#set probably around the non-flashback sections of The Circus? early s2 at least

[sunsetofdoom]

but I cannot come in unless you dream of me

"I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me..." -Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

-

Blitz’s knee rattled against the wobbly side of the barstool, tapping his leg compulsively as he scanned the dim bar. Everybody was fucking obnoxious, was the problem. Girls with judgy laughs, smug jocks, arrogant hipsters with their post-post-irony bullshit. Everybody copying the last trend, but really making fun of it, because they were soo over it, actually. What he wouldn’t give for Stolas’ full-throated fucking sincerity, sometimes. Maybe he was cringe, but he didn’t have the dead-eyed ‘look how cool I am’ syndrome that infested this fucking shithole like a plague.

He tapped his fingers against his phone laying facedown on the bar. If he flipped it over, he’d just have to look at the fucking weather app announcing the full moon, and the ghost of Stolas’ cancellation text lurking in his notifications.

“-and she just thinks she’s soooo,” some woman drawled, and Blitz’s eye twitched at the thought of talking to her for long enough to get his dick in her mouth and shut her the fuck up. That was a no.

“Better than workin’, though, innit,” said some guy, and Blitz leaned over, trying to figure out who. The accent was familiar. Not Stolas’, but the imps that worked for him all seemed to have that low-class, ‘allo guvnor’ shit going on. When Blitz exchanged two words with them, at least. Which he tried not to.

“You still workin’ at the Palace like your dear old Dad did, Reg?”

“Nah,” ‘Reg’ said, and Blitz caught him as he spoke- short-horned imp about Moxxie’s size, hair slicked back like he thought he was cool. Clearly dying a slow death of Hipster Prick disease. “Got to be too much for me. Pay sounded alright but there en’t enough money in the world to put up with those rich fucks.”

“Oh, tell us the good shit, Reg,” the girl at the table gushed, obviously thirsty for his shrimp dick. “Nick hasn’t heard your stories, ooh, Nick, they’re sooo funny-”

“You never came out with us,” Reg said, pointedly.

“Hard enough to when you don’t work two rings away,” Nick put in, and Blitz could have yelled at them to get on with the stupid story, because it was his only excuse not to find somebody to fuck in the nasty ass bathroom.

“Tell ‘im about the prince, Reg,” the girl begged, and Blitz slouched deliberately to look like he wasn’t listening. His nerves tingled.

“Oh, just a sad sack, it’s the wife that’s a real piece of work,” Reg said, sounding worldly and uninterested. “D’you know I once watched her smash a vase worth more than my mum’s house? Just hucked it overhand like a shot-put. Horrifying.”

Blitz filed this away. Like most mistresses, he had a looming blank space in his brain labeled The Wife, and he thought about her as little as possible with an angry, guiltless nausea.

“Why!?”

“Oh, her shit husband opened his mouth, what else?”

Stomach tying itself into a knot, Blitz reminded himself that he didn’t actually know who they were talking about. Maybe he was hallucinating Stolas in places where he wasn’t, like letting his name slip while fucking somebody else.

“Prince Stolas says the word divorce and she gets an extra health bar and a choir starts singing in Latin,” Reg continued, so there went that theory.

“This isn’t even my final form,” smirked the other fucking idiot.

“That’s, like, so derivative,” the girl snorted, and Blitz took a second to imagine shooting them, except then he wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on horrible stories about his sad fuckbuddy.

The bartender cruised by, giving him a hard look, and Blitz flicked two fingers at him for another drink. The first one was pretty much a prop that he’d intended to ditch on his way to Bonetown, but apparently that wasn’t happening because this place was full of miserable assholes. The second would be something to nurse while he tracked this stupid conversation. Blitz took a drink. He tried not to drink when he was pissed off. This felt like a special fucking occasion.

“What was the worst, Reg?” 

“Oh, fuck’s sake,” Reg sighed, leaning back in his chair until two legs were off the ground, and Blitz wanted to shove him over. “Gotta be- right, I come in when I’m s’pose to, end of the night, clean up after the gentry are in bed, except this one’s on the bloody floor, right? Demon prince dead drunk on the fancy rug. So I scarper.”

The other guy cracked up, booing him and throwing a crumpled-up napkin. “Coward!”

“Oi! Shut up! I was right to! The wife comes in screamin’ her bloody head off about what a fuckup he is, winds up, kicks him in the stomach-”

Blitz choked on his drink. He swallowed frantically, eyes watering.

“-and what’s he do, cover his head? No! Rolls over and throws up everywhere, she’s still screaming bloody murder, only thing out of his plastered mouth is not to let the kid hear, she smashes a vase next to his head and leaves. And there’s me behind the curtains, stuck there until he peels all ten miles of himself up off the floor and fucks off, and I have to clean up the sick and all the bloody shards-”

The other two ghouls at the table with him were fucking laughing, and Blitz hadn’t come with his usual kit but he wasn’t unarmed, either; he could throw his knife and give this little dickhead some new holes to fuck. He toyed with it, but what would be the point. Instead, he took another drink, trying to wash down the taste of bile at the back of his throat.

“Really. Surprised the miserable fuck hasn’t slit his wrists in his fancy fucking bathtub,” Reg shuddered mockingly. “I en’t gonna be cleaning it up when he does.”

“Good on you for quitting, Reg.”

“Oh, I didn’t quit. Got caught stealing the silver.”

And then they were laughing again. Blitz chugged his drink and tried to drown them out.

They stopped talking about Stolas after that, even though Blitz listened in on them long enough to want to blow their fucking brains out. Or maybe his. Somebody’s. Drink number three went down numbly, and then the group of fucking idiots left. Blitz stayed hunched over at the bar, drinking more than he’d planned to because it was better than thinking. He brushed off the couple of people who tried to talk to him, because his dick was so out of commission it may as well have been in another universe.

A notification on his phone snapped him out of the tunnel-vision haze, and it wasn’t anything, some fucking app trying to get him to open it; but it pulled up the fucking weather app with its little moon icon, which he stared at for a solid minute before opening the rideshare one, because he definitely wasn’t okay to drive home.

The guy’s car pulled up in the parking lot, and Blitz shook his coat to make sure he still had his keys (he’d get the van in the morning, or better yet make Moxxie do it) and got in. “There’s a puke bucket back there if you need it,” the guy said, and then proceeded to ignore him for the twenty minute drive.

That was fine by Blitz, who was still silently processing. Half-formed thought glopped around in his mostly-drunk brain like a lava lamp, putting disparate images together. Stolas, quietly uncomfortable as he stated one of his only limits was being hit in the face. Stolas, cringing and apologizing over and over with a rictus grin. My knight in shining armor, come to rescue me! That empty fucking house. Wine bottles stashed in weird places, the bedroom, the bathroom. Stolas sinking into the pretense of affection in Blitz’s subpar aftercare with starved desperation.

It’s like drowning, Stolas had said once, nonsensically, stuck in a subspace haze. Not just once, actually. Over and over, rolling it around. Feels like drowning. Like drowning.

C’mere and lemme give you mouth-to-mouth, then, Blitz had leered at the time, which made Stolas do that high-as-balls giggle that reached into Blitz’s chest and twanged a discordant note on his out-of-tune heartstrings.

At home, he hung up his keys and paced back and forth in front of the couch a couple times, tail lashing, full of manic energy that had nowhere to go. He flipped his phone over and over in his hands, tossing it in the air and catching it, seeing how many times he could do it before it fell. He wasn’t stupid, the juggling game was an excuse to keep him from opening the fucking thing, from making whatever stupid decision was lurking in his impulse-ridden brain.

Giving up, Blitz took off his coat and threw it in the general direction of the chair, tugging off his shirt and pants until he flopped down face first on the couch, took his horns in his hands, and groaned.

Not letting himself think about it long enough to realize it was a bad idea, Blitz grabbed for his phone, opened it, and texted Stolas.

u ok?

He slammed it facedown on the cushions, face heating up. Stupid. Stupid. Fucking stupid idiot. He made a policy of not texting first. He was gonna get back three six-paragraph texts that would take forever to decipher and when he did would tell him nothing except that Stolas was a double-texting asshole who ate dictionaries for breakfast.

The wife wound back and kicked him- Fuck, Blitz wished he’d killed that fucking kid. Maybe then he wouldn’t feel so awful now.

His phone buzzed.

I’m perfectly hale, thank you so much for asking, Blitz. I do appreciate that. Perhaps tomorrow we could meet up for coffee and complete our requisite trade of my grimoire? You can have it back straight away, I don’t mean to keep you from your important work

Blitz squinted. He could smell the avoidance on that bird.

Thot u wre sick ?

Typing bubble. No typing bubble. Typing bubble again. Blitz gnawed on the inside of his cheek.

I was unwell this afternoon, but I feel much btter now. Thank you for thinking of me <3

It took a second, and then another message dinged:

*better.

Squinting again, Blitz looked at it hard. Stolas didn’t make typos.

Blaming it on the drinks, Blitz closed his eyes while he typed, like not seeing it would mean he wasn't really sending it.

r u lkie fr ok

He opened his eyes. Looked at it. Thunked his head down on the sofa again.

Surprised the miserable fuck hasn’t slit his wrists in his fancy fucking bathtub. Except he couldn’t, because they’d played with knives before and nothing actually broke Stolas’ unbreakable immortal shell. He was untouchable. Un-hurt-able.

Right?

Determinedly, Blitz swallowed hard and followed up. Another rule broken: No fucking double-texting.

i worie abt u smtms

He tossed his phone onto the floor, crossed his arms under his head, and tried to go the fuck to sleep.

The next morning, he got up, nursed his stupid fucking four-drink hangover because being thirty-five sucked absolute ball sack, and got dressed for work. He didn't find his phone until he was almost fifteen minutes late, and going to be later since he'd have to walk; it had ended up wedged under the bean bag chair.

He opened it. A text message from Stolas waited there. 2am, almost an hour after he'd sent his, which was a record- Stolas usually responded instantly, like he had nothing better to do than wait by the phone.

Everything will be okay.

Somehow, Blitz thought as he slipped his phone in his pocket, that didn't make him feel better at all.