teaching me!”

“We did have someone that checked on people. My mother was the tribe’s nurse and midwife. Taught me a lot of stuff too, which was why I never though that it was important to spend money to go to a doctor when what I did fixed everything well enough,” Blitz shrugged. He spared a glance over to Ozzie and felt his heart beat settle down. He had been so scared to disclose that he was a tribal imp because many of the other demons in Hell considered them to be the lowest of all the creatures that resided in the rings, but Ozzie didn’t seem to be sneering at him or judging him at all.

“Good to know. So I take it you already know a bit about pregnancy? Such as what not to eat and the kinds of exercises that you should be doing to reduce back and hip pain?” the doctor asked, jotting a couple more notes down.

“Yeah, I do. I think you’re the first person that hasn’t doubted my ability to check on my kid,” Blitz chuckled. It was nice to have someone in the hospital respect him. The nurse had been nice enough, but he had seen the way that her eyes widened when he had provided her with the dates of his last cycles and how far along he had to be.

She smiled kindly at him, “In life, I was a trained midwife. I became an obstetrician when I arrived here because it was the standard that made the most amount of people comfortable and allowed me to get a job. Granted, I didn’t expect giving women critical medical care would end me in Hell, but it was nice to continue doing what I loved. I trust you, as a midwife, to know the basics of how to guide a pregnancy through to the finish. I say basics because, unfortunately, when it has to do with our own family or bodies we are a bit biased and can either see the best or the worst in certain actions that may not be as dire as we feared. That’s my job, to listen to you and use my distance from you as a way to diagnose and help you.”

He really liked the sound of that. He had been worried, based on the looks he had gotten from the other staff and the unpleasant interaction with the receptionist over the phone, that this was going to be the worst thing he had subjected himself to since the Mammon concert. Dr. Layla was warm, perfectly professional, and very respectful. He felt good handing his medical care over to her, especially since he knew that it would also help Ozzie feel better.

“So should we get started?” he asked.

“I think that we should!” she replied chipperly.

She had Blitz lay down and then palpated his belly with one hand to get the fundal height before she reported it to the imp. It was exactly the dates that he had in his own mind, especially since there was only one or two days between when the baby could have been conceived as he and Ozzie had seen each other rather briefly again after the first night they had spent together. She had a nurse come in and take some blood so that they could run routine samples, as well as a bite of urine to make sure that he didn’t have any signs of hypertension or gestational diabetes.

“This is the really fun part. Usually we do an early ultrasound to make sure that the embryo has implanted in the right location but based on how far along you are without extreme amounts of pain, I’m not going to advise one until the anatomy scan in about two weeks. However, I would like to use the doppler to check on baby’s heartbeat. That means that the both of you can hear it too!”

Blitz grinned so wide that his cheeks hurt, he couldn’t remember any other time that he had felt that excited about anything. He turned to look at Ozzie and saw that the look was matched perfectly. It was nice to have someone that was just excited about something happening to Blitz as he was. Fizz was supportive, but he was so anxious that he usually hid his feelings under passiveness and a shrugged body. No one else had stuck around long enough to see what Blitz’s life was actually like and he was the only being that he could blame that on.

Dr. Layla instructed Blitz to lay back on the crinkling paper that lined the examination table and then pulled a machine in from the hallway. “This is a doppler machine and it bounces high frequency sound waves off of red blood cells in the human world, or black and blue ones for the demons down here. It’s going to allow us to hear the baby’s heartbeat and make sure that it’s nice and strong. Would you mind pulling up your shirt?”

“That’s what got me into this mess in the first place,” Blitz joked, earning a choked snort from the sin beside him. He did as he was asked, pulling his shirt up so that it was resting just underneath the support bra that he had to buy himself when he hit his twelfth week. He hadn’t expected that much chest growth because his mother hadn’t had much, according to her, but he was having enough that it was uncomfortable to go without. The secure fabric was also a reassurance when his nipples began to get hyper sensitive.

The doctor placed the doppler down on his belly, and immediately the entire room filled with a sound that Blitz had never heard before. He’d been checked over for blood clots when he’d had his eye removed, but his hearing had been so busted by the fireworks in that moment that he hadn’t gotten to hear the sound of his own heartbeat like that. The doctor began moving it around so that the whooshing got stronger and softer depending on where it was. She then stopped when she got to the lowest part of the belly, shifting it from left to right until she found a very, very fast sound.

“There it is! That’s the sound of your baby’s heart. They’re sitting quite low, but that just means that you’re…” she trailed off. It sounded almost as if there was an echo from the heartbeat, a slightly quieter whooshing in the background of the first one. “Hmm.”

“What? Is everything okay? Is the baby okay?” Blitz asked. All the fears that he’d had when he was sitting in the waiting room and post-nurse were beginning to swell in the forefront of his mind. All he could think about was how he had stayed away from the hospital for too long and now his baby was badly injured in a way that he could have prevented if he wasn’t such a coward.

Dr. Layla soothed him with a single finger, moving the doppler slightly. “I can hear a bit of an echo in the heartbeat which could mean a lot of things. I’m going to schedule you an ultrasound a week early from when we usually do the anatomy scans so that you can get a better idea of what’s going on. I don’t think that this is anything to be too considered about, so please don’t stress yourself into a tizzy. I promise that we can get this sorted out,” she smiled at them both kindly.

The machine was removed from Blitz’s stomach and he sat up in a bit of a daze. All he could do for the rest of the appointment was sit beside Ozzie and try to listen to the important information that the doctor was giving them. It felt like so much had happened in one day even though very little had changed in his life. He was still going to return to his shitty apartment in the Greed ring and he was still pregnant, with a baby that might not be as healthy as he had originally hoped.

“Do you want me to bring you home?” Ozzie asked. They had met up together, but the Sin didn’t have a car present since he could call his staff to cart him around even into the other rings. Blitz, on the other hand, had driven his van from his apartment to the clinic, so he had to get driven or drive home in that if he had any hope of getting to work the next day.

“Uh, yeah,” Blitz nodded. He was still barely paying attention to what was going on around him, mostly just trying to focus on not holding his breath to the point where he died. It was surprisingly harder than it sounded, mostly because the nerves in his chest were constricting every single organ inside of his ribcage and pelvis.

The hybrid handed the keys over to the Sin and then clambered into the passenger seat of the van. They drove silently through the streets and into the elevator that brought them to Greed. Blitz only started talking when he had to give Ozzie directions on how to get to his apartment. It was a bit amusing to see such a powerful being struggle to navigate the myriad of potholes that littered the road on the way there.

Ozzie parked the car where he was instructed to and then rushed around to the other side so that he could open the door for Blitz. “Do you, uh, do you enjoy living in Greed?” he asked. His voice was strained, like he was trying to be polite but wasn’t sure that he could manage it for longer than necessary.

The hybrid shrugged and then motioned for Ozzie to come with him. They had a couple of things that they needed to talk about concerning parenting and the pregnancy in general, so it was better that they move somewhere where Blitz could sit down instead of standing in the shittiest parking lot ever seen that side of Pride.

Once they were in the hallway of the building, Blitz answered, “I don’t really like it but they’re one of the only rings that charges the same for hybrids or will rent to them at all. I had to find a place to live because being homeless or living in the back of my van was really not working out. You’d be surprised about how fussy those overlords can be about how their spaces look.”

The Sin gave a huffing snort, “I had to deal with quite a few of them myself after I took over the ring. They’re unbearable.”

“You’re telling me. Imagine how they are with you, someone that has a shit ton of power over them and is also literally an angel, and then imagine how much worse those bigoted assholes are going to get when they find out that I’m the second lowest of all the classes in Hell,” Blitz said.

“I’ve always hated the class system. When we fell, I was just barely old enough to remember some things from the early days. The imps that took us in were part of a tribe that roamed the Pride ring primarily, which was why my father ended up settling there first instead of somewhere a bit less tinged with poison,” Ozzie explained. “Those beings may not have lived the way that we had previously in Heaven, but they were far kinder and had a better community than I had ever seen. I never understood why they were looked down on by the other demons, simply because they didn’t possess the same talents as the others. They were still wonderfully gifted, I mean, look at the kinds of things that you can do on your own! You didn’t even have the priests to teach you the way that the old tribes did.”

Blitz felt his cheeks growing hot the longer that Ozzie talked. He had learned about how his people had traversed the land in search of the Fallen, since they had been prophesied by the Saints of Hell to help them once they arrived. He knew that one of the tribes his parents belonged to had helped Lucifer and Asmodeus when they fell, but there was no way that he would have known how much Ozzie still appreciated that kindness to that day.

He turned away from the Sin and cleared his throat, “Listen, man, if you want to help me get a better place where I can do my half of the kid raising then you’re welcome to.” He was mostly joking, but half of him was hoping that he could leech a bit off the Sin’s kindness to get a leg up in the world. Maybe, once it was known that a hybrid from the tribes had birthed the King of Lust his heirs, then it would be easier for other people like him to not flounder as much as they currently were.

“It’s funny that you mention that,” Ozzie said. “I don’t have to find you a place because I already have one. I own an apartment in Pride that I use to visit my siblings when my dad needs a break.”

“I always forget that Satan and Charlotte are your siblings. You don’t act like the Grand Prince of Hell or whatever. At least not when you’re with me,” Blitz said. The idea that Ozzie might act more humble or as a person instead of a grand mythic figure when he was around Blitz made the hybrid’s heart flutter in a way that he couldn’t describe.

“If Charlie heard you call her by her full name I think that she would cry,” he laughed. “She’s always be so sweet. You know, they’re both really excited about the baby.”

Suddenly Blitz felt very lightheaded. He placed his hand over the mark on his forehead as he sunk down onto his shitty couch, trying to breathe evenly. “You already told your family?”

Ozzie sat down beside him, the blue of his face far darker with the new blush that he was sporting. “I know that I should have asked you if it was okay for me to talk about it, but I was so excited to be a parent and they’re my family. Are you alright?”

“Well I just found out that the fucking royal family of Hell, literally the most powerful family that has ever existed, knows that I’m carrying your brood in my gut,” Blitz mumbled. “Are you sure that none of them are going to get mad at me for being of a lower class? I mean, there are plenty of other demons that you could have had a kid with and technically that offer is still on the table.” He was rambling at this point, trying to get out the feelings that were swirling around in him like a late-season Wrathian storm. It was hard to process everything that he had gone through during that day and he honestly felt like he deserved a metal for not breaking down and screaming for everything to stop.

“I’m not going to back out of this, now or ever,” the Sin said, his voice hard and determined. “Like I said when I first found out. You and I made this baby from Lust, which is my domain. I want to help you raise them and support you both for all the work you’re doing for me.”

“It’s just pregnancy,” Blitz argued, feeling his cheeks heat with embarrassment.

“I had to watch my dad go through the pregnancy with Charlie and Satan, I know that shit is hard work,” Ozzie shook his head. There was a slight faraway look in his eyes, which meant that there was probably something more to that story that he wasn’t saying. Blitz wanted to pry deeper, not only so that he could know more about the royal family for the sake of pure curiosity, but so that he could know more about Ozzie. The Sin had been imposing in the beginning, but he made Blitz feel assured of himself and safe in a way that no one had before. It was intoxicating and fun, he wanted as much of it as he could get his hands on.

They sat in silence for a while longer before the conversation drifted back to the apartment. Blitz regretted not asking questions about Ozzie’s family and past when he had the chance, but he knew that his living situation was more important. Eventually, they decided that Blitz would move to the apartment in Pride and get a certain amount of money every month that would cover his utilities and other necessities, fluctuating depending on the age and needs of the baby. Blitz would have to work for the things he wanted or didn’t need to live, but he had a safety net to fall back on now that he was carrying the Heir of Lust in his womb.

---

A week had passed since the last time that Ozzie and Blitz had talked in person. They corresponded often over text, the Sin asking how Blitz felt three times a day. The hybrid knew that the other being was just as worried about the baby as he was, which was reassuring. He still wasn’t super used to someone caring about things that he did with the same level of passion and commitment, but he was adjusting slowly. Every time that he got that text on his phone, he would reply with exactly how he was feeling and an assurance that the baby was okay.

By the time that the scheduled ultrasound came around, they were both so nervous that they were entirely silent from the club to the clinic. Blitz was picking at spots on his arm and face, the lines of his burn scars now agitated and leaking black blood. He hadn’t done something like that since he was a kid, back when he still had acne to fuss over in the mirror every day. It was a soothing motion but also one that was very obviously destructive, which in a weird way helped settle him down more.

They got up from the seats in the waiting room and went through the whole process of getting the vitals and weight checked out. Instead of going to one of the private examination rooms, though, they were led to a larger room with a set of different machines up against one of the walls. The nurse had Blitz lay down on one of the paper-covered tables and promised that the technician would be in soon.

The duo continued to sit in silence once they got there. A half dozen joked with varying appropriateness came into Blitz’s mind and then left it just as quickly. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do in this situation since he and Ozzie weren’t together. He had begun to wonder what it would be like if they were romantically involved like so many other people who had created children together were.

That had led him down a rather dark rabbit hole where he remembered the way that all of his other relationships had turned out. He wasn’t a very easy person to love, he had always known that, he got scared when it came to commitment and did a lot of things that were viewed as very hurtful from the people he cherished. Back when he was dating as a younger twenty-something and teenager, that hadn’t mattered. It was just him and he had already faced the worst things that could happen to a person post-fire. Now, it was different. He wasn’t just worrying about himself, his livelihood, he had a child to worry about. If he got involved in a romantic relationship with Ozzie, then it could cost him his child and his child one of their parents. While he trusted Ozzie with the safety and health of his baby, he also knew explicitly what it was like to grow up knowing that one parent didn’t want to be present on purpose.

A knock on the door broke him from his thoughts and he looked up. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Dr. Layla coming in with the technician. “Hello to you both. I don’t usually come with for this kind of thing, our technicians are very capable, but given the stressful situation I thought that it would be better if I was present,” she smiled kindly.

“Yeah, I think that would be for the best,” Blitz nodded. He was aware that the technician wouldn’t have gotten hired onto this job if they weren’t competent, but it made him feel better to have the doctor that had understood him so well before working with him again.

“My name is Ash, I’ll be checking you out and letting you two get a picture of your baby today!” the technician smiled kindly. “You’re lucky enough to have come in after we stop using the vaginal probe, so I’ll need you to roll up your shirt and push down your pants so that your whole belly is exposed.”

Blitz did as he was asked, just as he had done for Dr. Layla when she had palpated his abdomen. He didn’t like having his hands off of his tiny bump, not when there were other people in the room and individuals that he didn’t know for sure. He understood that this was very important for the health of his child and for the mental well-being of himself and others. He rolled his shirt up so that it was sitting underneath his bralette and his pants were down around his boxers. It revealed the entirety of the tear-drop shaped bump, which made him realize that he was already a bit bigger than he thought he should be for where he was in his pregnancy.

“This is going to be a bit cold, I have tried to warm it up a little,” Ash warned as they presented a bottle of clear liquid that looked very much like lube. They turned the bottle upside down and then squirted a decent sized amount onto his belly before doing the same to the wand in their hand. They then turned the wand upside down and began to spread the gel around like they always did in the movies. Once they had finished with that, they began to move slower over the apex of his stomach while squinting at the screen. After a moment, they smiled and turned the screen towards them, “This is your uterus, all this black space is the fluid that the baby sits in. Here you can see the placenta, it’s attached very nicely to your uterus and the umbilical cord appears to be in the exact location we want it in.”

Both parents turned to Dr. Layla to get a bit more infirmation, which she was happy to provide. “The placenta is against the back wall of your uterus, which means that you’re going to be able to feel it when baby moves, and the umbilical cord is attached to the center which allows for the majority of the blood flow to go right to baby. It’ll let them grow big and strong until they’re ready to be born and shouldn’t give you any fits when it’s time to deliver.”

The good news made Blitz’s shoulders droop with relief. He had been sleeping fitfully due to a surprisingly high amount of nightmares that informed him he was moments away from waking up to blood all over the sheets, again. “What about the heart? Is the heart okay?”

“We’re getting there, it’s alright,” Ash soothed. They probably had to deal with very worried people all the time, it wasn’t just a whim to get an ultrasound after all.

They moved the probe down further, the screen blurring with black patches and gray moving blobs. Finally it settled down and the technician grinned. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing, doc?”

“I believe that I am, and it would explain what I heard with the doppler!” Dr. Layla beamed. “Blitz, I would like to be the first person to inform you that you are expecting a beautiful pair of twins!”

“Holy fucking shit,” Blitz whispered. He knew that his eyes had gone comically wide and his face was probably chalky and pale. Part of him was so excited to be having twins since he was a twin himself, but the other part of him was terrified that history was going to repeat itself. What if his babies ended up hating each other the way that Barbie hated Blitz? What if he ended up ruining another pair of twins because he destroyed everything that he touched?

Ozzie gasped and stood up next to him, staring at the screen like the images on it were going to disappear if he so much as blinked. He had taken Blitz’s hand when they had entered into the clinic and hadn’t let go, which was a testament to how nervous they both were. Now, he brought Blitz’s hand up to his mouth and kissed the back of it adoringly. “We’re going to have two babies! This is the greatest honor that I have ever received.”

The reaction from the other being was enough to jerk him out of his panicked thoughts, “What? Honor?”

Ash cleared their throat. “I’ve heard that you grew up in the tribes, which means you probably don’t know a lot about succubus culture, right?”

“As fucking embarrassing as it is, yeah. My mom thought that there were more important things to teach me at the time and then her time was cut a little short,” he admitted. He felt tears welling in the corners of his eyes and then embarrassment swelled through him. While he wasn’t sure that he was ever going to be ‘over’ the death of his mother, he had stopped crying about her and everything that reminded him of her a long time ago. It was hard to regress back to the place that he had been before now that the hormones from the pregnancy were changing the way that his body worked.

“Well, in concubus culture, pregnancy is revered. It’s considered to be borderline holy to create another being through the power that comes with us. Having multiples means that you’re even holier than you would be if you were having one,” they explained as they continued to move the wand around to get different angels of the babies. “Your partner there is telling you that it’s an honor to have a child with you because you are creating life, which is the apex of our purpose.”

“Woah,” Blitz whispered. He had known that children were very important and pregnant people were to be treated gently in tribal imp culture, but his mother really had no time to teach him anything about where she had come from. He wasn’t even sure if she had known that, he had heard stories of how hard Cash had worked her when she was having him and Barbie. He knew that his mother had been adopted by her mothers, his grandmothers, when she was about six after her father had passed away of Cancer. He wondered if she would be excited that he was having twins or scared for him, scared that he would fall down the same path that she had.

The appointment moved on through the normal beats that would occur during an anatomy scan. They showed off the fingers, toes, and all other things that they could see from the twins. He learned that they shared a placenta, which meant that they were more likely to be identical, but had separate amniotic sacs. It was wonderful to get to see their little kicks and movements on the grainy black and white screen, but it was even more exciting to know how soon he would be able to feel those movements on the skin instead of mistaking it for a muscle twitching or gas.

It was ruined just a bit by the constant confirmation that Ozzie could never be his partner. He may be revered and cherished while he was growing life, but soon he would birth them into the world and then he would no longer be appreciated in that way. Ozzie would be able to take their little ones to live the privileged life of royalty, leaving Blitz with a broken heart and nothing to show for it once more. After all, time and time again it had been shown that all Blitz had to do was say the wrong thing once before he was dropped harder than yesterday’s beef.

“Do you want to know the gender of the twins today or would you prefer to wait until they’re born?” Ash asked.

“Uh, we’ve got to think of two names. I’m not thinking of four because I don’t know which gender they are,” Blitz declared. Given that he was trans, not that it was as big of a deal in tribal culture as it was in the common landscape of Hell, he didn’t think that it was super important to decorate the nursery with pink or blue. He just wanted to be able to think of a proper name and see if he could give one of his children his mother’s name, as a way to honor her since she never had been in life.

He realized that he wasn’t alone in the room when he felt a hand squeeze his own and he turned his head to the side, “is that okay?” he asked Ozzie.

“I don’t see why not. My siblings did want to throw you a party, but we can do a gender reveal for everyone else instead of just for us,” Ozzie said with a little shrug.

Blitz turned back to the technician and said, “Can you find out and then write it down? That way I can give it to my sister-in-law and she can figure out a way to reveal it at my baby shower.”

It still felt weird for him to be that involved in the lives of the royal family, but he was going to have to get used to it. He and Ozzie may not have been in love or romantically involved in any way, but it was important for him to feel as though he were a proper presence in his children’s lives even before they were born. If that meant holding off on the name search until after Ozzie’s siblings had thrown him a baby shower with a gender reveal, then so be it.

“Let’s see if they’re cooperating then,” Ash nodded. They turned the screen away from the expectant parents and then began to move the probe around again. Dr. Layla peaked over their shoulder to confirm and speculate as well. After about five minutes of whispering between the two of them, Ash got a paper and wrote down the genders before sealing it in an envelope.

Blitz took it when it was offered to him and then passed it over to Ozzie, “Make sure that Charlie gets this.”

“I’ll make sure that whatever she does is kind of subdued,” Ozzie assured him, bringing Blitz’s hand up to his mouth so that he could kiss the back of it.

“Hey, if she wants to waste a bunch of fireworks on me then that’s her decision,” he chuckled. The idea actually scared him, mostly because it might alert dangerous forces to the presence of his twins, but he wasn’t going to argue with the Princess of Hell.

---

When Blitz was six months pregnant, his life changed substantially again.

He was still working at the club, but he did fewer shows and wasn’t choreographed to do anything nearly as dramatic as he had been doing before. He understood the caution given the state that he was in, but he did miss it. He was glad that he was still getting paid the same salaried amount, but it honestly felt like he was taking from the other performers that had to pick up on his slack. None of them seemed to mind and the older ones even brought in baked goods in exchange for attempting to feel the babies move before anyone else did.

He had been packing up his apartment in Greed since he and Ozzie had discussed the fact that he would be moving. He had to be really slow and subtle about it because his lease didn’t end until he was six months. He knew that if someone picked up on the fact that he was moving and then ratted him out to his landlord, then he could lose his deposit or have to pay an extra large fee for breaking his lease even though he wasn’t planning on it. So he had to sneak plants and boxes to Ozzie’s apartment in Pride every time that he went to work or went to an appointment. It was slow going, but it meant that on the day that his lease ended, he was able to get the rest of his necessities out and into his van. It was nerve-wracking to drive away from the apartment with all of the things that had come with it still inside, including the last month’s rent and a letter saying that he wouldn’t be renewing it.

He arrived at the apartment after an hour or so of driving and then grabbed the box of his most treasured belongings. He got up to the apartment with the special key that Ozzie had given him and let himself in. “Oh, honey, I’m home,” he said in an extended voice, trying to parody the human shows that VoxTek sometimes ran when production was slow on the other projects.

“Welcome back!” Ozzie called from one of the bedrooms. They had discussed the move extensively over the phone and it had been decided that if the Sin had finished his work early then he would be able to come and help, but he had a lot to do that day. Blitz couldn’t ignore the way that his heart sped up at the idea of someone so powerful doing something so kind for little him.

He shook his head to try and get the thoughts to leave him alone as he took in the rest of the apartment again. He’d already brought several boxes in, so they were littered around the counter, walls, and anywhere else that he could put something down. The layout of the apartment was fairly straightforward, with the tile of the kitchen drifting into hardwood to dissect the spaces where the island didn’t already accomplish that. There was a small sitting area against one wall that would allow for more formal dinners, three chairs already next to it with two high chairs in boxes on top of it. To the left of the living room was a hallway that led to three bedrooms, one of them set up to be a rather distant guest bedroom and the other filled to the brim with baby stuff as it was becoming the nursery. The last bedroom was the master because it had an en suite, and it was also where Blitz was going to be staying.

Ozzie poked his head out of the communal bathroom and then his eyes drifted down to the box, “You shouldn’t be carrying that, you know.”

“It’s the lightest box in the van and I couldn’t just turn up here totally empty handed. I’ve got your huge kids pressing against my spine right now and that means that if I’m going to walk, I have to make sure that I’m multitasking.”

“Alright, fair point. Remind me not to argue with you in the future,” Ozzie chuckled, his blue eyes twinkling mischievously.

“Man if you keep smiling at me like that then I’m going to fall in love with you,” Blitz huffed. He had meant to keep it in his own head, but he had been talking out loud to the twins since he had read that they could hear him even while they were in the womb. He tried to ignore the way that his cheeks flushed darkly when he realized what he had done and continued to bring the box in.

The silence between them could have been cut with a butter knife, but Ozzie was smooth enough that he was able to bring it back to somewhere that felt livable. “If you give me the keys to your van then I can bring everything up for you. That way you can focus on unpacking everything here. That will be less stressful on your body, right?”

“Uh, yeah, should be,” Blitz nodded. He set the box down on the coffee table and then wandered to the bathroom. He sat down on the floor and began to unpack the box containing all the extra bathroom supplies he had, storing them under the sink and in their proper cupboards. There was already quite a bit of stuff in the apartment from when Ozzie had lived in it temporarily to spend time with his siblings, which made it feel a bit like Blitz was moving in with him.

He’d never actually moved in with one of his partners before because they had never gotten that far, but he had dreamed about it. He knew that he and Ozzie weren’t together and they weren’t moving in with one another, but he couldn’t help the way that his heart ached with longing for it.

They worked together in silent unison for the rest of the afternoon. Blitz went from room to room as he unpacked the things that Ozzie had brought upstairs and what he had already placed in the apartment. Moving his plants around so that they were all getting the appropriate amount of sunlight was what had taken up the majority of the time, but it was also hard to bend down and put all of his clothes away. The sun had begun to set over the horizon by the time that Ozzie knocked on the door that led into Blitz’s bedroom.

“Hey,” the hybrid smiled at him as he held his belly and slowly moved into a standing position. It was getting harder and harder for him to move now that he was noticeably showing, his balance was more off than it had been in his entire life. He was happy about it though, because that meant that the twins were growing big and strong under the protective hand the kept on them.

“I was thinking of getting some dinner. You feeling anything specific?” he asked.

“I want really greasy fried Chinese food,” Blitz grinned. “Like, the unhealthiest thing for me in the entire world.”

He had expected the Sin to argue with him about it. He was carrying the future heirs of Lust, it made sense that the king would want his diet to be strict and healthy so that the kids wouldn’t come out maladapted or anything. Instead, what he got was a smile that made him feel like he was going to die, “Coming right up. Would you like to make the cribs with me while we wait for it to come?”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Blitz nodded. He had come with very little, so most of the unpacking that he had to do was picture frames and private items. He didn’t really want to do that while someone else was in the house, so he was happy to leave it for the time being.

The duo walked over to the next room that they were going to transform into the nursery. Apparently Ozzie’s siblings had already come and painted the walls so that they were more neutral, other than the nursery. The nursery was painted a pastel yellow color with a dark blue ceiling that had glow-in-the-dark stars in perfect constellations stemming out from the cloud light in the center of the room. Blitz sat down on the ground beside one of the crib boxes and then got to work on that. Ozzie began to attach the shelves and bookcases to the wall where they had discussed their locations.

The conversation stayed quiet for a while, before they began to talk about baby names. As much as Blitz had said he didn’t want to have to come up with four names since they didn’t know either gender, it was fun to think of names. Ozzie’s were all somewhat related to Heaven and the old times since that was his only experience, but he seemed really open to the circus and tribal names that Blitz suggested.

They were now sitting on the big sunflower rug in the center of the nursery with the food spread out next to them. Blitz took a massive bite out of his wanton and then let out a happy moan, snacking down on it even harder when it began to satiate his craving. Once he had filled his belly enough to feel like he wasn’t going to die from lack of food, he said, “So for girls names what do we have?”

“Dahlia, Tilly, Aurelia, Kalypso, Andromeda, and Clementine,” Ozzie said, counting the numbers off on his fingers despite the chopsticks he held in one hand.

“I don’t like Saints names, I knew too many kids named Dahlia when I was growing up. Tilly is also pretty close to my mothers, so if we could use that as a potential middle name instead?” Blitz asked hopefully.

“Of course! Don’t worry about honoring my parents with middle names either. I think that it’s weird to do it to someone still alive in the realm you exist in and I hate my father,” Ozzie said as he popped a bit of food into his mouth.

“I thought that you and Lucifer were really fucking close or whatever. It’s all the tabloids ever print about, since Lilith left and stopped causing drama,” Blitz commented. He didn’t pay a ton of attention to the news because it was very sinner-centric, but it was important to know some things about the royal family. Lilith had disappeared around the same time that the exterminations had started, but no one knew why and had gotten bored of speculating very early. Instead, they focused on the attention the Lucifer was giving his children since he hadn’t been seen since the youngest prince and princess were born.

“Lucifer is technically my mother. I was conceived and born in Heaven, the first to fall but not the first to land,” he explained with a shrug. “My other father is still in Heaven. He watched us fall and did nothing to stop it. It’s one of my earliest memories, including the pain that I felt because of how damaged my wings became when I was thrown out.”

“Jeez,” Blitz wrinkled his nose. He wasn’t sure what was worse, the abuse the Cash had dolled out on him or the neglect that whoever Ozzie’s father was had done. “We’re both going to be better parents than our dads, right?”

“Of course we are. I mean, look at all the effort we’re already putting in!” he grinned, spreading his arms out to show off the nursery. It was already coming together, even if they were missing a couple of things that Blitz hoped they would get at the baby shower that Charlie and Satan were putting on.

He set his food down and stood up, one hand under the swell of his stomach and the other grasping at the mostly finished crib. He let out a yelp of surprise when the item moved to the left and then suddenly he was falling. Before he had the chance to hit the ground, he felt a pair of steady arms around his waist to guide him down safely.

He laughed when he looked up and saw that Ozzie had caught him and the comfortable place that he had landed just so happened to be the Sin’s lap. “Fancy meeting you here,” Blitz chuckled.

“Are you sure that you’re okay to continue working?” Ozzie asked. His hands moved as if they were possessed, shifting around Blitz’s waist so that they were resting on his heavy belly instead. He threaded his fingers underneath the slope and then shifted the way that his arms were so that he had taken most of the weight off of the imp’s struggling hips.

Blitz let out a happy moan and melted back into the hold of the incubus demon. “Hey, this was a freak accident. If you ever bothered to show up to the club anymore then you would be able to see how elegant and sexy I am when I swing from those silks,” he grinned. If he was being honest, he wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to last through the entire nine months while working. He was able to keep his balance better than other pregnant people might have if they were doing his job, but the fact that he was carrying two babies made his bump heavier than the standard person’s would be.

“Mm, I’m going to have to take you up on that,” Ozzie purred. He leaned down and nibbled at the underside of Blitz’s jaw just the way that he liked it. He had never been someone that was huge on pain and sex, but he did like the feeling of his partner’s teeth digging into his skin. He let out a breathy little sigh as he exposed more of the skin to Ozzie so that he could keep up the good work.

Both of the demons went absolutely still when they felt something that they had never felt before. Blitz shifted so that he was sitting in Ozzie’s lap with his back to the Sin’s chest. He placed both of his hands down on the baby bump and waited until he felt it again, the soft bumping of a hand or a foot against his palm.

“I think that the babies are moving!” Blitz gasped. He had been waiting for that to happen, because it meant that someone was going to be able to feel it from the outside instead of him only being able to feel it when they rolled over or got extremely rowdy.

“Woah,” Ozzie breathed. He released the weight of the bump slowly before he began to focus on trying to feel their children squirming around inside of Blitz.

“Isn’t it cool? I’m so glad that some of the other dangers at your club have been pregnant before otherwise I would have thought that this was a contraction or something,” he laughed. It was scary being pregnant when his mother had died several years ago, because while she had taught him about the medical parts of pregnancy there was something different about going through the process himself. It was nice to know that he still had a village around him, even if it wasn’t the one that he had always envisioned himself having.

Ozzie’s hands moved reverently down the front of his stomach to the underside, where he felt another small kick. “You’re really having my babies,” he whispered like it was something he was just realizing.

“Glad that you finally processed that fact, big guy,” he chuckled.

“This is amazing,” Ozzie whispered, nuzzling further into him.

Blitz just smiled as they continued to sit like that together until he had to pee for the fortieth time that day. He felt right at home in the arms of the Sin, settled and reassured that he was appreciated.

---

Part Three: The Birth

Being nine months pregnant was going to drive Blitz entirely and utterly insane. He was massive, his belly barely fitting in any of the maternity clothes that he hadn’t altered himself. He struggled to get out of his chair or bed whenever he sat down and his back ached all the time. He had continued to be active even as he got into the third trimester, which kept him relatively limber and helped with the waddling just a smidge. He couldn’t imagine how much worse he would have been if he hadn’t done that.

He had taken leave early from the club since it was stressing both him and Ozzie out to have his body presented in the club with only silk preventing him from falling. He spent most of his time watching shows, practicing his horse drawing skills, and looking into what had happened at people in his circus.

Ozzie had told him that he was helping a young imp get prosthetics after a fire had turned him into a quadriplegic. It wasn’t hard to put together that it was Fizz, so he had begun to look into the real reason that the fire had taken out so much of the circus. It didn’t make sense that birthday candles had managed to set the entire thing ablaze like that, and it wouldn’t have been burning hot enough to burn the caravans down to the ground. He had always liked the idea of being a PI, it sounded interesting for a job and he was bored out of his mind.

Something else had to have happened during the fire that had caused it to go so out of control so quickly. So far, he had been able to get in contact with Wally, the imp who had been holding the cake, and gotten a confirmation that he also thought it was strange. His father was nowhere to be found and had likely let the tribe dissolve, but he was digging further and further into the matter. Blitz had a half-written letter that was going to go to Fizz as soon as he had some actual answers to show. He wasn’t going to try and get sympathy from the imp that he had hurt so badly, he just wanted to give Fizz the same kind of closure that he would get when he found out what had really happened. That way, it would be easier for Ozzie to pursue whatever romance was blooming with the imp and raise the twins with Blitz.

He had been sitting on the couch for an hour when he got a twinge in his back. He thought that it was simply from not having moved very much during the day, but then he remembered that he had lost his mucus plug the night before. His hands were shaking as he reached out to the side of the couch and grabbed his beaten phone.

It took a moment of slow breathing and rationalization before he set his phone down, forgoing the decision to call Ozzie about his possible labor. He got up off the couch and began to wander around the apartment so that he could make sure everything was in its place. The guest room was littered with work from the Sin since they were both more comfortable with him staying around now that the due date was coming closer and closer. They had been warned by Dr. Layla that the twins would likely come early since they would simply run out of room, but the succubus side of Blitz seemed to be coming in handy for him again as he had already passed the thirty five week mark.

Ozzie was going to be staying until the babies came and then for about six months afterwards to help with the adjustment period. Neither of them really wanted to have to ween the babies early and Blitz wasn’t super keen on switching to only pumping. He’d always had a dream of being able to take time off when he had young children, the way that every new birthing parent in the circus got to. With the maternity leave that he had from the club and the financial security that Ozzie was providing him with, he did actually have that chance. Given his desires, it didn’t make a lot of sense for him to suddenly switch to only pumping so that he could send his babies away for a week at a time when they were barely even half a year old.

Somehow, Blitz had found himself in the nursery. He settled down in the rocking chair that was positioned underneath the window. He placed both of his hands on his heavy belly and began to rock slowly back and forth to soothe the nerves that were growing in the pit of his stomach. He knew that labor could come at any point and it was going to be happening soon thanks to the other things that his body had been going through, but the idea was still very scary. He had seen dozens of women give birth with various ease and complications alike, but it was different to be going through the process himself.

He had allowed himself a bit of cognitive dissonance while staring out across the grimy skyline of Pentagram City for nearly an hour. When he had five contractions within that timeframe, he knew that this wasn’t a false alarm. He’d had those a few times before, but was able to catch it before Ozzie had the chance to check his phone and then freak out.

Now, the real thing was happening and he was sure that by the next morning he was going to be a parent. The idea was as thrilling as it was terrifying, thinking of the next two decades that he would spend having two little beings asking everything of him. He knew that he would give it to them in a heartbeat, but that didn’t stop him from worrying if he would be able to provide for them like he dreamed.

He tried to center himself by focusing on getting through the next couple of hours. He’d always had bad cramps on his cycle, which made the contractions seem like a slightly elevated but not too egregious version of that, but he knew it was likely going to get even more painful.

Blitz grabbed his phone and texted Ozzie to let him know that it was baby time. Barely five minutes had passed before a swirling blue portal opened up with the Sin of Lust, in his fully demonic form, slipping through and into the room. “Are you okay?” Ozzie asked, his eyes wide and worried.

“Uh, yeah?” Blitz answered. “I did tell you how far apart the contractions were, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know, I only got as far as the first sentence,” Ozzie admitted a bit sheepishly. He shifted down into his incubus form and something inside of Blitz settled. It could have been the fact that he didn’t like demons who were literally looking down on him, he’d had that problem with royals before, but it might have also been because he and Ozzie were compatible as partners when he was in that form.

“Labor can take fucking days, Oz,” Blitz chuckled. “I told you that my contractions were far apart so that you would finish up your work and then help me out, I didn’t expect you to come home in a total tizzy.”

“Well, uh, I was just worried. When my dad had the twins they came after like five minutes of him being in labor,” Ozzie explained. He looked like a chastised child as he sat down on the couch beside Blitz, wringing his hands in front of him. “I’ll never forget how scared he was when my Aunt Bel delivered them. I didn’t want you to feel like that.”

Blitz felt his heart melt in his chest and he reached his hand up to cup the other man’s face. “You are the sweetest person that I have ever met in the history of forever,” he commented.

“I’m just being a basically decent person. One of these days I’m going to track down that father of yours and read him the riot act for the way that he made you feel when you were growing up. Now, are we ready to have a baby?” Ozzie asked.

The joke that he was going to make about Ozzie not really being the one to have the babies died on his tongue. Instead, he just nodded his head and began to get things ready. He wasn’t going to say that Ozzie was an absent father or hadn’t been as involved in the situation as Blitz was, because while he wasn’t carrying the children he was obviously trying very hard to participate. He had dropped everything that he was doing at work to come home when Blitz had simply texted him that the babies were going to be coming in the next day or so.

---

Blitz got to eat a lot of carbs and protein with that meal so that he would have plenty of energy for the coming ordeal. He sipped on water to stay hydrated as they watched his favorite movies, pausing them when the world would go black because he was having a contraction. The app on Ozzie’s phone was getting its work out for the first time since they had downloaded it when Blitz had hit the seven month mark.

They continued to grow stronger and more frequent. The pain was even and steady, which encouraged Blitz because he knew that nothing was going to stall if he kept going on that trajectory. Outside of the normal fears that came with giving birth, he had been terrified of the pain lasting for far longer than normal or endangering the babies inside of him. The contractions lasted about a minute each, sometimes differing as Blitz got better or worse at handling the pain depending on the way that he was sitting or what he had been doing. They came at about every ten minutes, then jumped to seven, then down to four.

At that point, they called Dr. Layla. She didn’t normally did home deliveries because it wasn’t standard in the living world anymore. Blitz had grown up where everyone’s homes were also their hospitals, so he felt more comfortable delivering his children in the safety of the apartment that he had carved a place for himself into. She had agreed to give them special treatment since she also missed being able to practice as she had been taught to before she became a sinner.

The midwife arrived only twenty minutes after they had called her. She got Blitz to his room and then checked the progress that he was making, just to be sure that the contractions weren’t just for show. She had Blitz place the pads of his feet together and then move them as close to his bottom as he could, inserting two fingers into his vaginal canal after placing gloves on. “I can assure you both that wonderful progress is happening! You’re going to see your twins soon,” she beamed at them both.

Blitz couldn’t ignore the way that his heart fluttered madly in his chest and excitement rushed through him. He was fixing his pants when he turned to look at Ozzie. He hadn’t sent the Sin out of the room because he knew that Ozzie was going to be seeing a lot more before the process was over, it also felt good to have him there for every single part of the delivery process. “Did you hear that? We’re going to be parents soon,” he grinned.

“I know! You’re so amazing,” Ozzie whispered as he knelt down in front of Blitz and kissed him sweetly. When he pulled away, they were both blushing and a bit shocked that it had just happened. They knew that it wasn’t time to talk about it, not when Blitz was consumed with another contraction.

---

Now that the midwife was present, they had a bit more direction than they had before. She instructed Blitz to bounce on the yoga ball so that they could get the babies down into the birth canal and hopefully into the right direction. When he had finished with that, he paced around the house to try and help gravity work things down into the right position. It ended up working to a point, because his water began to leak a trail from the kitchen to the living room before he had noticed that something was wrong.

“I am leaking!” he shouted as he felt the patch on his pants grow bigger and bigger. “I swear to fucking shit this better not be piss.”

“Even if it was, neither of us are going to judge you for that. You’re bringing children into the world and that’s not known to be the most elegant experience,” Dr. Layla informed him. She brought him to the bathroom and then sat him down on the toilet as she dealt with his dirty pants and underwear.

Ozzie sat down in front of him, a small smile creeping over his features and his hand trailing words and markings onto Blitz’s leg. “Are you scared?”

“Honestly? Not as much as I thought I fucking would be,” he chuckled. “I like having you here, makes it feel like I can actually do this.”

“You can,” Ozzie said. His brilliant blue eyes were sparkling with a kind of emphasis that Blitz never thought that he was going to be getting. “You’re the strongest person that I have ever met and you’re so resilient.”

“I’m just giving birth, you don’t have to give me a speech like I’m trying to fight Heaven,” Blitz flushed. The kiss from earlier was still sitting in his mind like an elephant in the room.

“I think that you could fight Heaven by yourself if you set your mind to it,” Ozzie grinned. He laughed when he got a punch to the shoulder from the imp. He gave a little pout afterwards and earned a kiss to the spot to make up for it. They had joked that they were practicing for when their kids came after they found themselves doing that to each other. It was a nicety now that everything was in the process of changing, it cemented that his friend was still there and still ready to help raise the babies working their way into the world. “I’m serious though, Blitz. You’re so unimaginably strong and resilient, you’re going to be able to get through this like breathing.”

They stared at each other with wide eyes, the air hanging heavy with the unspoken words. Blitz could feel his heartbeat pick up in a way that was completely unrelated to the babies squirming around in his belly. All he could think about was the deal he had made himself, that he wouldn’t catch feelings and he wouldn’t act on anything even if he did. Ozzie was the other parent to his babies and while he was handsome, supportive, kind, and generous, there was no way that their relationship would go anywhere but down. Blitz’s family and many of the other members of the circus had reminded him time and time again that there was nothing he could touch that wouldn’t break, including and especially relationships. He wasn’t going to ruin his babies’ chances at getting to know such a wonderful man as their father nor was he going to risk a custody battle that would leave him once again alone.

“He’s right, you know,” Dr. Layla said from the doorway.

The duo snapped apart and let her come in so that she could finish her job.

---

She helped Blitz stand once the amniotic fluid had stopped dribbling out of him and he went back onto the yoga ball. He clung to the edge of his bed so that he could rock back and forth without the risk of toppling over if he went just a little too far in either direction. Ozzie sat behind him and rubbed his back, especially down around his hips.

It quickly got too hot for him in the room that he was laboring in. He removed his shirt so that he was entirely bare, not that either other person in the room really seemed to mind. They had turned the AC on, which was actually functional in the apartment thanks to the money that Ozzie had been able to shovel into something that Blitz would never have even dreamed of affording. He knew that the doctor and his co-parent had to be absolutely freezing in the room, but he still felt as though he was roasting even with it cranked all the way up.

He began to let out small groans of pain whenever the contraction reached its climax. Now that the cushion of the amniotic fluid had left, everything felt so much more than it had before. He reached his hands onto the edge of the bedframe and began to dig his claws into it when the pain was beginning to occur. The anticipation of it was the worst thing, because he could deal with the pain when it was there but the memory of what it had been four minutes ago was so much worse than the experience.

“I’m going to explode,” Blitz grumbled after he had been laboring for an additional two hours after his water had broken. The contractions had changed the way that they felt, now tightening his belly to a frankly ridiculous amount while bringing what he could only describe as pressure throughout him.

“You’re not going to explode,” Dr. Layla chuckled. She knelt down on the ground in front of him while Ozzie moved behind Blitz to help him stand properly. She put another pair of gloves on and then checked his dilation before she gave him a bright smile. He kind of wanted to kick her for that, his contractions and labor were making him really grumpy. He held himself back because he did really like his doctor and didn’t want to chase her away, he just wanted to bite something. “In fact, you’re going to start pushing now and we’ll have the babies soon. Remember what we talked about?”

“Oh, oh shit. Oh fuck! Holy fucking balls!” Blitz gasped in surprise. He knew that pressure sometimes meant that the time to push was coming soon from the training with his mother, but hearing that said from another person brought into context just how close he was to making their twins.

“Do you remember or do you need a refresher, Blitz?” Dr. Layla asked again. She had gotten up so that she could make sure that they had all the supplies they would need for when the babies made their full debut.

“No, no, I remember,” he breathed. He could feel another contraction slowly beginning to cry up his back so that it could wrap around his hips and heavy belly. He readjusted his grip on Ozzie’s hands and then looked up to him for reassurance, which he got in the form of an excited-yet-nervous smile.

He turned his head back towards the wall that they were facing and then let out a huffing breath to get his confidence. He took in a lungful of air and grunted as he began to bear down. He didn’t even care that his bowels were moving with each push, all he could focus on was the massive baby that was descending through his birth canal as she got ready to be born. He only let it go when the contraction loosened its hold on him entirely, leaning back against Ozzie.

“Good! That’s wonderful, you’re doing it just right. Is this position working for you, Blitz?” Dr. Layla asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” he nodded. He had his eyes closed as he focused on the feeling of the baby sitting low in the birth canal and the hands that were holding him up. He groaned as another contraction began to creep up his back and then wrap around his belly, but he was able to use the pain and pressure that it brought to do something useful.

With every single push he was able to feel the baby moving lower and lower down inside of him. He let out a surprised cry of pain and stopped pushing in the middle of a contraction when all the nerves in his vulva suddenly felt like they were on fire. He panted as he tried to process what that feeling had been, his eyes now open and looking around for some kind of explanation despite it coming from inside him.

Dr. Layla placed her gloved hand on his leg and said, “You’re doing really well, you’re already crowning. It’s going to burn something fierce while you push but I know that you’re strong, you can do this.”

He looked at her with what he knew was fear, his heart was beating quickly from more than just the exertion of pushing. He set his jaw, gave his head a small nod, and then bore down as hard as he could when the next contraction came. It was easier to do it now that he was totally aware of what was happening, it was confusing when it was happening to him instead of to someone else.

He grunted and yelled out when the crown of fire really started, his vulva expanding as wide as it would go to get the apex of the baby’s head through the birth canal. He gasped and felt his knees buckle when suddenly he constricted down again and felt something slide from him entirely. “Knees, can’t hold myself up,” he mumbled.

“We can do that, come on, down you go,” Dr. Layla said with a slow nod to Ozzie. She had her hand between his legs, cupping whatever had just come out of him. He assumed that the baby’s head had finally been born, based on the way that he still felt incredibly overwhelmed by the amount of baby inside of him but his vulva was no longer actively being stretched to the maximum capacity that it could reach.

He was eased down so that he was kneeling before the doctor said, “I’ve checked for the cord and you’re good to push when you feel the urge. If you need to take a break then just pant for me for a while.”

“I don’t need a break,” he almost snapped. He felt bad for doing so, but his mind was so focused on giving birth that it was something floating around in the back of his thoughts instead. He would apologize for the way that he acted when the babies were out of him and healthy, for now they were the only thing that he could focus on.

He grunted and grasped Ozzie harder as he pushed again. The pain that came from the shoulders turning and exiting him was just as bad as the head, but it also felt a bit different because the shoulders were a wide oval instead of a circle. He felt his legs shake as the rest of the baby was delivered, sliding down into Dr. Layla’s hands, right before she brought the newborn to his chest and let him hold her.

Despite the fact that his body felt akin to what it had after the fire, his entire world narrowed down to the newborn in his arms. She was covered in black blood, vernix, and a lot of other gunk that he couldn’t quite name, but she was the most beautiful thing in the entire world to him. The tiny newborn had the beginning of horn nubs at her forehead, right where he had when he was her size. Her skin was a soft shade of pastel blue like Ozzie’s when he wasn’t in his Sin form. Her tiny fingers had a place where claws would grow in later, but for now they were absent entirely. Her nose and lips looked like Ozzie’s had in the pictures that Lucifer had been able to draw up in Blitz’s mind during the baby shower. She had a tail with a club at the end of it and hooved feet, a perfect mix of her parentage and grand-parentage.

“She’s amazing,” Ozzie whispered. He had shifted Blitz a bit so that the imp was laying down on the waterproof padding they had lined their floors with. It was easier for him to hold their daughter when he was no longer entirely vertical, so he didn’t mention anything about his sweaty back sticking to Ozzie’s bare thigh.

“She’s ours,” Blitz grinned. He lifted one of his fingers up and trailed the back of it over her chubby little cheek and jaw, reverently memorizing every single part of her. She was his baby, he had worked for nine months to make her inside of his body. He was flabbergasted that she had come from him when he was so used to the only thing he could bring being pain. She was beautiful and perfect and made from him, so something in him had to be good too.

Dr. Layla clamped and tied the cord before cutting it, setting the scissors back in the kidney dish so that no one would step on them. She asked, “Would you like me to bath the baby and get her in her bassinet or does one of you want to try and do that in the meantime? It has to be done before Number Two makes her appearance.” They had already discussed the facets of a vaginal delivery of twins that shared a placenta, so the next baby would come when she wanted to and they would go about business as usual while they waited.

“Yeah, you should do it,” Blitz said. He didn’t want to let go of his baby and he wasn’t sure how he felt about her being held by someone that wasn’t her partner, but he knew that the midwife had done this for her entire life and death, so she would treat the baby gently. The plus side of having a baby with a Sin was also that he could destroy anyone that tried to hurt their little one, which allowed him to give up some control. He would have done it himself, but he felt so shaky from the delivery of his baby that he wasn’t sure he could figure it out on his own.

“What were you thinking of naming her?” the midwife asked. She walked to the corner of the room where they had set up the baby washing station. The water was a little above room temperature from this point, having been incredibly hot when Blitz’s labor started in earnest. She dipped a rag into the water and then began to smooth it over the baby’s skin to get all of the stuff off of her.

“I think we wanted to meet them both before we decided which name went with which twin,” Ozzie said. They had settled on their names a little while after the baby shower that Charlie and Satan had thrown Blitz. The names, along with vines for one and the night sky for the other, had been painted onto the cribs in the nursery. They wouldn’t be used for another month or so as Blitz struggled to recover and the bassinet was a closer location, but it was the thought that counted.

“Sounds like a good plan to me,” Dr. Layla smiled. “Back in my day, people rarely knew that they were going to have twins before they started having contractions again. I knew women who thought that their afterbirth was another baby!” she laughed.

Blitz was glad that the science and education in Hell was better than it was in certain parts of Heaven. Almost everyone that he talked to knew the basics of pregnancy and what went into it, especially in the concubus circles. It must have been incredibly scary and difficult for people that knew nothing about pregnancy and had to go through the ordeal completely blind. It was terrifying for him and he had training in how to deliver babies and assist pregnant people, so it was likely so much worse without that baseline of knowledge. For what had to be the thousandth time, he thanked the Saints and his mother for everything that they had done for him during the process of bringing his children into the world.

He was drawn out of his thoughts when he felt a great rush of fluid between his legs. He looked down at the stained pad of cotton and newspaper, which was collecting everything that continued to spill out of him. “I think my water just broke again,” he commented.

Dr. Layla looked up from where she had finished swaddling the eldest twin and then grinned at him. “It most certainly did. This is good progress, it means that you’re going to be meeting your second child very soon,” she explained. She finished wrapping up the baby and then placed her down in the bassinet beside the bed, on the other side from Blitz so that it wouldn’t get bumped or knocked over during the process of everything. She had cried when she was born, like all babies did after going through something that traumatic, but now she had settled down to a couple of gurgles. It was as if she were reminding her parents that she was still there even though they weren’t directly hovering over her any longer.

“How much sooner?” Blitz asked. He didn’t like the fact that the pad underneath him was now squelching when he moved his legs a little bit, so he began the process of standing up. Before he could even put weight on his shaky legs, Ozzie’s hands were on his elbows and practically scooping him off the ground. The solid warmth of the twins other parent behind him reminded him that he was okay and that he could do this. He wasn’t sure what he would have done without that, probably handled the entire situation a lot worse than he currently was.

“Thanks,” he whispered. He remembered the kiss that they had shared earlier just as he got another contraction. The amniotic fluid had been the only thing keeping the other baby from being born, since he was already fully dilated, so he grunted as he began to bear down. He was almost relieved that the pain had wiped the image from his mind, had brought his heart back to racing because of the pressure and not because he felt like he was falling in love.

“Well done, you’re doing very well,” Dr. Layla murmured as she got the pad swapped out for another one and then helped him back down onto his knees. This time, he placed his hands down onto the ground as well. His hips were tilted low so that gravity could continue to help him, but his belly had shrunk enough that he was able to be in a different position than he had with the first.

He pushed for almost ten minutes before the second baby’s head began to crown. The same pain as before befell him and he pushed through it because he knew what would be coming. He paused and panted when he was told, allowing the midwife to check for the cord and rotate the shoulders. It was a strange feeling, but he felt almost meditative as he began to push again and delivered the rest of the little one.

The same processes as before were completed. He got the baby onto his bare skin and then assessed her features. They weren’t identical, the smaller of the two babies had his red skin and no horns. Her fingers lacked claws and likely always would, and her feet resembled that of a concubus instead of an imp.

Dr. Layla took the baby and then cut her cord before she went to wash her. The placenta was delivered just as the second twin was laid down in the cot next to her sister. They both seemed to settle once they had the other to cling to, which made Blitz’s heart ache something fierce.

Only a couple of years ago he had been a twin himself and had sought comfort in his sister the same way that his girls were doing to each other now. He knew that Barbie hated him because he had caused part of the accident that had burned down their circus and was blamed for it, but he wondered what she would have thought of him being a parent. He was sure that she would have been supportive of him if she had been there during the delivery, fussing over every aspect of it to make sure that everything went to the plan he had set. He knew that she would have cooed over her nieces like they were the most precious thing on the planet. Most important, she would have encouraged him to go forward with his relationship with Ozzie. She was good like that.

“I’m disgusting. Can I take a shower or something?” Blitz asked.

“Are you able to stand?” Dr. Layla asked as she inspected the placenta in the basin that she had caught it in.

“I can stand. His name is Ozzie and he has big hands,” Blitz said as he tilted his head back. Their eyes met and he felt another sprig of butterflies shoot throughout his body despite the exhaustion that was weighing so heavy on him. He could handle anything when Ozzie was by his side, he was absolutely and utterly sure of it.

“Then I would suggest getting a shower in, before the girls decide that they’re hungry and the rest of your attention goes to them,” the midwife replied.

Ozzie carefully placed an arm underneath Blitz’s legs and another one around his back. With a single smooth motion, he lifted the hybrid up and walked him to the bathroom. They had already placed a shower stool inside of the stall due to Blitz’s aching hips when he began to near his labor, so he got to sit down on that instead of having to stand entirely on his own. The water felt blissful and cool as it began to run over his body, but it was nothing compared to the washcloth covered in soap that Ozzie used to wash his sweaty body.

When the shower was over, he stepped into the special underwear that would track how much he was bleeding and help carry the flabby skin of his belly while his organs were returning to their rightful place. He dressed in sweatpants and a nursing bra but decided to forgo a top as he was carried back to the bedroom. Ozzie laid him down on the bed right as the twins woke up and set of a chain reaction with each other.

Dr. Layla helped them lift the babies up and then get them nursing. When she left, she took all the things that had been involved in the birth and gave them instructions to try and keep the twins on the same schedule so that the adults in the house could keep their sanity. They were both going to try their best, but Blitz was glad Ozzie was immortal when he heard the horror story she had to tell about twins keeping parents up constantly.

---

Parenting came naturally to Blitz, unlike so many other things. He was able to learn the sounds of the babies’ cries almost immediately after they were born. He was able to tell when they were hot, cold, hungry, tired, lonely, or needed to be changed. He was able to tell which one was Kalypso, the older of the two twins, and which one was Aurelia, the younger and smaller of the two.

The duo had gotten into a good rhythm with each other. Ozzie handled all the changings because Blitz was lucky enough that he didn’t have to supplement with formula and thus was nursing all the time. They would sleep during the night, usually in the same bed and waking each other up when it was their turn to do something. They slept late into the morning and then woke up around ten so that they could pretend to be alive until about eight. They ate hearty meals that were provided by their friends and family, keeping up their strength in that way.

It had been about sixteen weeks since the girls had been born and they were already so big, it absolutely baffled Blitz. He was glad that Ozzie was around to help him with the parenting so that he could be coherenting enough to watch the girls as they grew, he would be devastated if he didn’t get to have all of that simply because he was too tired.

Ozzie sat down beside him on the couch after placing Aurelia down in the playpen next to her sister so that they could be stimulated by a crinkle mat while doing tummy time. He cleared his throat and asked, “Blitz, can we talk?”

“We’re talking right now,” he said, though he knew that wasn’t what the Sin meant. He fidgeted when he saw the serious look in the other being’s eyes and then nodded, “Uh, yeah, we can talk.”

The worst of the worst was flashing through his mind as he waited for the Sin to collect his thoughts. Things had been going so well, and to Blitz that meant he was simply waiting for the other shoe to drop and everything to become awful again.

“So, I know that we agreed that we would just be friends. I want you to know that if you still want to be friends then I’ll respect that, but I have to get this off my chest,” Ozzie said. His gaze was flickering all over the room and his powder blue fingers were picking at the edge of the couch that they were on. He took a deep breath and said, "I love you. I've been in love with you for a while now. I hadn't wanted to tell because I was afraid that you wouldn't want me to be in your life anymore, but I can't keep pretending. I wake up to the thought of you, and at night, the thought of you helps me sleep. Your smile makes me forget my trouble, and your laugh is like music to me. You are so brave and handsome and smart, and I want nothing more to be in your life in any way I can be. I know that you hold fear from what had happened, and I have fear too, but I want to come home to you every night and wake up to you every morning. I love you Blitzø Buckzo."

There was a long moment of silence before Blitz said, “I love you too.”

“You do?” Ozzie asked, his brilliant eyes wide with shock.

“Yeah, I do. I have for a long time, I just didn’t want to make a move because of what happens every time I date someone. They always end up hating me and then vow to ruin my entire life, but with the kids I couldn’t let that happen. They’re so good though, perfect in literally every single fucking way. I know that I have good in me somewhere because that’s where they got it from, so I think that I can have a good relationship, especially if it’s with you,” he rambled awkwardly.

Blitz looked up just in time to be met with another kiss, similar to the ones that they had shared throughout the pregnancy. It was magical and perfect in all the right ways, even if they had done things a little backwards.

#fanfiction #fanfic #writing #ao3 #archive of our own #helluva boss #blitzo buckzo #helluva blitzo #helluva ozzie #helluva boss ozzie #ozzie x blitz #blitzo x ozzie #ozzie x blitzo #blitz x ozzie #fizzblitzozzie #pregnancy #childbirth #trans blitzo #trans blitz

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prettygreenpills · 2 years ago

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Can I call you mum?

summary: Larissa adopts you and you get a little scared

“Y/n, would you like to go with Miss Weems?” The woman you called mum for the past few years since you could remember called you and Larissa, the high blonde woman looked at you, gifting you with a smile. “It’s your choice honey.”

“I would love to,” you said quietly and hugged your jacket. You were already ready to leave.

“Alright. Miss Weems please sign the adoption papers here,” Mrs Rogers said and you were watching the pen sliding on the paper. What if she would decide to not take you?

“Here you go,” Larissa signed that paper and tossed it over to Mrs Rogers. Something inside of you tickled and you looked up at the woman. She was your family now.

“Thank you. I will tell Philip to take Y/n’s things to your car. It is really pleasant to see that you truly care for Y/n, I know she would be safe with you.”

“I am happy to hear that,” Larissa said back and Philip was already at the reception. He smiled at you sadly and took your suitcase where all of your clothes were.

When he helped you with your things getting into the car. When you got in, you just waved to Philip sadly, somehow knowing that you’ll never see him again.

“Can you tell me something about yourself Y/n, that we didn’t talk about yet?” Larissa asked you and you looked at her. You felt like you have told her about everything already. Looking at her with a little fear in your eyes, you started playing with your jacket.

“Well, there is nothing much to say really. I’m fifteen, but you already know that. I don’t know my parents and I really like you.”

“Are you happy? That I adopted you?”

“Yes I am,” you said with a little smile on your lips and when you realized that Larissa saw it, you turned away, looking out of the window.

“You should do that more often.”

“Why do you think so?” Asking her back immediately, you realized that it might’ve been a mistake.

“Because smile suits you. And I would like to see my daughter smiling a little more than I have already seen,” she explained to you and when she said that word “daughter” you felt something tickling in your chest.

You arrived to her house and all you could do was just watching the building. She lived in a really huge house and you were somehow really happy about it. All you knew was just the building where you have been for the past few years.

“Come, I’ll show you everything,” Larissa reached out her hand and you looked down at it. Taking it really slowly, you stepped next to her and took a deep breath.

“You live in here?”

“Yes. Do you like it?” She asked you back and you just nodded your head, not paying any attention to that your things were levitating straight to the house.

Larissa showed you everything. Her study, the bedroom, your bedroom, kitchen and the bathroom. There were so many other rooms and you were both walking through the house. Your heart felt so warm and you felt already so loved.

“Would you like to ask something?”

“Can I unpack in the bedroom?” You asked a little shyly and Larissa smiled, nodding her head. Your things appeared in the room and you took a deep breath.

“I will be in the kitchen okay? If you are not sure where it is, just call for me,” she smiled softly at you and you nodded your head. She stayed in the doors for few more seconds and you looked at her. Smiling, she walked away and left you alone in the room.

Sitting on the floor for some time, you were just absorbing the surrounding. You had a family now. She was your family. You lived in a house with her and she seemed to be happy with you.

When you were done with unpacking, what didn’t took you that long, you decided to change into more comfortable clothes. After that, you decided to go and search for a bathroom where you could take a quick shower before you went to search for Larissa.

She was in the kitchen just like she said. Sitting on the bar chair, she had her MacBook opened and she was clearly working on something. When you walked inside of the room, she closed the MacBook and looked at you.

“Hello Y/n,” she greeted you with a warm smile what made the corners of your mouth go a little up.

“Can I have a question?”

“Of course. What is it?” She turned to you with her whole body and she was giving you her full attention.

“Uhm… maybe it’s too soon or something but we know each other for some time,” you started slowly and also played with your fingers in front of your body.

“Come here darling, sit,” she pulled out the second bar chair for you and you followed her request, sitting down next to her. “What’s the issue Y/n?”

“I… You are like a parent to me now. Can I- I mean… Can I call you mum?” You asked a little worried about her reaction and looked up at her. Larissa had a huge smile on her face and you could see how her eyes were shining. “I mean I don’t want to call you Larissa since you’ve adopted me and I don’t know how should I call you…”

“You can darling,” she answered after you went silent for few seconds and she opened her arms. You immediately hugged her and rested your face on her chest.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me for such a thing. Have you unpacked already?”

“Yes. I put all of my clothes in the wardrobe, even though there are not much of them,” you said, pulling away softly to not hurt her.

“We could go shopping tomorrow if you’d like. And we can get ice cream on our way back home,” she offered. You were surprised by her reaction. This was how it felt to be a part of someone’s family?

“That sounds lovely,” you answered with a smile. “Uhm…”

“Yeah?”

“Can I have a question?” You asked and Larissa smiled even more.

“You don’t have to ask me that,” she said and brushed your cheek with her thumb. Feeling that warm from the inside you desired to feel for such a long time, made you a little more confident.

“Where is dad?”

When you saw her smile drop a little, you knew it was a bad question. You wanted to start apologizing immediately but as if Larissa knew what was about to happen, she started explaining.

“I don’t have a husband or a boyfriend. It will be just us for a bit of time,” she said, making you nod. “Actually there is a little thing happening between me and someone, but there will be no one else until you won’t feel comfortable with me enough.”

“I already feel comfortable with you,” answering her, you made her chuckle.

“If I will like someone, I will tell you. And of course ask you if it’s okay,” she promised, making it tickle inside of you.

“Thank you so much mum.”

“Of course. You’re my number one in my life,” your mum said and you felt like melting. All you have wished for in your whole life was the person you were living with now.

A mother, who would love you for who you were.

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fallenangelblade · 2 months ago

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uh oh it’s “cass is thinking about neverafternatural” hours once again

the thing about the spn multiverse is that. theoretically. neverafter could exist within the show’s existing canon. i mean they already had that whole thing with dorothy and oz so it’s like not even that far fetched.

anyway. i’m just thinking about dean trying to summon death (for an Empty rescue mission or otherwise) and being met with a snot-nosed pre-teen wolf girl in a red cloak.

he’s so confused but her name’s ylfa and then she says something certifiably insane about the three blind mice or lollipopcorn and dean knows with 100% certainty that he would kill and/or die for her. instantly adopted. that’s his monstrous death entity/daughter now.

they swap stories about how they defeated their respective authors. ylfa asks dean what he’s doing now that he has control of his destiny. he tells her it’s not that simple.

sure it is, she says.

she tells him all about mother goose and his true book, how everyone in the lands of neverafter got the chance to pen their own tale, finally. as it should be.

she gives him a scrap of paper and a drop of true ink, and tells him that when he’s ready, he can write a new story for himself, too.

#i think about these two all the TIME but i can’t believe i never thought about them interacting before #the thing is that no one else in the world is interested in this deeply niche crossover #but i WILL have to write this for my own personal reasons #anyway. them #dean winchester #ylfa snorgelsson #neverafternatural

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lxdymoon0357 · 1 year ago

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Hopefully it's not too late for a rasheinrey (Rashta x Heinrey) request 🤭

rashta and heinrey fake dating au where everyone thought these two are the penpals. Thank you sooo much !!

(Rashta and Heinrey are two creepy sociopaths whom I love, with my whole heart!!! Rashta is Sovieshu's adopted sister, not concubine and Sovieshu is in love with Kaufman while my aro/ace hcs of Navier prove she hates sappy shit, but sse's a funny, goofy and nice sister. not proofread. )

Fog of the heart..

It was a chilly morning the moment Rashta opened her window as she read the tiny piece of letter again and again, she got from this golden bird with purple eyes, she just caused during the breakfast banquet when she declared she was Heinrey’s pen pal because she knew her sister (Navier) didn’t like him and he was being pushy and being annoying…

As she read it gain, “Listen, if you butt in my business again, you won’t realize where it hit you.” Snickering to herself at this man being so dumb, she crumpled the paper and looked at the golden bird with purple eyes who seemed very angry before she stroked him and whispered to it, “If your owner doesn’t stop misbehaving with Rashta’s sister and Rashta herself, his kingdom will be removed off the map and cartographers will have to create a new map with more of Eastern Empire territory, got it?!” Rashta whispered to the bird with anger in her voice, the bird seemed shaken up before Rashta pulled out a tiny paper, writing an insult to him and tying it on the bird’s legs before Rashta went to Sovieshu’s room, walking through the many hallways and greeting those she saw on her way to Sovieshu’s office and as she reached there she saw Navier, her face pale and it looked as though she was about to throw up.

Worried for her as always Rashta ran up to her and asked in a worried tone, “Sister, are you okay? What happened?” Rashta asked rubbing Navier’s back before snapping her fingers and ordering a maid to bring Navier a glass of water the maid ran back and got a glass of chill water before Rashta handed it to Navier who gulped the glass down in a matter of seconds, before pointing towards Sovieshu’s office.

Thinking Sovieshu did something Rashta angrily turned towards the door before bursting through and what GOD nobody could prepare her for the sight he was about to see , Sovieshu and Kaufman making-out…though the sight did make Rashta coo on the inside she was still mad at the fact that it made her sister sick, so she yelled loudly, “EWWWW! STOP EATING EACH-OTHER’S LIPS!” Sovieshu and Kaufman both jerked away from each other while pulling away flinching while look at a fuming Rashta and a pouting Navier who still had a pale face and a few maids who were giggling at the banter. Looking at them Kaufman apologized profusely and blushingly , while Sovieshu only scolded them….

This banter was the usual of the household and it was something that occurred on a regular basis, and while Heinrey watched this, he learned that day that maybe there was more to royal family then he thought of them to be…Sovieshu taking in Rashta as his mistress and poor Navier being side casted, but actually Sovieshu took in Rashta as his sister and Navier was absolutely happy being single and having fun with the gals, and Sovieshu was a simp for the grand duke and the strong mage of Luipt kingdom…Rashta then cleared her throat before saying,

“Actually we have to get ready for the banquet today, I was the one who decorated it and yes, I did not go above and beyond like last time I assure you, but before the banquet, we have dinner with Sir Heinrey, Ergi, Kaufman and other guests…”

Rashta says assuring them with a sheepishly smile before mentioning Heinrey and Ergi with venom and anger lacing her voice…As everyone nodded and went to get ready for the evening….

…

The tense atmosphere during the banquet dinner was not making anyone comfortable enough to break the painful silence, especially with Rashta and Heinrey glaring at each other while giving backhanded compliments, “You know…Here Rashta thought were a cruel tyrant, but in reality you’re just a prince from Western Kingdom….So adorable!” Rashta said with a smirk on her lips and anger in her eyes as she stared down at Heinrey, who was dressed up specially and was looking more handsome than usual with his hair slicked back and wearing an expensive suit, Rashta wouldn’t lie, Heinrey was an extremely handsome man but if not for the fact that he had feelings for Navier and would constantly send her things to make her reciprocate her feelings, he could have earn the favor of many ladies in the palace, maybe even including Rashta’s.

Heinrey laughed back fakily and said as he glared at Rashta who was just as dressed up as Navier, but in all honesty if anyone were to ask who was more pretty, most people would say Rashta due to her angelic beauty, yet she was also the most narcissistic and self-absorbed person Heinrey had ever seen, “Well at-least our Kingdom knows how to handle its nobles from butting into other people’s business~ No?” Heinrey replied back with same amount of anger and fakeness laced in it, Rashta was about to flip the table and stab him if not for Navier and Sovieshu holding her both of her hands with one of theirs and stroking it to calm her down as Navier ate 8th slice of cake while Sovieshu gulped down glass after glass of alcohol to drown themselves away from this horrible atmosphere of the dinner, while Mckenna was also trying to calm down Heinrey as to not cause a massacre…

The banquet started right after the dinner where Navier was dancing with Sovieshu and then Navier danced with Kosair while Sovieshu left the banquet to meet Kaufman, leaving Rashta to fend for her own self in a social gathering…So she left for the balcony to breathe out for some time, as she entered, she probably didn’t realize someone else was there until someone spoke up, “Uhm…Lady Rashta are you okay?” Rashta held her head as she looked up at Mckenna looking at her worriedly, putting her defense up Rashta angrily speaks out a reply, “Yeah, of-course Rashta is okay!” she says as Mckenna smiles,

“That’s nice, why are you out here?”, “To breathe for some time, why are you here?” Rashta asks suspiciously

This apparently hit something in Mckenna as he says, “Ah, nothing just a fight with my lover and Heinrey…so here to calm myself down..” As Mckenna says this, Rashta notices his red eyes, nose and red ears and splotchy cheeks, she immediately took out a napkin and handed it to him to which Mckenna smiled and thanked her as he wiped his cheeks as Rashta walked beside him to the railing and looking out at the scenery of the huge moon and a gorgeous view of the empire from the palace…

Soon, Rashta didn’t know what it was, but she started talking with Mckenna and on the fight he had with his lover, just some little disagreement as she gave him some advices on how to handle these types of argument out,

“Lady Rashta, do you like someone?” Mckenna asked with a smile, Rashta never really thought about it as she looked ahead and thought for a while, at the mention of liking someone, for some reason, Heinrey came to her mind as she remembered how handsome he looked today, he was shitty but he was looking extremely handsome today….After a moment Rashta shook her head which made Mckenna very surprised for some reason, “What?! You don’t like anyone at the moment, what about Heinrey?!” Mckenna asked as Rashta jerked and asked,

“What about him?” Rashta asked as she looked at Mckenna with a strange look on her face as Mckenna said, “I thought you both were courting each other, because how much he talked about you!”

Now this made Rashta surprised as well, as she felt her cheeks warm up as she said, “WE’RE NOT COURTING EAHC OTHER!!”

“Well you might as well, Lady Rashta, the way he talks about you, it sounds as though he’s seriously in love with you but he hides his feelings using hatred…” Mckenna said with a smirk on his lips as Rashta shook her head denying everything.

As Mckenna sighed, Ergi came in and looked at Rashta in surprise, as he bowed before saying, “Dear….shall we?” Ergi asked Mckenna with his usual grin offering his forearm, to which Mckenna nodded and dug through his blazer pocket before pulling out a tiny box and shushing Rashta as to say this box held secrets to which Rashta nodded her head , as he handed it to Rashta and bowed, to which Rashta held it in one hand and bowed as well, holding her skirt with her other hand as she waved Mckenna goodbye who walked away hand in hand with Ergi..

As she suddenly opened the box and saw many tiny letters, she randomly picked one up before opening it and reading,

“Dear Navier, I like you, but I want to ask….Is Miss Rashta single?” it was written in Heinrey’s writing with a “yes” from Navier at the bottom, Rashta scoffed thinking, ‘Why does this bastard care if Rashta’s single or not?’

Before picking another up and reading,

“Mckenna maybe I should stop chasing Queen…” in Heinrey’s writing with an answer from Mckenna, “You were desperate for her, what happened?” to which Heinrey wrote another answer,

“I fell for queen’s sister….”

“Ew….you’re weird, she doesn’t want you..”

“SHUT UP!”

And the letter ended, as Rashta looked at it with anger in her eyes, he fell out of love with Navier and feel for her instead?! WHAT TYPE OF WOMANIZER WAS HE BEING?!

She put the letter back in the box before closing it and getting back to the ballroom, which was still filled with people as she subtly looked over at Heinrey from the corner of her eye as he was staring at her intently, ignoring it she slowly walked to Navier and told her she was retiring for the night, to which Navier nodded and Rashta waked to her room…

Changing quickly, Rashta laid on her stomach on her bed as she again opened the box and picked another letter which read in Heinrey’s writing,

“Rashta looked pretty today, with her pink dress, and sunflowers in her gorgeous, long, blonde nearly white hair with the cute pink flower necklace and earring, with pretty yellow lace on her skirt…Her grey eyes looked adorable, she was pretty today and I was an asshole again today….” And after it was Mckenna and Heinrey’s message,

“Why are you an asshole to her?”

“……Don’t know, actually…”

Before the letter ended. She folded it again and picked another letter before reading it, which was apparently written on the first day Heinrey came to the imperial palace and was sent to Mckenna,

“The empress is very pretty, but I think the emperor’s mistress is prettier, with her long wavy hair, her soft looking eyes and her cute and childish self, heard she was a slave, but ….I think she’s still very pretty…Her name is Rashta…”

“Yeah, she was pretty!”

Rashta read through it before feeling her cheeks heat up, refusing to acknowledge the fact that she was feeling happy that Heinrey thought she was prettier than Navier whom Rashta thought was the prettiest lady to ever exist…Also why did Heinrey think she was Sovieshu’s mistress….Folding the letter she picked letter after letter with conversations between Heinrey, Ergi and Mckenna,

Heinrey:- “Rashta was being feisty today, she suddenly announced I was her penpal….That was hot, but why???? Doesn’t she already have the emperor as her husband?”

Mckenna:- “Calm down…I’ll see what we can do..”

Heinrey:- “I just found out, she is Emperor’s sister not his mistress….I have a chance, but she literally hates me…..Let me die..”

Mckenna:-“You were literally an asshole to her and reminded her of her slave root…That’s your fault..”

Heinrey:- “Please help me..”

As Rashta finished a few other letters, all of which described her beauty in great detail by Heinrey as Rashta was slowly accepting the fact that Heinrey was good at flattering her and seemed genuine with his feelings for once as she read through them when suddenly there was scratching on her window, Rashta peeped up to see it was blue bird which had an angry face, she stood up and opened her balcony door, to let the bird in which perched upon the chair in her room, Rashta slowly opened the letter room it’s legs, she rolled it open in which Heinrey’s writing said,

“I know you have seen the letters just burn those and forget this ever happened…Got it? And if not, please just don’t ever tell anyone about this, I know I’m shitty, but please, this can ruin me and I only have this going on for me..” the letter had wet spots on it as though it was written while he was crying…seeing this Rashta got a tad bit concerned..

She slowly put her palms around the bird and picked it up, the bird was seemingly calm but was trying to escape her hands as though. Rashta quickly walked out of her room, and let it go in the hallway and ran through the hallways behind the bird to find Heinrey’s room… running up and down the smooth marble floors at the middle of the night to find Heinrey of all people was something definitely not on Rashta’s list today, but here she was standing outside his room, panting and breathing as the bird settled on Rashta’s shoulder seemingly also taking a break, as Rashta took a few deep breathes…before she knocked on the door and brushed her dress to maybe see the face of the men who created a fog in not only his heart but her heart as well, the fog of love…

#navi⌗writes⌗#remarried empress sovieshu #remarried empress rashta #remarried empress webtoon #the remarried empress #remarried empress #remarried empress navier #remarried empress x reader #navier #rashta #rashta x heinrey #rasheinrey #remarried empress fanfic #remarried empress scenario #remarried empress imagines #remarried empress ships

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demonbanisher · 2 years ago

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I have Sirius loves rescuing animals brain rot.

I’m Just Like You

By this point in time Remus was very familiar with Sirius Black. Working at the shelter you got to know your regulars, the same way you would at a coffee shop, it was just that most of his regulars didn’t end up taking a new dog home with them every time they came in.

The bell rang over the door and Remus who was in the midst of washing dog shit off his hands called out, “Be right with you!” He emerged a few moments later to find Sirius standing at the counter eyes clearly red and puffy from crying.

“Do you have any new dogs I can see?”

Remus faltered for a moment. Unsure whether or not to comment on his clearly visible distress. “Sure, Layla just got cleared for adoption after her surgery yesterday.” He opened the door into the back and gestured for Sirius to follow him, filling him in on the way. “The rope her owners were using to tie her up snapped. Unfortunately, it got tangled in the train tracks down in the ravine. She’s a luckily little dog but – “

“Oh,” Sirius said as Remus opened the cage and the most perfect three-legged, one-eyed Shiba came hobbling out to meet him.

“Yeah. She’s had a couple families come by already but people were too worried about the extent of her injuries. That and the vet isn’t sure if the fur around her missing eye will ever grow back in.”

Sirius promptly sat down on the floor with crossed legs looking more like a toddler than the full grow adult in a studded leather jacket with more tattoos and piercings that Remus could count. “Hi Layla.” She stopped, hesitating in her approach. “It’s okay sweetheart. Wanna see something cool?” Sirius struggled to roll up the leg of his jeans before giving up and yanking his leg off. Something that would have startled Remus a lot less if he knew he had a prosthetic in the first place. “I’m just like you.” He set the prosthetic down in front of her and she moved tentatively towards it, sniffing it carefully.

When she decided that the prosthetic wasn’t going to attack her she started moving more tentatively towards Sirius, sniffing his now outstretched empty pant leg first. She proceeded to stick her snout inside only to promptly get stuck.

Sirius giggled as he leaned down to rescue her. “That tickles.” Sirius set her down so she could walk away on her own terms but instead she promptly scooped up the prosthetic in her teeth before curling up in Sirius’s lap.

“Yeah,” Sirius said, tears streaking his face anew. “We’re gonna be okay me and you.” He wiped his face as he looked up at Remus. “Can she come home with me tonight?”

It took Remus a moment to get his own emotions under wraps and come up with a coherent response. I mean, how are you not supposed to melt at the drop-dead gorgeous punk with a heart of gold? “You know we got to review all your information. Call your vet, reference checks, etc.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sirius said, looking down at Layla heartbroken as he scratched behind her ears. He looked like a kid who had just dropped his ice cream cone.

“Maybe. Maybe you could take her home as a foster tonight?” He really wasn’t supposed to do this. “You can fill out all the paperwork and we can bring it in tomorrow for us to review.”

“That’s okay,” Sirius said, shifting so he could pull a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket. He smoothed it out on the floor and then reached into his jacket for a pen, petting Layla with one hand when she whined at him for stopping. “Layla with a y or an i?”

It took Remus a moment to realize that Sirius had brought an already completed adoption form with him that was missing everything but the dogs information on it. How do you not fall a little in love with that? “A y.”

“Thanks,” Sirius said as he finished and handed it off to Remus.

“No problem. I’ll go file this and then I can meet you out front?”

Sirius nodded. Remus went and completed the paperwork and waited for Sirius. It usually didn’t take him too long to get the dog all ready to go but this time it seemed to be taking an abnormal amount of time for him to come out. Remembering how upset he was when he came in Remus decided to go and check on him.

“Everything okay?”

Sirius blushed, clearly embarrassed. “Um, I sorta realized I can take my leg off from under my pants, but I can’t really put it back on that way and getting up on one leg has never been my party trick.”

“Oh,” Remus said, feeling like an idiot for not having realized that himself. “Can I help you up?”

“Yeah, if I can just put my arm around your shoulder like this and then… there. Thank you. Do you have a bathroom I can use to put this back on?”

“Yeah, end of the hall.”

“Thanks,” Sirius said, leaning one hand against the wall as he started to shuffle down the hallway, but stopping when a heartbreaking whine sounded behind him. He turned to see Layla curled up with her head on her paws looking at him sadly. His own eyes started to water again. “Could you stay with her? Just so that she knows I’m coming back?”

Remus was a moment away from getting on his knees and proposing to this man. “Of course.”

Sirius smiled and then turned to Layla. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

Remus sat down with her in the meantime and whispered soft assurances to her about how lucky she was and what a great life she was going to have with Sirius and lots of other dog siblings to play with. Before he knew it, Sirius was coming back down the hallway and she was hurrying out of his arms over to greet him. He smiled and bent down to pick her up.

“I’ll get you some food,” Remus said and Sirius thanked him as he headed out into the office. Remus met him out there in a moment and pulled out the foster form for him to fill out and sign. “I hope it’s not pushing, but are you okay? You seemed upset earlier.”

“Bad day.”

“So you decided to adopt a dog?”

Sirius gave Layla a kiss on the forehead. “Figured I could give someone a good day. Besides,” he said, giving Remus a sweet smile that had his insides turning into a puddle, “I think my day just got a whole lot better too.”

Remus smiled back but Sirius must have been remembering whatever had bothered him in the first place because his expression had darkened again by the time he’d finished the form.

“I hope me taking off my leg didn’t gross you out or anything.”

“Sirius, I spend most of my day cleaning up dog vomit or poop and you do not want to know the things I’ve seen. Was I little shocked you were able to suddenly rip your leg off? Sure, but nothing gross about it.”

Sirius smiled sadly. “Frankly, I don’t like to wear the prosthetic much at all. I never wear it at home but… I thought I’d use my crutches out today to have lunch with my parents. They weren’t so happy about me showing my ‘weakness’ in public.”

“That’s bullshit,” Remus blurted out and then immediately covered his mouth in horror when he realized what he’d said.

Sirius laughed. “It is, isn’t it?” Layla snuggled against him. “We’ll only get one made for you if you want it, okay? Thanks for everything Remus.” Sirius set Layla down so he could put her leash on and then grabbed the food and turned to leave. However, when they got halfway to the door Layla seemed to realize Remus wasn’t coming and barked to let Sirius know they were forgetting him.

“It’s okay Layla,” Remus reassured her. “Sirius is going to take really good care of you.”

“Maybe if you wanted, you could visit her sometime?”

Remus beamed. “I’d like that.”

#wolfstar #listen sirius is a softie i don't make the rules #sirius adopts a dog #remus x sirius #fluff #so much fluff #fanfic rec

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casual-violinist-fangirl · 2 years ago

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You Loved me so Loud: 5,163 Words

. Crosshair and Omega Modern AU where Omega was adopted and has been living with her brothers for two years.

. Angst and Fluff

. TW: Homophobia is a theme throughout, but there is not physical violence and no slurs are actually written.

. I’ve attached the link to the AO3 page that this is posted on, but it’s also below! The link is in the comments, I hope you enjoy 😊

The first sign that there was something going on was when Omega shuffled over to Crosshair one evening after school. He had been getting ready to head to work when she scuttled over to him, glancing around to make sure that none of her other brothers were around. She then stuck her hand into her school bag, desperately trying to find something.

‘I swear if you’ve brought another kitten home, Omega…’ Crosshair sighed as he tied his black work boots, not even bothering to look up. ‘Hunter said that you can’t have one, besides they’re the spawn of the devil.’

He was cut off when a piece of neatly folded paper was thrust in front of his face, making him blink as he was still crouched to tie his shoes.

Taking the piece of paper off of his little sister, he noticed the way that she chewed her bottom lip anxiously. This was clearly a letter from her school; it’s logo was printed in the top right corner. ‘Shouldn’t you be giving this to Hunter?’ he asked, trying not to sound irritated as he kissed his pre-work cigarette away. So much for getting to work early.

Omega had clearly handed this to him on purpose… but why? A quick scan of the letter answered his question, and Crosshair almost found himself laughing out loud at the situation he was now in.

‘You’ve got a detention?’ he raised an eyebrow at the child, noting the way that her cheeks flushed. Omega had a pristine school record and always had done. She was at the top of most of her classes and got along with nearly all of her teachers, so the fact that she was now handing over a detention slip was surprising to say the least.

The girl fiddled with the hem of her school jumper anxiously. ‘I… had an argument with someone,’ she started. ‘A teacher overheard me saying some things, and when she asked me to apologise I refused…’ Her blush increased, but a look of sheer determination spread across her face. ‘I don’t take back what I said though, I just got in trouble for it.’

Crosshair was actually quite proud of the fact that Omega was beginning to learn to stand up for herself. She had been awful at it in primary school, constantly coming home in tears because of the names people had called her for not having “proper parents.” The school had done their best to deal with the situation, but their response had been orientated around the fact that Omega’s upbringing was in fact “not normal” and that maybe she needed to adjust to the fact that people were going to ask questions.

‘Has this got something to do with last year at school?’ he asked, looking down at the letter again, realising that she needed someone to sign it. ‘Because if it is, one of us can go to the school…’ he trailed off when he saw the look of panic in her eyes as she shook her head frantically.

‘It wasn’t that!’ she gushed. ‘Please, I just didn’t want to give it to buir because I knew he’d make comments and ask me loads about what happened.’ Ah, so that’s why she had gone to him, not Hunter.

Crosshair sighed, knowing that really he should let Hunter know what was going on in Omega’s school life. ‘It’s not that big of a deal!’ she continued, telling him that it was anything but. ‘Please, Cross…’ despite nearly being a teenager, her big brown eyes still worked their magic and he found himself grabbing a pen from his work belt and scribbling his signature on the permission slip. ‘You promise you’re not in big trouble?’ he asked with a sincere tone to his voice. ‘Because I’m only signing this and not telling Hunter because you’ve told me it’s not a big deal.’

‘I promise!’ Omega flung her arms around him and gave him a quick squeeze before taking the permission slip back off of him. ‘It won’t happen again, I swear. It was just a stupid argument at school taken out of context.’

Crosshair didn’t say anything else about the matter, though he wasn’t entirely convinced by what Omega was telling him. He vowed to himself that if anything else happened, he would go straight to Hunter.

————

The second sign that Omega wasn’t okay was when she stormed through the front door two weeks later, running straight upstairs and slamming the door before greeting anyone. For once, Crosshair had the day off, and he hadn’t long woken up (there was no point in breaking his sleep cycle, so he still found himself sleeping through the day) and was sipping a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

Immediately Hunter had tried going up to talk to the girl, picking up her school blazer that had been thrown unceremoniously to one side. ‘Omega?’ he had called gently through her bedroom door, only to be told that she was fine and didn’t want to see anyone. He hadn’t pressed her, knowing that she would want to talk at some point, she just needed to have some time to herself.

Three hours had passed… Omega still hadn’t come downstairs, and it was clear that everyone in the house was starting to get a little more worried. Wrecker was pacing the floor, whilst Hunter sat staring into the void. Even Tech, who seldom let on when he was concerned, was bouncing a nervous leg as he stared down at his tablet. Echo, still at work, had been informed that Omega was upset and had been dropping occasional messages to the group chat for updates.

Crosshair couldn’t help but worry a little bit about his sister. She very rarely stayed in her room for that length of time, even if she was truly upset. Something tugged at him, his mind going back to a couple of weeks ago when Omega had thrust that detention letter into his hands… had she been given another detention? Surely not, she would have just come to him as she had done before. Something else must have happened; it was in that moment that Crosshair wished that he hadn’t promised not to tell anyone what had happened the other week, or that he had pushed her a little more to tell him what was going on.

An idea coming into his mind, he took his phone out and tapped out a quick message. He doubted he would receive a reply at all, but he figured that reaching out wouldn’t hurt, especially if his suspicions were correct. He was shocked when three dots appeared on his screen before he could even put his phone away, indicating that Omega was tying out a response. His phone vibrated seconds later, and he scanned the message before nodding.

He grabbed his car keys off of the side, making the others look up at him in surprise. ‘Do you think now’s the time to take a drive?’ Hunter asked, the worry clear in his voice. Crosshair rolled his eyes at his brother, but kept his tone sincere. ‘I’m taking the kid for a drive, don’t worry,’ he responded as he headed out into the hall. Sure enough, moments later Omega’s door creaked open and she appeared at the top of the stairs. She was still in her school uniform, her shirt creased from where she’d clearly been lying on her bed for a while, and her tie loosened.

Nothing else was said as the pair left the house and got into the car. As Crosshair started the ignition, he considered when he should ask her if she’s okay. Deciding to leave it until she was happy to talk, the pair drove in silence, Omega fiddling with the radio stations until she found something that she wanted to listen to. Driving was something that the pair had done a couple of times in the past when Omega was upset; she never did this with any of the others, Crosshair found himself thinking in an almost proud way. If it was Hunter she wanted, she’d simply go to him and curl up in his lap; if it was Tech, she’d go and ask him a question about whatever he was doing and let him ramble on at her, finding his mini speeches soothing. With Wrecker, she would ask him to play a game with her, and if it was Echo she was looking for she would ask him to bake something with her.

No, driving quietly with the radio on was Omega and Crosshair’s thing, and whilst it didn’t stop him being concerned for the little girl, it warmed his heart to know that she trusted him and felt as though she could go to him when she needed help.

Eventually they pulled into a parking space and Omega, who hadn’t been paying much attention to her surroundings, looked up and frowned.

‘We’re at the beach?’ she asked, looking to her brother as he took off his seatbelt. ‘I thought you hated the beach.’

This was true. Crosshair couldn’t stand the beach; everything about it from the sand to the cries of the seagulls. He huffed as he reached over to the glovebox and pulled out a box of cigarettes.

‘I do,’ he responded as he pocketed the box. ‘But I know you like it, God knows why.’ He didn’t give her any more time to respond, getting out of the car and heading towards the shorefront. Omega paused for a moment, baffled, before scrambling out of the car to follow him.

They reached the pier and took a seat, perched on the wall that created a barrier between the pavement and the sand. The waves lapped in and out gently, and Omega couldn’t help but smile as she breathed in the sea air. She had never been to the beach before Hunter and his brothers had adopted her, and since then i had become one of her favourite places to be. She looked over at Crosshair, who was staring out at the sea with his now lit cigarette between his lips. ‘Don’t tell you buir,’ he commented, and Omega snorted with laughter. She could see the look on Hunter’s face now if he found out that Crosshair was still smoking.

A more relaxed atmosphere settled over the pair, and for a moment they both forgot why they were here in the first place. Sighing, Omega reached into her pocket (her school skirt had pockets courtesy of Tech) and pulled out a piece of paper. Crosshair glanced over at it without moving his head, not wanting to intrude, but whatever was written on the piece of paper was obscured from him.

Eventually the girl handed the piece of paper to him, not looking at him when she did. Crosshair scanned it, and his stomach dropped.

‘Did someone write this about you?’ he snarled before reminding himself to stay calm. Omega didn’t look at him, but he could see her shaking slightly. ‘Omega,’ he took her shoulders in his hands and made her face him. ‘If someone is writing this sort of thing about you then you need to tell a teacher at school.’

Omega’s eyes widened and filled with tears simultaneously as she shook her head. ‘It’s not that simple,’ she cried, going to take the piece of paper back. ‘If I tell a teacher, this just gets worse… I don’t even know who’s doing it.’ Her shoulders fell and she looked down at her hands. Her brother sighed, looking back at the note. ‘Is this… the first one you’ve received?’ he asked tentatively. She had chosen to go to him, not the others, and the last thing he wanted was to push her away by making her panic.

A shake of her head confirmed that this wasn’t the first message she’d received. He nodded and took a breath, wracking his brain for a way to respond. ‘And…’ he trailed off for a second. ‘Do they all say the same thing?’ Another nod. ‘Omega, you really should talk to someone at the school about this, or let one of us go in…’

He didn’t get to finish is sentence because Omega’s head snapped up, her eyes angry. ‘And have the whole school find out that it’s true?’ she scowled. ‘Hera’s my best friend, I can’t have the whole school finding out h-how… how I,’ she stopped herself, pulling out of Crosshair’s grip. ‘Then they’d call her names too, and then she wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore. You just don’t get it!’ She stood and stalked off down the beach, leaving her brother with a slight look of shock on his face. Not at her confession, no, but at how angrily she’d reacted. He wasn’t used to Omega snapping in his face.

By the time Crosshair caught up with her, she’d kicked her shoes and socks off and was stood in the sea, letting the waves lap around her shins. Groaning internally, he did the same, rolling his jeans up and praying that they wouldn’t get too wet. He waded out to where she was and for a moment they stood quietly together; he could hear her snivels next to him and resisted the urge to reach out a hand of comfort. Instead he lit another cigarette.

‘You know,’ he started after a while. ‘I was bullied a lot in school for… being different,’ Omega twitched, a sign that she was listening. ‘Turns out being gay in an all-boy school is not a great way to spend your teenage years,’ he drawled on. ‘I got called every name under the sun it felt like, including but not limited to some of the names on that piece of paper you’re still holding.’

A sniff from Omega told him that she was still crying and he turned to her properly. ‘I can’t stop the bullies, ‘Mega,’ he went on. ‘If I could I would,’ a tearful nod from the girl. ‘I can, however, be there for you. So can the others, if you wanted to tell them.’

‘Not yet,’ came a shaky reply. ‘I don’t know how they’ll react, and I don’t think I would cope with losing any of you.’ Crosshair took the information in, knowing that he had felt exactly the same when he was her age. ‘You won’t lose us Omega,’ he soothed. ‘I won’t make you tell anyone anything you’re not comfortable with, just know that dealing with shit like this is so much easier with a support system in place…’ Omega looked up at him, her face blotchy with tears. ‘Whatever you need, whenever you need it, I’m here.’ Before he knew it she was launching herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck.

It would have been a lovely moment, had Crosshair not lost his balance and sent them both tumbling into the sea. For a moment all the pair of them could do was sit and splutter; luckily it was a warm day so it wouldn’t take long for them to dry off… and Crosshair’s phone had accidentally been left in the car. ‘You’re lucky my cigarettes are wrapped in cellophane,’ he joked as he got to his feet, making sure to splash the girl, making her shriek and laugh. He offered her his hand, which she accepted and before long the pair of them were trudging back to the wall to dry off.

An hour or so later, a far drier Crosshair and Omega sat on the same wall as before, a cone of chips each held in their hands as they stared out at the waves once more.

‘Thank you,’ came a quiet voice to his left, and he looked at her with a small smile. Shuffling closer, he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his lighter.

‘Still got that note?’ he asked, offering the lighter to the girl, who raised her eyebrow. She nodded, pulling the now slightly blurry note from her skirt pocket. ‘Quite often when I got given notes like that at school, Wrecker and me would make a bonfire in the garden and burn them…’ he trailed off, remembering those times with almost a hint of fondness, despite the circumstances. ‘We don’t have the wood for a bonfire, but this would do the trick.’

And that’s what they did. Omega sourced a couple of small sticks and set the note on them. Crosshair handed her his lighter and the pair of them watched as the note slowly burnt away to nothing. Omega wrapped her arms around Crosshair’s middle, giving him a small squeeze that he returned, and rested his chin on her head. He couldn’t solve all of her problems, as much as he wanted to storm into the school and demand they find out who this bully was, but he could be there for her throughout it all. That’s exactly what he planned on doing.

That night, when Omega went into her room having just brushed her teeth, she spotted something small on her pillow that definitely hadn’t been there before. A pin badge that she had quite often seen on Crosshair’s denim jacket. A pride flag. Knowing exactly where the badge had come from, she smiled to herself and slipped it into her blazer pocket. She would put it on at some point, when she was ready, but until then it would serve as a reminder that she was loved and supported by her big brother.

————

Crosshair’s head snapped up when he heard his mobile ringing. It was the middle of the day, and he was sleeping off the night shift so he knew that it wouldn’t be any of his family calling him. They knew better than to deprive him of sleep.

Picking up the phone groggily, he didn’t even bother to check the caller ID before answering.

‘Hello?’

‘Good afternoon, am I speaking to…’ there was a brief pause as the voice at the other end of the phone checked something. ‘Crosshair Fett?’ The man in question nodded before realising that obviously the woman couldn’t see him. ‘Speaking,’ he mumbled as he sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

‘Ah good,’ the voice responded. ‘I’m the receptionist at Ord Mantell Secondary School. The headteacher has requested that a guardian come in following an incident that happened between Omega and another girl in school.’

Crosshair snapped out of his sleepy state and was suddenly wide awake. ‘Omega?’ he asked. ‘What happened, is she okay?’

There was a brief pause down the line and Crosshair resisted the urge to ask the question again. ‘It seems as though Omega started a fight today at break time.’ That didn’t sound right. Omega didn’t start fights, not unless it was a play fight with Wrecker. ‘This isn’t the first time Omega’s behaviour has been brought up as a concern recently, and the headteacher would very much like to discuss it with one of her guardians.’

Crosshair had forgotten that according to the school they were all down as being Omega’s guardians, despite Hunter’s name being the one on the legal papers. That explained why they were calling him, and not his eldest brother. ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ he replied before saying his goodbyes and scrambling around to find a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

The drive to the school was a short one, but for some reason it felt like it went on forever as Crosshair contemplated what could possibly be going on for Omega to have started a fight. He approached the school building and was quickly signed in before being walked through the corridors towards the headteacher’s office. This wasn’t the first time he’d been to Omega’s school; her netball tournaments brought him and his brothers here most weekends during term time, and this was where they’d brought her to learn to swim.

When he reached the office, he saw his little sister and had to stop his mouth from falling open in shock. There sat Omega, scowling and tear stained outside the office in a plastic chair, her arms crossed as she waited for whichever brother had been summoned to come and get her. Looking her up and down, he quickly noticed that she had a split lip and what looked like a bruise forming on her cheekbone. Forcing himself to stay calm, he crouched in front of the girl, making her look up at him. The office worker turned and left, knowing that the headteacher would call them into the office soon.

‘Cross…’ she stammered, her resolve crumbling as she went to hug him. He returned the hug, but pulled away quickly, a serious look on his face.

‘Omega,’ he started. ‘What happened? I got a call saying that you started a fight with another girl…’ the distraught look on his face told him that there was at least some truth to that version of events. ‘Are you okay?’ He tried another, slightly gentler approach.

For a moment it seemed as though she wasn’t going to reply to him, her bottom lip kept trembling as she tried to compose herself. Then, as though a dam had burst, she started talking.

‘I found out who was sending those notes,’ she practically whispered as tears started trickling down her cheeks. ‘I caught her writing all over my locker in sharpie… and I confronted her.’ Crosshair nodded, taking in the information. ‘She told me that I was disgusting, so I told her that I knew I wasn’t. T-then she asked me where I got my pin from and I told her that m-my brother gave it to me and she…’ Crosshair spotted the small pin attached to her blazer. ‘She called you names…’ she trailed off, snivelling. ‘So I k-kinda lost it and hit her.’

Crosshair took everything she had to say in, a small swell of pride for his little sister sticking up for herself. It was replaced by irritation when the headteacher opened the door to the office and beckoned them both inside. Straightening, he put a hand on Omega’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. Reassuring, he hoped as they walked into the office.

‘Mr Fett,’ Ben Kenobi started as he looked over his glasses at Crosshair. ‘I assume you’ve been informed as to why you’re here.’ A nod and a scowl told the headteacher what he needed to know. ‘And I gather that it is you who signed Omega’s detention slip a while ago.’ Another nod, and Ben sighed. This was going to be long meeting if neither adult nor child were willing to work with him. He sat further forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his desk. ‘Would you like a coffee and a biscuit?’

Crosshair, who had been determined to remain steely throughout the meeting, blinked in confusion. He had been expecting to be told about Omega’s behaviour, not be offered a hot drink and a biscuit. Mr Kenobi was already across the room with the kettle on before he could respond. ‘And a hot chocolate?’ he looked to Omega, who looked equally startled, but nodded anxiously. Before long, the three of them were sat back at the desk, hot drinks in hand and few biscuits on a small plate.

‘Let’s start again,’ Ben prayed that a slightly gentler approach would persuade the pair to talk to him. ‘I have read through Omega’s student file, and even taught her for some lessons. She’s a pleasure to have in the classroom.’ He regarded the pair, Omega looking a little flustered at being praised by a teacher. ‘So you can understand my confusion when I read through all of her recent reports only to find that her behaviour has gone through the floor… but not all the time.’

A blush of embarrassment was starting to spread across Omega’s cheeks, and she looked down at the mug in her hands. Crosshair glanced at her, not wanting to overstep any boundaries, but wanting to defend his little sister. It was the least she deserved.

‘It would lead me to believe,’ Mr Kenobi continued. ‘That perhaps there is something going on either in school or at home that is provoking this sort of behaviour.’

There was an almost sickening silence, and Crosshair was trying not to think about how similar this was to his own school experience (although his teachers had been far less understanding). He was about to open his mouth to respond to the head teacher, not wanting to draw the process out for Omega any longer than necessary when the child spoke up.

‘I know what I did was wrong,’ she started, putting the mug down and fiddling with a loose thread on her blazer. ‘But Maisie was calling me names, and leaving notes in my bag and my blazer…’ she trailed off, looking upset. ‘And then I saw her drawing on my locker and she started calling my brother names and I kinda lost it.’

Ben took in the information; the teacher on duty had mentioned Maisie drawing on Omega’s locker but he did not know the nature of those drawings. ‘I know this must be difficult for you, Omega,’ he responded. ‘But if you could tell me what sort of things Maisie has been calling you and your brother then I would find that most helpful.’

Omega fidgeted in her seat, looking uncomfortable and embarrassed. Crosshair put an arm around her shoulders, and it was as she turned to her brother for support that Ben spotted the small, yet brightly coloured pin badge on the collar of her blazer. Following his instinct, he turned a photo around on his desk. Once again, Omega and Crosshair looked slightly confused at his behaviour.

‘This is Cody,’ he started, pointing to one of the adults in the photo. There were three in total: Ben, Cody and a small child sat between them at what appeared to be a wedding. ‘We’ve been married for three years now, and our daughter is starting primary school in September…’ he trailed off, looking over his glasses at the pair sat in front of him. ‘I know what it is to be called names and have dirty looks thrown at me when people think I’m not looking.’ Omega’s shoulders sagged and her eyes filled with tears. He’d hit the nail on the head then.

‘Omega,’ the little girl looked up at him, trying not to cry. ‘If Maisie has been saying what I think she’s been saying, then you can tell me and I will see to it that her parents are called in. She will receive a detention and I will try my best to make sure that you’re not in the same classes anymore.’ A small nod from the child reassured him a little and he moved a tissue box a little closer. Crosshair took a tissue and handed it to his sister, who hid her face in her hands.

‘No one else needs to know, though?’ she asked eventually, and Crosshair looked up at the headteacher. He shook his head.

‘No one else needs to know,’ he reassured. ‘I will see to it that I meet with Maisie’s parents personally and that I’m the one who supervises and detentions she receives.’ The look of relief that washed over the child almost made him smile.

‘I’m afraid that you’ll still have to take a few days off for the fight,’ he continued. ‘Maisie will receive the same treatment, don’t you worry, but now that you know you have an ally in school maybe you could come to me before defending your brother and yourself so valiantly next time?’

This brought a small smile to Omega’s face and she nodded sheepishly. Crosshair, realising that he’d been sat pretty much silently throughout this meeting, cleared his throat. ‘Thank you,’ he said with sincerity in his voice. Ben simply nodded, a silent understanding, and thanked him for coming in before dismissing the pair.

Once outside the school building, Omega looked to her brother, trying to read his face. ‘I’m sorry I got into the fight,’ she started, knowing that this time it wasn’t something they could keep between the pair of them. It was one thing for Crosshair to pretend that a detention had never happened, but a fight was a completely different matter. This would put both of them in an awkward position at home and she knew it.

Crosshair didn’t respond for a moment, and the little girl could feel more tears forming in her eyes. She’d finally done it, she’d well and truly pissed him off. She turned and stated to head back to the car when she was pulled into a hug.

For a moment she was in shock. Crosshair never initiated hugs. Never. Omega thought at one point he didn’t like being touched, but he always seemed to be open to receiving hugs… this was new. She didn’t realise that her big brother was getting emotional until she heard a sniff coming from above her head. Looking up, her eyes widened, but his grip didn’t loosen.

‘Cross?’ she asked, her voice muffled by his shirt.

‘I’m proud of you, ‘Mega,’ he rasped out, eventually letting her go. Both of them were sniffling now and they let out watery laughs. ‘I’m so proud…’ he trailed off as they continued heading towards the car. ‘But Hunter’s gonna lose his shit when he sees that you’ve been in a fight.’

Omega groaned and pressed her head against the dashboard. She had come out to her buir not long ago, and of course he’d been the same loving father figure he always had been. Crosshair was right though, he would loose his mind when he saw her split lip and bruised cheek. Out of concern of course, and he would undoubtedly understand once she explained, but it didn’t make her look forward to the conversation any more.

‘Stay with me when I talk to him?’ she asked, looking a little concerned. A small smile appeared on Crosshairs face and he nodded. ‘Of course, vod’ika,’ he replied, ruffling her hair gently. There was a comfortable pause between the pair of them as he started the car. ‘At least tell me she looks worse than you do,’ he said after a few minutes.

His sister looked at him, the hint of a sly grin on her face. ‘Two black eyes,’ she responded and Crosshair snorted. ‘Good,’ he stated as they left the school car park and turned onto the main road. The pair drove home, knowing that the others would be back soon and that the house would no doubt descend into chaos upon seeing the state that Omega was in. She would have been more panicked, but knowing that she had her big brother there to support her was one of the biggest reassurances. She would be okay, she knew that now.

#the bad batch #sw tbb #star wars bad batch #tbb omega #tbb crosshair #tbb hunter #tbb wrecker #tbb echo #tbb tech #obi wan kenobi #tbb commander cody #family #family fluff #siblings #sibling fluff #omega is queer #i said what i said

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