Coming into work today, Blitzø didn’t expect to find anything good in the company mailbox. Besides the bills he used for target practice when he was bored, all that arrived to the I.M.P. office were coupons or scam offers for new credit cards. If he was feeling particularly lazy, the whole pile could usually be tossed into the trash without a glance at it.
But today there was something in the pile that he had never expected to find. The handwritten addresses alone were suspicious enough for him to want to cast the letter far, far away, expecting a curse in it from an irate client. However, the back of it bore a wax seal that held a sigil’s design. Closer inspection revealed it to be Stolas’.
“Oh sh*t—what the f*ck?” Blitzø muttered, tossing the rest of the pile out the window to the surprised scream of a passerby down below. He flopped onto the client waiting couch and ripped the top open with his teeth before pulling out the piece of folded paper.
When he opened it, it read as follows:
My dearest Blitzy,
Greetings my darling! I realize it is silly of me to send you written correspondence when we’ve our phones to communicate through text messages. However, I could hardly resist after rereading a favorite novel of mine where the characters correspond to their loved ones via handwritten notes. There is something just so deeply personal and intimate about reading words one takes to parchment with quill! I realize too you are probably very aware of my feelings for you, so consider this as a reminder in case you find yourself tangled in a moment of doubt.
I love you, Blitzy! You are the sensation of snuggling under a warm blanket on a chilly night. You are the forgiving breeze on a sweltering day. Seeing your face fills me with the glee of a child on Sinsmas with your smile being a gift every time I get to witness it. But that isn’t to say I do not adore your visage in other ways too. You are so wonderfully expressive and I find myself enjoying your wild gesticulations; your proclamations of challenges to your foes; the glee that spreads across your whole face after you’ve spoken humorously. I long to see every side of you, Blitzy, to embrace the entirety of what makes you you.
Yet, my darling, know too I am happy embracing what you do offer me. Every moment with you feels like a dream come true. Your presence is the highlight of my days and thoughts of seeing you again fill my dreams at night. You are my desires, my hopes, my dreams, my everything. There has never been and will never be anyone else who could capture my heart as you have. I am yours forever.
With all my love,
Stolas
“Oh sh*t—what the f*ck?” came a voice from over his shoulder.
“GYAAAH.” Blitzø would have fallen over had he not been seated against the couch’s backrest already. He did drop the letter, however, as his head whisked to the three faces staring at him with varying degrees of amusem*nt and bewilderment—namely faces belonging to the other employees at I.M.P. who had walked in to find their boss reading which was cause enough to investigate.
It was Moxxie who had made the comment that had made Blitzø jump. He was staring at Blitzø with the most bewilderment out of the three while Millie was absolutely bouncing on her heels with excitement. Loona had already retired to her desk, not caring once she’d seen what was going on.
“Ohhhhh Bliiiiiitz!!! That is so dang cuh-yooot!” Millie squealed, picking up the letter to re-read it on her own, her eyes shining all the brighter as she got a better look at Stolas’ flowery sentiments.
“It is not! It’s bullsh*t!” Blitzø shouted back, feeling his entire face light up with a burning blush. He tried to cross his arms and look annoyed but he didn’t realize his tail was swishing excitedly behind him, totally betraying his real emotions to the gesture. “And stop reading it! It’s mine, dammit! It’s uh,” he yanked the letter back and searched for the word, “private corraborationspondence!”
“Correspondence, sir. And you are going to write one back, aren’t you?” Moxxie put in, crossing his arms.
“Pfffft. Why the f*ck would I do that?” Blitzø asked, pulling up his hellphone. “I was gonna take a pic of the letter and send him an emoji reaction.”
The gasp Moxxie gave could have sucked all the air from the Pride Ring. It was an inhale of absolute lividity and bafflement. How could Blitzø even suggest such an- an- egregious insult to the prince’s gesture?!
“Absolutely the f*ck not!” Moxxie shouted before he tugged Blitzø to stand, causing the other imp to yelp in protest. For such a little guy, when he was determined, he could stand his ground! And right now he was dragging Blitzø to the door by his jacket with determined steps. “We are going straight to the stationary store so you can buy some proper paper and an envelope that isn’t reused from a bill and a working pen! And furthermore-“
Millie walked to a window and watched her husband continue ranting as he dragged their boss straight to the I.M.P. van, yanking the door open before throwing a protesting Blitzø into it. As the van screeched out of the lot, Moxxie’s voice could still be heard going on about dating etiquette and love languages and how Blitzø was soooo lucky he had the others there to correct his incompetence.
“Aww, it’s so much fun to see the boys bonding,” Millie commented with a giggle before she turned to greet their first client of the day.
~*~
“Alright, Blitz! Let’s begin!”
Upon their return to the office, Moxxie had sat Blitzø at his desk with a fresh piece of thick pristine letter paper (chosen by Moxxie) and a smooth gel-writer black 0.55 mm pen (also chosen by Moxxie) in front of him.
Blitzø stared at the page and got instant flashbacks to his brief stint trying out college. To those terrible tests where you had a singular sentence prompt and had to vomit out five paragraphs in thirty minutes for a test that counted for half your grade. Beads of sweat gathered at his temples now like they had back then. His throat felt constricted. The room began to spin and-
“Blitz? Sir?” Moxxie grabbed Blitzø by the shoulder and shook him, getting alarmed when his boss just sat there frozen. “Blitz! Hey!”
Moxxie looked around then pulled up a secret weapon—namely one of Blitzø’s horse figurines—to shove in front of his face. That managed to snap Blitzø from his dumbfounded staring as he snatched the figurine away and snuggled it to his cheek. The moment after, he threw up a middle finger Moxxie’s way.
“This is stupid. You’re stupid. Nobody writes f*cking letters these days!”
Moxxie rolled his eyes before holding up Stolas’ love letter. “Then I guess Stolas is a ‘nobody’, sir?”
“….” Blitzø looked down guiltily at the blank piece of paper. After a long moment he heaved a sigh and picked up the pen before he began writing. It had barely been five minutes before he shoved the letter at Moxxie for his goddamned approval.
“Alright, let’s see- oh my Satan what is this?”
On the paper, there was written in a scrawl worse than a child’s:
hay Stlus,
I <3 u 2 ig
U r cool an u luk preety
Hard dabs,
Blitzø
Moxxie graciously crumbled up the letter and threw it in the bin.
“Hey! My feelings!” Blitzø protested, shooting Moxxie a dirty look.
Moxxie yanked another piece of paper from the letter-writing pack and slapped it in front of his boss.
“Try. Again. Sir. And we are going to stay here until you compose something that fully expresses your emotions in a way that isn’t reeking with stupidity and sarcasm!”
Blitzø watched Moxxie head out with a raised eyebrow. “And where are you going, bitch?”
“To make a pot of coffee and a sandwich. I just know this is going to be a long f*cking day.”
~*~
It was eleven pm before Blitzø finally, finally got to push the folded letter paper into an envelope. They’d been going at this since the start of the goddamned work day and now finally he’d done something that was Moxxie-approved.
Moxxie didn’t look entirely satisfied, but having to work on this for 13+ hours had made him face his limit. If after all the revisions and guidance this was the best Blitzø could offer, then so be it.
“Alright…sir… mail this off and you’ll be done…” Moxxie sighed, tiredly searching around a desk drawer. “You do have stamps, right?”
“Bitch, why would I have any fatherf*cking stamps?”
Moxxie felt the twitch under his eye intensify.
“Nevermind. Just drop this off at his front door on the way home… You can manage that at least.”
“f*ck you, Mox. Okay? In the most loving way possible, f*ck you, Mox.”
Moxxie was too tired of Blitzø’s sh*t to do more than flip him off before they both made their way out of the office and down to the company van.
~*~
“Oh, look, dad, you got something,” Octavia announced as the butler imp came up to their breakfast nook to set down the day’s mail as he did every morning after the prince and his daughter had settled in their royal private kitchen.
Stolas poured some coffee into two mugs before coming over to look. A red envelope with ‘For Stolas’s eyes only’ caught his attention and he plucked it from the pile, opening it carefully with a summoned letter-opener. The letter was pulled out and opened with care.
“Oh my-!” Stolas exclaimed with a titter, blushing with delight.
Curious, Octavia came up to his side to look.
What she saw was a drawing of a long-horned imp and what she assumed was meant to represent her father (the tophat with eyes was a dead giveaway) together under a tree holding hands with little hearts around their heads. The square under them both must be a picnic blanket while the sky above the tree was filled with approximations of constellations.
Sentences were written under the drawing with the letters looking to be formed painstakingly so they were decently legible. Some letters had large blotches of ink where the pen paused, as if the person writing it needed time to ensure the spelling was right or were thinking way too hard on the next thing they wanted to say as they were in the middle of writing.
The sentences read as follows: [Stolas—a picture tells 1,000 words so this is how I feel about you. We can go to the human world for our next date and I’ll show you more then what I feel, OK?
-<3 Blitzø]
To Octavia, it looked like a note someone would pass in class. But, she supposed, to her father it was a pure expression of love. It may be different from how her father expressed his, but the intent was the same.
Besides, look how happy it made him. Stolas was hugging the letter to himself as he glided towards the kitchen doorway.
“Going off to scrapbook it, dad?” Octavia called out with a grin.
“Even better, Via! I’m going to frame it!”
Within minutes it was set up right by the balcony in his room where Blitzø was sure to see it the next time he came for a visit. From the sound of it, it would be with a picnic blanket dangling from his arm and his Asmodean crystal ready to be activated from his keychain.
