#there's quite the backstory there but hopefully I haven't left out anything critical

[thedevillionaire]

Best Served Cold

≈ 3,000 words of Underworldian shenanigans - Cerberus and Kia and some guest appearances; any and all questions, please do ask! And as always, thank you so much for taking the time to enter in; my ridiculous little heart loves you all. ---

Seriously?

He’s somehow managed to resemble an outtake from a baroque portrait, an array of plush blankets slung over the chair and side table in what certainly wasn’t artful arrangement but has fallen that way all the same, much like his own position, like he’s been purposefully styled to be all long, sculpted limbs, curtain of silken ebony hair falling just so, shirt semi-unbuttoned as if for an intentional, dramatically splendid unconsciousness. The grandeur of the room itself brings its own measure of import, and a claret-stained wineglass and tissue box, both notably empty, lending further subtle touches to the vista – of indulgence, of necessity. An almost bacchanalian, luxuriantly rich chaos of classic beauty gone vaguely awry, a haphazardness in paradox, perfectly disordered.

And he’s got no right to be this beautiful, not under third-day ravages of a heavy headcold, asleep in the fireside chair that he swore to her he wouldn’t fall asleep in, he’s just going to review some papers, it’s no problem, darkling, and it needs to be done.

He’s a little flushed; could be the wine, could be a touch of fever.

Kia sighs. He may indeed be an unfair triumph of aesthetic debauchery, but right now the stunning Demon king is also just her sick husband, his formidable dominance quieted under blanket pile and sleepthick congested breaths, domestic everyday mundane, which is somehow the most surreal and incredible part of all of it.

Picking up one of several scrolls strewn across the table, she glances over a complex and bloodthirsty looking collection of daemonological whatnots she mostly doesn’t comprehend. Okay, pretty sure that’s ‘evisceration’…

Alrighty, then.

She takes a brief detour to the kitchen, collecting the tissue box from the countertop there, and returns.

“Hey, hon,” she says as he blearily wakes to her soft stroking of his hair, the contours of his face. Her briefly reproachful expression is entirely a work of fiction, though, and she tilts his head towards her for a loving kiss.

:You’re the worst self-medicator I have ever met.:

Cerberus murmurs a congested, hoarse and not quite awake yet Mm, hello, love with a sniffle and nose rub against an itch that wastes no time in reasserting itself; with an urgent gasp he collapses into crooked elbow and a couplet of heavy sneezes he doesn’t even consider fighting. “Ah-TSSCHH-uu! Huh-hhAHTSSCHhuu!” He excuses himself breathlessly a moment before an immediate third, powerful and possessing. “HHAAHTSSCCHU! Ugh, pardon me. *SNFF!*”

“Bless you, sweetheart. Here,” Kia says, passing him a couple of tissues from the new box, which briefly confuses Cerberus before he gathers enough wherewithal through coldhazy tiredness to work it out. He presses his hand to his temples, the bridge of his nose, a series of ineffectual, wet sniffles in the wake, pushes his hair back from his face and makes a halfhearted attempt at rearranging both himself and the blankets into a slightly more put-together fashion.

Another sniffle. “Thanks, love. Sorry.”

She touches a kiss to the top of his head,running her fingers through his hair even as she gently pushes it aside, her hand resting a moment on his brow, noting with slight concern a heat beyond his norm. Another kiss as she drapes her arms around him. “How’s the cold?”

“Flourishing.” He sniffles again, particularly emphatically, and groans as he notices that he’s not, in fact, completed the work he meant to do – work that he thought he had done. “And apparently I’ve had—” he says, as much to himself as to Kia while running through a rapid double check of several scrolls, definitely incomplete, “—the world’s most tedious dream.”

He looks up at his bonded as if she’s going to know the answer, though he’s asking himself more than asking her. “How have I not finished this?”

“Well… You did finish the wine, so...” She gives him a good-natured, gently teasing smile.

“Ah, no, that was shared with Lilith during a delightful impromptu argument earlier,” he says, examining a particular scroll for a third time, “and… *snf* Oh, I…” He frowns, breath sharpcatching, and raises an index finger in urgent necessity of pause, turning from Kia with haste. “Hhh-AHTSSCH-uu! Hh...hh-HH… Ah-HEHTSHhuu! Ah, gods.”

A tired exhalation follows and he sniffles thickly in the wake of it, grumbles something about barely know what I’m doing thanks to this pestilential nonsense and excuses himself to claim a fresh sequence of tissues. He blows his nose, which does little more than reignite the itch with extra heat, burning insistent relentless, and he sneezes again immediately. “Huh-AHSSCHuu! Honestly, this has been… hpt-XCH! all damn… hhH! *snf* All damn day. Excu… hh-ah…AAHTSCHUU!! Gods, excuse me.” 

“Aw, bless you, babe.” Kia gives him a moment of recovery – such as it is, his breathing still somewhat erratic – and runs her hands through her bonded’s hair with one hand, passes him some more tissues with the other. “So, want my news of the day? Yeah, you do,” she says with a kiss to his cheek and no pause for an answer. “You know how I had my crash course in Mortal Studies instructing? Okay, well, oh my god it’s a whole lot harder than I expected. Like, some of the stuff you have to explain is just really…really weird. Ash has been super helpful, though. Except he did give me all the assignments to mark, which is definitely less cool, but fine, I guess. At least it’s a small group.”

She stops to regard Cerberus a moment in a sudden, slightly delayed curiosity. “So what were you arguing with Lilith about?”

Cerberus scoffs as he vaporises the used tissues. “Gods know. Haven’t a clue. I’ve willfully forgotten, or today’s medication came with some creative side effects notably more effective than its purported effects.” He clears his throat and sniffles again, rubbing his nose with a determined firmness, and subdues the most recent of the recurrent itches – almost. “She came around here and said some things at me. *snf!* I’ve no idea what.”

“So what did you say, then? You must have said something.”

“Probably did more sneezing than talking,” Cerberus mutters with clear touch of bitterness, more to himself than to Kia, though she offers a nod of agreement and wry chuckle all the same. “Be that as it may, though, I really have very little idea of what the problem actually was. Something about the damned Nuit and Arcadia issue.” He frowns in thought, pressing a hand to his forehead, and sighs. “I could have sworn we started out holding much the same opinion on the matter. Though I’m sure she’d be more than willing to let me know exactly where, why and in which way I was completely wrong about everything.”

“If you don’t remember what you said,” Kia says with a playful wicked grin, “you really can’t be sure that you weren’t wrong about everything, yeah?”

“Honestly, darkling. Are you actively trying to make my day worse than it already is?” Cerberus raises an eyebrow at her and shifts his position to rest his head against hers, murmuring, “I couldn’t have been wrong about everything. I never am.” He turns slightly to give a fleeting, knowing smile at her resultant incredulous laugh, coughs in reflex and groans quietly. “Ugh, I feel appalling.”

“Aw, honey.” Kia touches an affectionate kiss to his temple. “I know.” She glances over her shoulder as a knock sounds at the door. “Huh. Are you expecting anyone?” she asks, already moving to answer it.

“Dear gods, no. Although Lilith didn’t let that stop her from turning up earlier.”

Kia opens the door.

“Guilty co-worker reporting for duty.” Ashtaroth smiles in apology and hugs her in greeting. “Also here’s some bribery so now you have to forgive me,” he adds, proffering a particularly decadent-looking box of dark chocolates.

“Oh, I am totally bribed!” Kia laughs, accepts the box, and closes the door behind him. “I didn’t think you did guilt,” she comments with a grin.

Ashtaroth gives her a sultry look from underneath velvet eyelashes. “I do everything,” he purrdrawls, exaggerated and playful, following her along the hallway, and waves cheerily to Cerberus in an affable greeting which isn’t acknowledged further than a cursory nod.

:Huh. His Majesty not playing the friend game today?:

“Be nice to him. He’s sick.” Kia picks up the stack of assignments from atop the side table she’d left them on and hands roughly half to Ashtaroth.

“I’m always nice to him, Kiki, he’s lethal.” Flicking through the papers, he picks one out of the pile and flaps it at Kia with a groan. “Can you take Jezebel’s? Please please please. Her handwriting’s a nightmare and I may actually die of mental anguish.”

Kia laughs. “Okay, but what about if I swap you with Auror…” A second knock sounds, startling her, and she fumbles the assignments she’s holding, nearly dropping them. “Oh my god, why is it rush hour all of a sudden?” Her hurried attempts to neaten the stack result in not a lot of effective neatening at all, two papers falling to the floor, one of them now looking particularly unprofessionally rumpled.

Aera, impatient, becomes very quickly tired of waiting and lets herself in.

“Hey. Sorry,” she says, not sounding especially so. “I’m not staying, it’s just a fly-by visit to pick up my coat. Pretty sure I left it here last week. I’ve looked everywhere else, so…”

“I really should rescind your threshold entry permissions,” Cerberus remarks, vaguely regretting doing so as his voice cracks with the effort.

“Wow, you sick, Cerbie? You sound like ten buckets of shit.”

“Astutely observed. *snf!* Thank you for your concern.”

Aera rolls her eyes at his expected prickliness about it but he really does sound terrible, his usual satin cadence and crisp enunciation ruthlessly blunted by congestion, and she can’t help but soften a little, offering a somewhat more empathic pat to his shoulder as she walks past him to meet Kia, retrieving one of the stray papers from the floor as she does so. She hands it over. “Mortal Studies, huh? Well, once you’ve done a few of them, it definitely gets more dull than difficult. My coat is here, right? The purple one?”

Kia thinks on it for a moment. “Uh…well, it’s not in the loungeroom... Oh!” she exclaims in a sudden flash of memory. “I put that in the study, I think. Ohh…it’s probably locked, though.” She turns to Cerberus. “Babe, is the top study open?”

“No.”

“Any chance you could open it, then? I’d like my coat,” Aera says, adding with a smirk, “You’ll get rid of me, think of it like that.”

True enough. And not inclined to argue – or engage further at all, come to that – Cerberus pushes the blankets aside with resignation and a thick sniffle, stands and leaves the loungeroom in favour of the staircase.

He makes it up a grand total of three stairs before another knock comes at the door.

Cerberus stops in situ, and the heaviness of his sigh speaks of an exasperation verging on the very, very last straw. “Do we have a ‘vacancy’ sign up that I’m unaware of?” he says tersely.

“I guess it could be Levi, although I doubt he’d just turn up unannounced,” Ashtaroth muses, sidestepping Aera neatly in a lithe move back towards the entry foyer. With a quick glance at Cerberus, who is leaning on the banister looking thoroughly unimpressed, he adds, “I’ll get rid of him if it is," opening the door as he does so.

Therion, his expression gravely serious, looks straight past Ashtaroth to make immediate eye contact with the Demonics Leader.

“It’s for you,” Ashtaroth quips, leaving the foyer forthwith to rejoin Kia and Aera.

Cerberus wipes his nose and returns Therion’s gaze warily, raises an eyebrow in inquiry.

“Your archives have been destroyed.”

Quietly. “What?” Cerberus, stunned, releases his grip on the banister and sits, slowly, on the stairs. He covers his mouth with his hand, a cacophony of thoughts and questions insistent, only one of which is clear at this stage. And neither blunted consonants nor congestion can detract from the barely restrained fury, the certain, darkest finality unmissable in his tone. “So…who gets to die?”

“Um, well, I…” Therion starts hesitantly – rather too hesitantly, as it turns out, and he abruptly breaks off at the immediate rampant fireball Cerberus produces, taking a reflexive step backwards and raising his hands in surrender. “Fuck, man, not me! Shit.” He exhales shakily.

Cerberus murmurs an apology, Fire dissolving. “I have had…quite an exceptionally bad day.” He sniffles again, and looks at Therion again in expectation. “You might want to reconsider your phrasing.”

Therion half-smiles, just briefly, in wry accession. “Thing is, you might want to reconsider the death threat.”

“Why would I conceivably…” Cerberus doesn’t need to complete his sentence, nor confirmation, as the realisation strikes him in an icy flash of betrayal. “Nuit.” He bows his head, ebony hair curtaining his face momentarily, before returning his gaze to Therion, pure storm and inferno reflecting vivid in emerald. “Does she know that you saw her?”

Therion shakes his head.

“Good. Find her. Now.” He stands, gives Aera a cursory glance. “Your coat can wait.”

Aera doesn’t argue, doesn’t question; it was a spur of the moment thing anyway,and she nods in agreement; she knows just how calculated, how targeted Nuit’s treachery actually is. And she knows how deeply this will cut. :Look after yourself, you idiot: she Mindsends Cerberus, lacing it with as much gentle affection as she can manage, and vanishes.

As she does so, Ashtaroth takes Kia’s pile of assignments and adds them to his own. “Okay then, plans have clearly been changed. My karmic debt, I suppose.” He kisses her cheek. “Take care, darling. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, and vanishes also.

“Find her?” checks Therion. “How am I…”

“Mindsend override.” Selecting a jacket from the hallway coatrack, Cerberus caresses Kia’s hair as he passes her, touching a kiss to the top of her head.“Make something up. I don’t care what. But you don’t know that she did anything and neither do I.” He sniffles again and wipes his nose, excusing himself with more than a touch of irritation, clears his throat. “Incidentally, who the hell is running Fire?”

“Till I get back? Shadow.”

“Shadow?” With a brief shake of his head, Cerberus moves to the front door, opens it. “Find her, please.”

Therion nods. :Nuit, where are you? I’ve got you listed for an instructional lesson with level 3 in ten minutes.:

Kia, not entirely sure what’s going on, nevertheless knows one thing as certainty: there is no way she’s not letting her beloved leave the house tonight. Hopefully. Shit. She hurries down the hallway to takes his hand. “Babe, don’t you want to, you know, maybe just, like, think about this a bit more?”

“Darkling—” Cerberus cups her face in his hands and kisses her on the forehead. “—the only reason she chose to incinerate my archives instead of you is that she knows I’d find over six generations of research more difficult to bring back.”

Kia’s expression is briefly pained as she recognises the truth in this, that this destruction was geared not just to do damage but to hurt. She’s not going to be swayed from her goal, though. Not this easily, at least. “Honey, please. I just really think this isn’t a good id…”

“She’s at home,” Therion reports, “and will be leaving for a completely fake lesson in about five minutes. Your choice where you meet up with her.”

“Thank you,” Cerberus manages just moments before the state of his health takes precedence again, and he turns to rapidly cover with tightly bent elbow against the needful, demanding tickle, recognising the cause as lost, and with deep inhalation doesn’t fight it. “Huhh-hhAHTSCHH-uu!” He sniffles sharply and shakes his head in irritation, flicks some disarrayed hair from his face. “Goddamn it. *snf* Pardon me. *SNFF!* Go and relieve Shadow, mm?” He excuses himself and blows his nose, for all the little good it does.

The moment Therion accedes and vanishes, Kia steps in front of Cerberus, her back against the door as she closes it, and resumes her entreaty, this time with no maybes about it.

“Sorry, but you need to be home, babe, you need to be by the fire under a blanket with a bowl of soup or something and…and chamomile tea and honey and...” She trails off as all focus falls from her bonded’s expression and he capitulates to insistent need again, again.

“Ah-TSSCH-uu! Hh-HH... Ahh-TSSCH-uu!”

“Sweetheart, you are not going on a vengeance mission tonight, you’re just… You’re just not.”

:Bless you, by the way.:

And he’s touched by her passion, and he knows she’s probably right, he feels truly wretched, but the fact of it is not negotiable. “I cannot let this stand, love,” he says, and blows his nose again, Mindsending a thank you and an apology as he does so.

“No, no, you don’t have to! You can totally do the deliver justice thing, you can, you will, just not now.Just wait a day. One day.” Or two, Kia thinks, and…probably three, really. “Please, babe. Please look after yourself. You’re running on adrenaline and…and honestly not a whole lot else right now. You’re not well.”

“Darkling, I could have the plague and she wouldn’t be able to match me.”

“You do have the plague. Well, you have a plague. You literally called it pestilential,” Kia reminds him.  A thought strikes her then, and she gasps with deliberate melodrama. “Oh-ho-ho, hang on, now. You’re not about to tell me it’s just a cold, are you? No way.” She can’t help but grin, just a little wicked. “This is not the time you actually say those words.”

She waits for him; she knows he won’t. It’s never “just” a cold, after all.

They hold one another’s gaze for some loaded moments; she knows she’s right. And she knows she’s won.

So does he.

:Therion.: Cerberus looks again to Kia as he Mindsends both his Understudy and his bonded simultaneously, her hopeful hint of a smile, the depth of concern apparent there solidifying his decision. Not to mention the fact that if he tried to leave, she’d follow him and get as much in the way as she could; he chuckles slightly at the image, despite himself. And it’s almost relieving to step away. For now, at least. What with the focused rush of initial purpose dissipating, malaise and lack of energy returning with force, his head feeling full fathom five and this ridiculous, endless itch still refusing to be sated – he presses a firm hand against irritated nostrils as it rises anew, sniffling just as uselessly against incessant drip that seems counterintuitive to the cloying congestion but somehow isn’t – the picture of roaring fire and enveloping blankets, hot tea and his beautiful bonded by his side is sounding…immensely appealing, truth be told.

:Tell Nuit…that her lesson has been postponed.:

Kia’s delight is tangible as she Sends him a heartfelt Thank you, sweetheart, souldeep and sincere, before adding a much more notably salacious, “I will absolutely make it worthwhile, you know.”

“Darkling, I’m not sure whether I’m…”

She interrupts, first with a gently placed finger to his lips to silence him, then wrapping her arm around his waist she stands on tiptoe to purrwhisper in his ear, “If you had enough energy to go do the whole Demon lord retribution thing, you have more than enough energy to lie on the bed and get magnificently sucked off.”

His eyes widen, briefly stunned into blankness. “Wh…”

“See?” Her smile is sweetest victory as she slips a hand inside his shirt, her touch covetous, descending.. :I’ve taken your mind off it already.:

---

#does the tiny dance of long-term WIP completion #Nuit is his protege #there's quite the backstory there but hopefully I haven't left out anything critical #and if i have please PLEASE let me know #i get so nervous that i haven't made sense #And thank you so so much for reading #it's the very bestest thing #cerbia #cerberus and kia #cerberus #supernatural soap opera #my OCs #my writing #snzfic