Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Ictus had decided that the manifestation of Copia’s power warranted an emergency meeting. 

So, the whole satanic unit had been herded out into the graveyard’s abandoned chapel. See, the motorhomes were good for sleeping and sulking and pretending the world outside didn’t exist, but they were not built for emergency meetings. The chapel, with its cracked stone floor and stained walls, at least had enough space for everyone to stand without bumping shoulders, and enough high, empty air for all their bad news to rise into. 

Everyone had quickly headed inside: the four Guardian Ghouls, the two Medics, and of course - after the area was deemed to be safe by the ghouls - the twins as well.

Yes, they had headed into the chapel, but not into the main nave with the pews and the altar where a casket would usually sit. No, Ictus had led them straight past all of that and down a narrow spiral staircase into the basement. The whole way down Copia had been quietly bracing himself to step into some awful room, some grim little morgue-slash-storage-room, full of embalming tables and bad smells. He could practically picture the fluorescent lights buzzing and the stainless steel drawers.

But when they actually stepped through the doorway at the bottom, it wasn’t anything like that. It was a room that looked like it was meant for small gatherings rather than keeping dead bodies. 

In it, five square tables were scattered over a light grey carpet that was stained in some places. Each table had been draped with a navy-blue tablecloth, but the cloths had clearly been slapped on in a hurry. They hung crooked, one side dragging almost to the floor while the opposite corner rode up short. On every table sat a metal hospitality tray that still carried the faint memory of being used for actual guests. Three or four porcelain cups stood in a loose ring on each one, their saucers mismatched, rims coated with a fine grey film of dust that made Copia decide instantly he would not be drinking from any of them, thank you very much. Next to the cups was the usual congregation of small silver spoons - some tarnished, some still bright - and those strange glass sugar pourers he wondered if anyone actually ever used. A few trays even had sad piles of stale-looking sugar cubes, some toppled over, like they had given up on life.

Beside the trays were burning candles. Prayer candles, the tall glass ones with the paper sleeves, stood clustered near the edge of each tray. But when Copia squinted at the images, he realized they weren’t the usual Sacred Heart or Virgin Mary scenes. These were Clergy candles. They held images of Lucifer, Baphomet, the Sigil of the Grucifix, and more. The ghouls had obviously set them out. The candlelight pooled across the tables and turned the surfaces into shallow, flickering lakes.

Yeah. Okay. This was kinda cosy.

He could see it, easily, if he let himself. People sitting here, very cosy indeed, maybe after a funeral, their hands wrapped around tea that wasn’t quite hot enough. He could also imagine a village group using the space on a weekday evening, talking over each other about their lives in Brixen while eating someone’s self-baked cookies. 

The place seemed to still hold the memory of those events, even if all that was left of them now was dust on crockery and a faint lingering scent of stale sugar and old carpet. The pale blue walls were peeling now, the wallpaper flaking in thin curls here and there, and at times in whole sheets. 

He glanced sideways. Perpetua was also looking around. He wondered if he was sharing the same thoughts. 

Probably not. 

Before he could dwell on it, a gentle hand closed around his upper arm.

Jacobaea. 

"Come with me," she said quietly, pulling him with her, away from his twin. He automatically followed her.

Jacobaea guided him toward the nearest table while Perpetua drifted after Ictus to one a few steps away. Copia half-turned, curious what instructions Ictus might be giving his brother, but Jacobaea’s voice drew him back.

“I heard you hurt your hand,” Jacobaea said as she gestured to a chair, “Please, sit down.” 

The chair complained under him as he lowered himself onto it, the wood giving a long creak that he hoped wasn’t too loud. He flicked a quick look around to check if anyone had noticed. However, everyone seemed occupied with their own conversations.

That left him painfully aware of himself. Of his slumped posture, his hurting hands, his cold face. Copia adjusted in the seat, and he nudged the chair closer to the table so he’d look composed and ready for Jacobaea’s treatment. It would have been an easy, practiced slide in his mind. However, somewhere between the thought and the motion he completely, catastrophically misjudged the distance. His knees smacked the underside of the tabletop with a solid, unmistakable THUNK that rattled the cups. Pain flared bright and stupid up both kneecaps.

Ow! Shitty shitting- Fucking- why is this table so low? Who designed this? What the fuck!

He gritted his teeth, waiting for someone to laugh or comment, or look over with one of those sympathetic little winces people did when they’d just seen you do something deeply avoidable.

But only Jacobaea spoke up. 

“Are you alright, Frater?” she asked.

He inhaled carefully through his nose, willed the sting back down to something manageable, and pulled his features into the closest thing he had to bored neutrality. He adjusted his posture, and set his elbows on the table as if that had been the plan all along, as if his knees had not, moments ago, introduced themselves to the underside of the furniture with great enthusiasm.

“Wha? Oh, yeah. Yeah.” He waved a hand vaguely, the universal gesture for I am a functioning adult who definitely did not just do something clumsy. “I just eh- I thought the table was… higher. It… wasn’t. Clearly. But I’m fine. Really, it doesn’t even hurt.”

“I see.” From the way she squinted, he could tell she didn’t believe him all that much. “All right. Give me a moment to grab my tools.”

“Yeah, of course. You need your eh, tools. For… Take your- take your time.” He nodded too many times, trying very hard to look like he was a put together, mature individual and not internally screaming about magical numbers on gravestones and their stinging kneecaps.

Across from him, Jacobaea swung her bag onto the table with a thud. It was a sturdy pink backpack with green buttons sewed on to the front pocket. She unzipped it with a sure, practised motion and began to lay things out without needing to look for them. Gauze packets came first, the paper crinkling softly as she set them in a neat little stack. Then a pair of red scissors, the metal catching what little light there was, followed by a small roll of tape, a small bottle with a label he couldn’t possibly read from here, and a folded elastic bandage. Watching her work, he had the sense that if the world fell apart entirely, Jacobaea would still know exactly which pocket held what and how to fix whatever was left of him with it.

As she readied her things, his gaze drifted past her shoulder to the corkboard on the back wall. A calendar hung crooked in the centre of it. It was one of those old-school tear-off calendars, the kind you rip a sheet away each morning to reveal the next day underneath. The edges of the exposed page had gone brittle and faintly brown over the years, curling at the corners like they were trying to roll themselves up and disappear. Its page was forever stuck on August 23rd, 2017. 

Twenty-three…

For a moment he almost thought that number would glow too, as if the twenty-three was waiting for its turn in that ominous countdown. He stared harder, willing it to pulse or shimmer or do anything other than sit there inert. But no matter how long he held his breath, no matter how many times he blinked the dryness out of his eyes, it refused. It was still just ink on just paper. Just another summer day that had ended and never been turned.

He sighed.

Next to the calendar, a green flyer had half-peeled at one corner, advertising a job as a receptionist at some hotel with a name that looked aggressively German and full of consonants. Below it, another sheet of paper had been tacked up with more enthusiasm than correct spelling. It was some kind of invitation to join a Bible study group called ‘God’s Bookwurms.’ They apparently met every Thursday at eight and their location rotated weekly. Copia squinted at the phone number for a moment longer than he meant to, wondering if these so-called God’s Bookwurms still existed somewhere out there, still shifting from living room to living room and probably reading the Bible for the fifteenth time. If they weren’t currently being hunted by an assassin, he might actually have been tempted to call.

His attention slipped away from God’s Bookwurms and their eternal Thursday at eight when Jacobaea dragged a chair over the carpet and sat down beside him. Her hands were already gloved, mint-green latex snug around her fingers, and a moment later they were on his. She caught his right hand and turned the palm upward.

Right. His hand. 

Yeah, so he’d burned that. Pretty fucking good too. 

He hadn’t felt any pain at first, not until a few minutes after Perpetua had pulled him away from that gravestone. Now, it consistently throbbed in a deep stinging rhythm that matched his pulse. 

It hurt a lot. Like. A lot.

Should he ask for painkillers? 

The thought flickered and died almost instantly.

Probably not.

He was their leader now. Frater Imperator. If he’d learned anything from Mom and her iron-fisted run as Sister Imperator, it was that you didn’t let shit affect you. Nothing. Not even when the whole Ministry felt like it was balanced on a knife’s edge. She’d drilled it into him without ever saying it outright: Show weakness, and you will lose their respect.

He’d been just a boy when he first really saw her lead, when he still thought of her as just a relative and not his mother. He may have been eight or nine, and he had hid in the shadows of her forbidden meeting room during one of those endless strategy sessions. The air had been thick with cigar smoke and incense. Some crisis had blown up: Papa Nihil had botched a ghoul summoning, or something. The details were blurred now, but the tension hadn’t. He remembered the way the room had crackled, and he remembered voices rising like a storm, accusations flying. One of the senior Cardinals had slammed his fist on the table, red-faced, yelling about how it was all falling apart.

But Mom had just sat there at the head, fingers steepled, eyes like chips of ice. She had waited until the noise had died down. Then, she’d laid out the fix, step by step, without any emotion or hesitation. No one argued after that. They just... did what she said. Copia had peeked out from behind the velvet curtain, heart pounding, expecting her to crack or yell back. But she didn’t. She just moved on, like the tension had not affected her at all. 

He needed to be more like that.

So, no painkillers. For now, at least. Because that’s what Mom would do.

“Please hold still, Frater. I’m going to take the glove off.”

You’re fine. It’s just a burn.

Jacobaea brought out a small pair of scissors, and eased the tip under the edge of his glove. She worked slowly, careful not to nick his burned skin. The blades made quiet, decisive snips as she traced a line up toward his fingers. Once she had enough of a seam, she hooked her thumb under the split and started to peel the leather back. She cut along the fingers here and there to fully open up the glove, before trying to peel off more.

It clung at first, tacky from sweat and heat, Then it gave way in small, grudging tugs, each one pulling a fresh sting along the raw edges. 

Copia sucked in a pained breath when the glove finally came free and the air of the chapel got to the skin underneath. Aw, shit. Every nerve seemed to jolt awake at the same instant, firing off a chaotic storm of pins, needles, and sudden, blooming heat that raced up his forearm and made his wrist twitch involuntarily.

He made himself look down.

Oh, wow.

The pads of his fingers and the meaty curve below his thumb had darkened to a slick, angry rose, almost glossy in places where the heat had pressed deepest. A scattering of pinhead blisters hovered just under the surface in a few spots, hesitant, like they were still deciding whether to commit. If he’d seen it on someone else, he would have said it looked like a small splash of boiling water had hit and run. Frankly, the sight wasn’t as grotesque as the pain insisted it should be. He’d expected worse, if he was honest. Seriously, he’d been halfway convinced the skin would just… slough off once the glove was off.

Jacobaea leaned in a touch closer, eyes narrowing thoughtfully at the reddened skin along his thumb. “Mhm… yeah, your thumb took the worst of it,” she murmured, almost to herself at first. “But it's a mild second-degree. The good news is that you'll be fine. We just need to take care of it properly.”

“We?” Copia’s gaze flicked up to meet hers. He  still tried to look confident, but what came out was a small, crooked twitch of a sheepish smile. “… You will take care of it, yes? I mean- not that I am trying to be lazy, but… I’m pretty terrible at doing doctor things.” 

Her lips curved into a small, genuine smile, the kind that reached her eyes and made the candlelight feel warmer. “Of course.”

“Ahh, great. Great…” He rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand, the motion quick and nervous, then let out a soft, self-conscious chuckle. “That’s very reassuring. So, eh… What is the plan for this? To take care of it, I mean. Would you- could you walk me through it? I’d like to be a good patient for you. Or at least… not a terrible one.”

“Don’t fret about that, Frater.” She gave his wrist a light, steadying squeeze before releasing it. “I want to cool the skin first. Hold on…” Without lifting her eyes from the burn, she raised her voice just enough to carry across the scattered tables. 

“Draziel! Could you come here please?”

The ghoul who answered Jacobaea’s call began moving across the room immediately. He peeled himself off the wall where he’d been leaning - arms folded, posture loose but watchful - and crossed the carpet in long, near-silent strides.

He kind of had a soldier’s walk: his back straight, shoulders set wide under the fitted blue tank top, claws folded neatly behind his back as if he were on some invisible parade ground. His steps were firm without being heavy, landing in an even rhythm that carried him straight across the room with no sidestepping, no little checks or second-guessing, and no tripping over that orange-plumed long tail of his either. Copia could see why his brain kept serving up Ictus every time he looked at him. There was the same compact strength in the arms, the same thighs filling out the black Clergy trousers, just without Severan’s overall door-frame size.

When Draziel came to stand beside Jacobaea, he tipped his stubbled jaw just enough to bring Copia into his line of sight. Up close, Copia realised his hair was really, really dark. It was practically a shaggy black wolfcut that fell feathered out around the jaw and neck, and the last centimetre of each strand was stained red. Near one ear, a few thin braids hid among the looser hair, threaded with orange beads that clicked softly as he angled his head. 

The stare he gave Copia next wasn’t unfriendly, but there was nothing warm in it either. 

The ghoul watched him through a narrowed sliver, like he was slightly suspicious. Soot-dark shadow was smudged around the red of those eyes. It looked as if he’d rubbed at them with the back of his hand and never checked a mirror, and every blink dragged thick, feathery lashes across grey skin dusted with tiny white freckles. 

It made sense, suddenly, why they hadn’t exchanged much more than nods on the trip. 

Jacobaea glanced up, and whatever coolness had been sitting in Draziel’s mouth thawed a little. The corners lifted, just enough to change his face. Copia caught a brief flash of red-stained fangs, upper and lower both, before his lips closed over them again.

“Sure. What do you need my help with?” he asked. 

The voice that came out of the ghoul was more mellow than Copia remembered, soft enough that you had to lean in a little to catch all of it. Draziel sounded like someone who assumed people were already listening and didn’t see the point in raising his volume.

“I need you to run water over Frater’s hand here,” she said, circling a fingertip above the reddened skin of Copia’s hand. “The temperature should be fifteen degrees. Do you think you can manage that without flooding the floor this time?”

Draziel listened, waiting a second as if running through some internal checklist only he could see, before replying, “Of course.”

Hey, what? Water? Over his hand? Why did she need him for th-

Oh yeah, right. Draziel was a water Ghoul. 

Copia’s stomach did a small, nervous turn.

Soo… How was he gonna run water over his hand? Without… flooding the floor?

He immediately pictured a dozen different scenarios, each more alarming than the last: a gentle trickle from a perfectly ordinary kitchen tap, a polite misting spray like the kind they use on produce at fancy markets, or, worst-case, a full-pressure blast from some infernal firehose that would peel the dressing right off and leave him soaked to the bone in front of everyone. He had zero clue where Draziel’s “water” specialty actually fell on that spectrum, only that the ghoul’s job description included the word and his posture right now screamed ‘this is normal Tuesday for me’ while Copia’s brain screamed this is going to be mortifying.

“How will you-” he began, then stopped. Something else had tugged at his attention. 

“Oh. Hey, uh, your… your horns. Are they supposed to be doing that?”

He lifted his good hand in a vague, pointing gesture toward Draziel’s head. There were three of them: two long crimson spurs sweeping back from his temples toward the base of his skull and, between them, a shorter ridge that followed the same rearward line. There was nothing unusual there. He had seen ghouls with more than two horns before, although they were rare.

He’d never seen horns giving off light though. 

A faint pulse of pale orange light crawled along the keratin, starting at the dark roots where the horn met scalp and travelling toward the ember-red tips. Then another pulse followed it. And another! They moved in slow, steady waves, brightening as they ran the length of each horn and fading as they reached the points, the whole pattern settling into a rhythm that felt kind of like a heartbeat. 

Draziel, for his part, just looked at him as if Copia had pointed out the color of his shirt. 

“Yeah, they are supposed to,” he said, without elaborating further.

Oh. Okay. Then. 

“Right.” Copia glanced at Jacobaea, looking for backup, but she had simply leaned back in her chair, one leg crossed over the other, watching the whole thing with the mild interest of someone observing a familiar trick.

Before he could blurt out the obvious - why the actual hell are your horns glowing like discount neon? - Draziel lifted one gloved index finger. Copia’s eyes snapped to it the way a startled cat tracks a dancing red dot. No thought, just a stupid reflex. 

The finger hovered at eye level for a moment, then began to trace a wide, lazy circle in the air between them. Copia opened his mouth to ask for some kind of explanation for that, but shut again when the answer appeared on its own.

Water seeped into existence at the tip of Draziel’s finger, and it ignored gravity completely. It didn’t drip, and it didn't even think about heading for the carpet. It literally just hung there, as if the air had quietly thickened enough to hold it in place.

When Draziel moved his hand, the water obediently followed. It trailed after his fingertip in a thin, clear line that lengthened with each slow circle, closing on itself and building layer after layer. The ring thickened and widened until it became a small tunnel of moving water, the whole thing bright and unnervingly clean, the kind of clear that made some stupid part of Copia’s brain think it looked almost drinkable. Within seconds, he found himself staring at a hollow water cylinder suspended in the space between them. The surface rippled in one direction while the flow inside seemed to run in loops, chasing itself around and around. It reminded him, absurdly, of those perfect, curling water tunnels he’d seen surfers shooting through in cartoons.

The pulses of light along Draziel’s horns matched the slow rotation, each flare of pink running to the tips in time with the circle’s turn. 

And finally, when the ring seemed to have reached whatever invisible threshold Draziel was aiming for, the Ghoul lowered his finger. The ring kept turning, but the glow along the horns faded out and went quiet.

He extended his other hand then, fingers wide and steady, palm tilted toward Copia’s like he was offering an invisible handshake. A few low syllables slipped out under his breath, a fragment of a language Copia couldn’t place and was almost sure he wasn’t meant to understand. 

The tunnel of water that had been hovering between them responded like a dog hearing its name. It snapped forward in a fluid, almost liquid lunge. It was too fast for Copia to track properly. He jolted, instinct screaming to yank his hand away, but his nerves were sluggish from exhaustion and the lingering burn. Too late.

“What the-” A very embarrassing sounding yelp escaped him before he could clamp it down.

In one clean, startling motion the water reshaped itself. It flowed over his fingers, curled around his knuckles, slid up the back of his hand and sealed itself in a smooth cuff just below his wrist.

He could feel it moving immediately. It was like a cool current sliding over his fingertips, slipping through the gaps between his fingers and sweeping across his palm and knuckles before circling back again. The water had wrapped itself into a perfect glove, and everything inside that shell was in constant motion. It really was the same sensation as holding his hand under a running tap, only the tap had been folded into a loop around his skin and told to keep flowing without spilling a single drop. 

“Holy shit,” he said, because his brain did not appear to have any better vocabulary available for the magic glove of water now attached to his body. Copia stared at his own hand, now encased in living water that shimmered faintly under the candle glow. Tiny bubbles drifted inside the glove, carried along the invisible currents.

He flexed his fingers experimentally. The water flexed with him, stretching, thinning slightly at the joints, then flowing back into place without so much as a ripple.

He looked up at Draziel then, who was watching the construct with a small, satisfied smirk that definitely hadn’t been there before. There had probably been a much faster, much less theatrical way to get water onto a burn, something involving a tap and a bowl and zero light show, but clearly this ghoul liked to put on a performance - well, most ghouls did.

“Without a spill,” Draziel hummed, before flicking his gaze toward Jacobaea.

She shook her head, the corners of her mouth curving in something that was closer to fondness than exasperation. Her eyes followed the flow of the water where it slipped and re-formed over Copia’s skin, the sheath shifting and moving but never letting a single droplet break free.

“Stay like that for twenty minutes,” she said, stepping back to give him space. “It will cool the burn.”

Indeed, the initial stinging of the burns had already started to ease, heat pushed back by that constant, even motion of the water. As he watched the current slip over his knuckles and vanish between his fingers only to appear again, a question finally barged its way to the front of his tired mind.

Where did the water come from?

Did Draziel use his own body water for this? The thought made his nose wrinkle. No, that didn’t seem right. Draziel didn’t look dehydrated, and if this was all coming out of him, surely there’d be a limit before he just shrivelled like a raisin. Maybe he had a fixed amount he could play with? And it was stored somewhere else? Was there a tank somewhere in Hell labelled ‘DRAZIEL’S WATER. DO NOT DRINK’ and he pulled his water from there?

Or maybe he could just summon it from the environment. Pull moisture straight out of the air, or the walls, or whatever passed for humidity in a graveyard chapel that had been shut since 2017. 

The more he stared at the clear, looping flow, the more his brain tried to pin it down with rules and explanations, and the less any of it helped. In the end, all he really knew was that his hand slightly felt better, the burns throbbed less, and Draziel had already walked back to his previous place by the wall, watching the room again while the magical water glove kept quietly working on Copia’s skin.

At some point later, Jacobaea had murmured something about needing to speak to someone, and slipped away, and Copia was alone at the square table.

He eased back in the wooden chair, and rested his forearms on the table, his non-water-gloved fingers drumming quietly. With nothing else demanding his attention, his mind finally unclenched enough to take in the interactions in the rest of the room.

First, he noticed Ictus. She stood planted in the back of the room, right in front of the corkboard like she was guarding it from the rest of the room. Her thick arms were folded tight across her chest, with the sleeves of her red muscle shirt pushed up past the elbows. Her tail had slowly been brushing back and forth over the floor, but now curled back around her foot. Even from a distance, Copia could see the tension in her square jaw. Like Copia himself, she must have been unsettled by the manifestation of his power. 

Ravach stood beside her but faced the corkboard, long fingers resting lightly on his hips, apparently reading some flyer Copia couldn't make out from here.

They were talking. Their voices were low, only meant for each other, but the basement’s acoustics were cruel in their generosity. Fragments drifted over to Copia anyway. He kind of didn’t mind that.

"You said only he could see it? Not even you?"

Ravach shook his head and plucked at the corner of a pinned paper. "Only Frater. Papa and I thought he was having delusions, for a moment."

"But he wasn't."

"Apparently not."

"And… He saw a twenty-five. Then twenty-four."

"That would be correct." Ravach turned his head briefly, scanning the room, and Copia looked away.

"It has to mean something."

"Why, yes, of course, it does."

"What?"

“I know what it means.”

“Well, don’t just keep it to yourself…”

“He is the killer radar, remember? And he went off today… So that means our killer is getting close. Maybe they’re already in Brixen.”

Ictus smacked his shin with her tail. “Vach,” She whispered. "Don't just - what if he hears you? You know how he can get."

"Mhm. Yes, fine."

You know how he can get.

He felt his heart sink from his ribcage, straight into his shoes. Part of him wished he hadn’t heard that. Instant karma for eavesdropping.

He wasn't sure what bothered him more: that Ravach thought the assassin might already be here, or that Ictus's first instinct had been to look across the room and check whether he'd heard. Like the information itself was less of a problem than what it might do to him. Tail-smacking each other into silence in case the Frater Imperator needed to be managed.

The water-glove gave a tiny, involuntary squeeze around his thumb, like it had picked up the spike in his pulse and was trying to soothe it back down.

He dragged his gaze away before they could catch him listening in, letting it slide across the scattered tables to Jacobaea.

Jacobaea had settled beside Perpetua now, and Copia watched her lift one gloved hand and press it flat against his chest, right over the sternum. It was the same gesture she'd used back at the first safehouse when she'd sniffed out Copia's cold before he'd even felt the first tickle at the back of his throat. Her head tilted, eyes going half-lidded, and appeared very concentrated, like she was listening to something the rest of them couldn't hear.

But the moment her hand really pressed against Perpetua’s chest, her fingers stiffened. She withdrew her hand quickly, not quite a flinch but close to one, like the contact had passed something unwelcome back up through her palm.

"Woah, I sense a lot of distress in you, Papa," she said, quietly enough that meant that it wasn't for the room.

Perpetua simply scratched at the bandages on his head. “Don’t concern yourselves with me.”

Jacobaea held his calm stare for a moment. Her hand lowered slowly to her lap, but she didn't look away from him yet, the way a nurse didn't look away when a patient said I'm fine in a tone that probably meant they were not.

"Alright," she said, evenly. "But if it- and I mean the stress, worsens, or if you notice any changes, … in your appetite, sleep, anything, I'd like to know. That applies to your emotional distress as much as physical."

Perpetua gave a single, shallow nod that didn't commit to anything.

Across the room, Copia watched the exchange with a small frown. He already knew that Perpetua was stressed, of course. Perpetua had told him himself: that being in Brixen made his thoughts go sideways. And some small, admittedly petty part of him felt kind of honored. That Perpetua had told him. Just him. 

He understood the need to brush Jacobaea off, though. Copia had been Papa once, too. He knew exactly what it cost to let a follower see something was wrong, how fast not being alright could curdle into whispered conversations behind closed doors, into the quiet reshuffling of trust that happened when an Emeritus stopped looking like one. He didn't know if that was why Perpetua was declining to talk about it. Perpetua kept things close regardless of the audience. 

A heavy hand landed on his shoulder from behind without any warning whatsoever.

Copia's whole upper body lurched forward from the impact, an “aaah!” sound escaping him that he would not be describing to anyone ever. He twisted around in the chair.

Severan stood behind him, grinning. "Frater! My vir bellus. I got something for you. I heard you had a rough time out there."

"Cazzo, Sev." Copia pressed his good hand flat to his sternum, feeling his own heartbeat misbehave underneath it. "That is- I have been scared twice today already. I- I am running out of heartbeats, I think."

“Aye, sorry, Frater. I didn’t mean to add to the list.”

"It's- ehm. It's alright. I just-" He twisted further in the chair to look up at him properly, and that was when he noticed that Severan's other palm had a silver tray balanced on it, held flat and steady at shoulder height like he was some kind of professional pizzaiolo. "... What is- what is that?"

“Your dinner.” Severan withdrew the hand from Copia's shoulder and came around the table to his right side, setting the tray down with careful precision. On it, Copia saw a white porcelain bowl that looked rather ordinary, steam coiling off the surface in lazy spirals and catching the candlelight on its way up. "Ictus cooked for us all. I cut the vegetables. Just so you know.”

“Oh, that is very… Good of you- to do that. To help out. So, what are we eating?”

Severan pulled out the chair across from Copia and dropped into it, all six-something feet of him landing like a boulder. The chair creaked in a way that suggested it had opinions about that. 

“Have a look.” He pushed the tray towards Copia and leaned back, folding his bulky arms across his chest with that same grin he gave Copia when he’d managed to debate him into stuttering. 

Copia leaned forward to look into the bowl properly, and then stopped.

It was … soup? Yeah. Soup. It looked like soup.

But the soup was fucking cyan.

No, really. It was a bright, loud, aggressive neon cyan that would have been a terrible color for a car and was somehow worse for a food. 

The soup’s surface glittered faintly, like someone had dissolved a small quantity of stars into the base and stirred. Floating on top were flakes the color of a flamingo, and what appeared to be a sprig of coriander that had clearly been placed there in the hope of making the whole thing look less alarming. It was not working. Submerged in the depths of the cyan were pale dumplings, plump and bobbing, drifting through the broth with a serenity they had absolutely no right to.

Copia stared at it for a moment.

"Ehm. Severan."

"Mhm."

"Uhhhhhhhhm... What is this.”

Severan's grin widened. He had clearly been waiting for this. 

"It’s Apa fruit soup! We have talked about it before," he began to explain, and his already glowing red eyes seemed to glow brighter when he did, "Apa fruit grows underwater in Hell. It looks like your watermelon… Except it’s blue and salty on the outside, sweet inside. You take that, cook it down with coconut milk, carrots, some other things, and you get-" He clapped his hands together with a surprisingly muffled thud, before rubbing them together happily. "-this! My favorite. Oh, and the dumplings have Apa fruit jelly inside them." 

Jelly?

Copia stared at the dish again.

This was his own fault, really. He had asked Severan on the road what he liked to eat, and in response to this mysterious ‘apa fruit soup’, Copia had said he'd love to try it sometime. But when the ghoul had mentioned ‘apa fruit soup’ was something the younglings in Hell ate as comfort food before playing sports, Copia had pictured something more… hellish? Something with smoke and fire, or something. Not a bowl of what looked like melted mermaid.

“Ehm, and it’s not…” Copia lifted his eyes from the shimmering surface. “It’s not spicy, is it? I’m not really good with spicy stuff. Makes me, eh.” He gave a helpless little shrug and a wry smile. “Poop a lot.”

Severan chuckled and shook his head. The wild hair hanging over his forehead swung with the movement. “Nah, no spicy stuff in there, Frater. Come on, take a bite. I really did my best on those vegetables.”

Right. Okay. 

How bad could it be? 

A cyan soup with glitter was, he figured, not the worst thing he would ever eat. After all, he had eaten a spoonful of anchovy paste straight from the tube on a dare from Dew at two in the morning. And come to think of it, he sometimes ate plain unsauced boiled gnocchi like popcorn while watching television, followed by eating chocolate jimmies by the pinch directly from the container with the cleanliness of a deranged little bird. 

Copia reached for the spoon with his left hand, which was not his usual hand for spoons, and it showed. His fingers closed around it slightly wrong and it slipped, hit the tablecloth with a soft clatter, and spun to a stop against the tray. He picked it up again with a soft grumble that sounded like “stupid spoon”, adjusted his grip, and tried again with more success.

Copia carefully dipped the spoon into the soup, watching the cyan coat the metal. It clung in a thick layer before sliding back down, leaving a faint glitter behind. Before he could think too much about it, he brought it to his lips and took a cautious sip.

It was… not terrible. 

He could taste coconut, yes, but it was mild, not the overwhelming sunscreen flavour he dreaded. The base had the comforting body of a vegetable soup. The closest thing he could compare it to was a sweet broccoli soup with something slightly garlicky and salty lingering at the back of his tongue. Every now and then one of the pink dumplings slipped against his teeth and burst softly, releasing a warm, sugary syrup that somehow didn’t clash with the rest.

"It's…" He glanced up and found Severan still watching him, grin barely contained. The same Ghoul who had spent the better part of the evening with his hand on a weapon and his eyes on every exit was currently sitting across from him with the barely-suppressed energy of a child who had baked something and needed to know if it was good. Even his tail was flicking behind him all excitedly. It was, Copia thought, extremely difficult not to find that endearing. 

"... I like it."

“Yeah?” Severan leaned in across the table, forearms settling on the cloth as the candlelight caught in his eyes and made them seem even brighter. The grin on his face widened, slow and pleased. “Heh. I knew you would like it. Although that face you made when you saw the color had me worried for a second.” 

"What face?" Copia frowned, already knowing exactly what face.

"This face.” Severan shifted his whole expression into ‘that face’ without any warmup whatsoever. His thick brows dropped heavy over his eyes, mouth pressed flat, and his jaw set. Then he stared down at an imaginary bowl on the table as if it had insulted his entire bloodline and he was still deciding whether to forgive it.

"Ey, I do not- " Copia pointed his spoon at him. "That is not- I do not look like that! I was just surprised by the color. It's a surprising color, eh? You have to admit to that. It… It is not a normal color. It looks like-eh… a melted crayon, or something.” He searched for a better comparison but came up empty.

"Melted crayon.”

"... Yes? It really does look like that.” Copia blinked at him. “What? Why do you look at me like that?"

"Nothing." Severan leaned back into his chair. The sharp grin on his face eased into something lopsided smaller, but remained warm. “You’re funny, you know that?”

“Oh.” 

A heat moved through Copia’s chest, strange and sudden enough that it made him look down at his soup as if words might also be floating in there. 

“Thanks,” he replied, a little quieter than he would have liked. “I wasn’t trying to be. Ehm. Funny, I mean. But… yeah.” He scooped up another spoonful and brought it to his mouth, focusing very hard on the taste of coconut and salt and spice, because that felt much less awkward than looking back up just yet. 

For a moment he kept his gaze down, watching the surface of the soup ripple faintly as his spoon moved through it. Then, once he’d swallowed, he let his eyes drift upward again, cautiously at first, just above the rim of the bowl. 

Severan was still there across from him, broad shoulders relaxed, the head turned now to look around like he usually did when he was checking every corner of their environment for possible dangers. So even when talking about soup like a child in Disneyland, he was alert. Good to know.

Copia’s gaze drifted past Severan at some point, pulled by the scrape of a chair being dragged across the floor. He saw, as a result, Perpetua sitting at another table a little further away. Ictus was lowering herself into the chair beside him, settling between him and Jacobaea. She had brought a tray along and slid it carefully into place in front of him. Copia noticed right away that it wasn’t the same meal everyone else had been given. Nope. Not at all. There was no bowl of crazy cyan soup on there. Instead, two small plates rested on the tray. One held a thick slice of toast with cheese melted across the top. The other carried the dumplings Copia assumed had come from the soup.

Ictus must have remembered that Perpetua does not enjoy soup very much. 

His brother gave a small nod of acknowledgment and murmured a quiet “thanks” to the ghoullette before reaching for his fork and knife. Of course he did. Copia watched him begin to divide the toast, cutting it into freaky squares the same way he always did with his pizza. For a moment, Perpetua paused his cutting, and to his surprise, their eyes met. 

Copia gave him a small, automatic smile, then let his gaze slide away again. No one liked being watched while they ate. Perpetua least of all. 

His attention moved to the walls in front of him  instead. Not because they were interesting, or anything, but mainly because they were just there and he needed to look at something. As he did, cutlery began to tap against porcelain as people finally started eating. 

As they ate, the basement sat wrapped in that steady orange glow the fire cast across the walls, the light shifting gently as the flames moved in the hearth somewhere behind him. Shadows climbed and slid along the stone and plaster, stretching and shrinking as people moved. The shapes of his ghouls drifted across the walls like quiet silhouettes, long horns and shoulders passing slowly through the firelight, a silent reminder that they were always nearby, always watching. One of them laughed under their breath, and a chair creaked softly as weight shifted. 

The air, which had carried that dry, dusty stillness of the basement earlier, now held the richer scent of food. Garlic. Black pepper. Something warm and buttery from the cheese. The smell was strong enough that it pushed its way through the gentler coconut and lemongrass notes of the Apa fruit soup in front of him. 

Right. The soup. He should probably eat that.

Copia lifted another spoonful. While he brought it up to his lips, his eyes passed over Severan’s shoulder, then toward the pale blue wall where strips of wallpaper had begun to curl away from the plaster in thin, tired ribbons.

When his eyes reached the corkboard, his spoon stopped halfway to his mouth.

Wait a minute-

That was…

The twenty-three on that tear-off calendar was glowing.

His heart jumped. 

Not again.

He lowered the spoon without registering that he had. On the corkboard, the number pulsed slowly, the red glow spreading over the nine-year old calendar’s weathered, yellowed paper before it breathed in again. Then out. Then in, again. 

Copia waited for a moment, because maybe he was imagining it? Maybe his eyes were pulling something out of the candlelight and the exhaustion and the general ongoing disaster of the evening, assembling a pattern from nothing the way tired eyes did. He had spent enough years standing under stage lights to know that combined with exhaustion, he got these bright red blobs that floated at the edge of vision, ghosts of light that weren't really there.

He leaned forward slightly, squinting his eyes to really focus on the glow, as if that might help make it disappear. 

But of course, none of that made it disappear at all. He really wasn’t imagining it. The number just simply continued its slow ominous crimson breathing: spreading and retreating, spreading and retreating.

The way it pulsed reminded him of the low, flickering lamplight in his childhood bedroom, back when the Ministry still let Marika read to him before lights-out. She’d perch on the edge of the mattress, the same worn fairytale book open across her lap every time he begged for “the one with the apple.” The spine had cracked years earlier and pages were tattered here and there. He could still hear her lively voice going through the story that very first time.

When she reached the part with the Evil Queen at the cottage window, disguised as a frail old peddler woman, something in his small chest would clench. The Queen would hold out the apple, one of those red, perfectly gleaming ones, and offer it with a gentle, coaxing smile to Snow White. Just fruit. Just kindness from an old lady who meant no harm. But the way the story described the moment, the way Marika’s voice became lower when the Queen said “One bite, dearie,” had always made Copia’s skin crawl. He hadn’t had the words for it back then, but he’d felt it: that something was wrong. 

And now, as he stared at that red twenty-three, he felt it again.

Was it the same? Was the number hiding poison behind a pretty shimmer the way the apple had? Or was he projecting, turning what seemed to be his ‘power’ gifted by Satan himself into a childhood nightmare because his brain was tired and his hand hurt and every thought felt like it was circling?

He didn’t know. That was the part that was starting to needle under his skin. Once you knew the story, the feeling he got around the Evil Queen made sense. You could point at the poison apple, the smile, the whole ugly rotten shape of her, and say: There. There she is. Don’t trust her. She’s an evil motherfucker, alright. But the numbers were still a mystery to him. They could still be anything. And still, they felt wrong.

He could stare at them until his eyes burned and the lines began to blur, could drag meaning over them again and again like a man striking matches in the dark, and still they refused to explain what they were trying to say. They would not give him meaning. They just stayed numbers. Silent as teeth in a skull.

He looked around. 

The basement had not changed. It remained what it had been a minute ago: low ceiling, air filled with the aroma of food, his companions packed into it, all of them carrying on and eating their dinners as if nothing had happened. Their murmurs still moved through the room. Cutlery occasionally knocked against the thick rims of porcelain plates and someone crossed the carpet somewhere behind him, the tiles compressing softly under their weight and jumping back up with a ‘floop’. One of the candles on the nearest tray guttered in a draught from somewhere he couldn't possibly locate.

His eyes dropped back to the number.

Candlelight, plates, people, and that fucking number, pulling his whole heart tight around it.

“- the outer skin of the dumplings is made out of the Apa fruit’s peel-"

Right. Severan had started talking at some point beside him. He had caught pieces of what he was talking about here and there, a few words at a time, but they kept sliding loose before they could take hold in his memory.

It was something about the soup, for sure. He was talking about the dumplings in it. And Satanas, he really should be listening to that. Severan was taking the time to explain this special dish to him, and Copia was sitting there letting every word drift past him as if he wasn’t interested in him at all.

Finally, he forced his eyes away from the number and lowered the spoon back into the bowl. The faint clink against the rim sounded strangely far away, as though it had happened at the other end of the room instead of in his own hand. Shit, even his fingers no longer felt fully like his. They had gone cold and stiff around the handle, numb in a way that made him want to flex them just to prove they still belonged to him. 

“Sev? Ehm…” 

“And- yes?”

Severan paused immediately, and Copia had the distant thought that it was probably because he was pulling a face again. A different face from the soup one. A worse one. He'd been told before, by enough people and on enough occasions that it had started to feel like a personality trait rather than a flaw, that he was very easy to read. Whatever flashed through his head seemed to go straight to his mouth, his eyes, the set of his brows, and announce itself to the world before he had the chance to hide it. Maybe it was for the better. At least it was clear to Severan now that he had had a reason for not really listening before.

"Yeah?”

“So...” Copia kept his eyes fixed on the corkboard again. It was still there. “Do you see that? On the calendar,” he murmured. “The number on it. It’s... ehm. Yeah. I think it’s glowing for me. Like before.”

Beside him, Severan turned in his chair to take a look. As he did, Copia watched the back of his head angle slightly, the curve of one horn catching the warm glow of the candlelight while his eyes moved over the page pinned there. A few ordinary, everyday sounds filled the brief silence that followed. A door eased shut somewhere behind them with a soft click. Across the room, Perpetua bit into his toast, the crust cracking cleanly between his teeth. Fabric whispered nearby as someone adjusted a sleeve or straightened a napkin in their lap. 

"August twenty-third," Severan read out loud. "Two thousand and seventeen." He stayed facing the distant corkboard for another moment, his gaze lingering on the page as though patience alone might coax something out of it, some faint shimmer or shift that would prove Copia wasn’t imagining things. But the number remained exactly what it had been a second ago. Just flat and ordinary ink on paper. 

Eventually Severan turned back and looked for Copia’s eyes, his own narrowing a little as they settled on him. His brows lowered too. 

"I don’t see it,” he said after a moment. “But neither could Papa and Vach, before, I’ve been told. So…” He straightened in the chair. 

“We should tell the others."

"I-..." Copia pulled in a breath that wavered halfway through and pushed it out again through his mouth. “Yea- Yeah, that’s probably a good idea, I agree with that. Good idea… to tell.” 

He let his gaze fall to the table. 

The tablecloth had a small stain near his wrist that he hadn't noticed before, faint and brownish, the ghost of someone's spilled tea from some Thursday evening years ago. He fixed on it and tried to force his thoughts into some kind of order as Severan pushed back his chair and stood across from him, but all his thoughts were already sliding apart. 

Twenty-five. Then twenty-four. Then - now - twenty-three. 

The numbers ticked down in his head like beads sliding off a broken rosary. It had been, what, two hours now, maybe a little under, since he had found that first stone. One hour since he’d touched that second stone and felt the glow pass through him, deep and calming, as though it had put a hand somewhere inside him no one should have been able to reach. And now, there was another number in some old tear-off calendar.

A different number every hour. And the number was dropping.

So… was it counting hours? 

Hours. Of course. It had to be. Satanas. Unless it wasn’t. Unless he had got hold of the wrong conclusion entirely. But if it was hours, if that was what this meant, then another conclusion came into focus far too quickly.

It was counting down the hours until the assassin arrived.

Twenty-three hours.

That meant tomorrow night.

His killer would arrive tomorrow night and he was sitting here eating soup.

His pulse suddenly did something complicated. He could feel it beating, but not properly track it, as if the rhythm had gone skittish and was now slipping away from him between each thud. Darkness crept in the edges of his vision and the murmur of voices seemed to drift further off, as if being pulled down a long corridor. He blinked and the darkness receded. He blinked again.

“Everyone! He’s seeing numbers again,” Severan’s voice carried across the table, though it also sounded oddly distant to Copia, as if it had been spoken from the far end of the room instead of an arm’s length away. 

Copia didn’t look up. The stain on the tablecloth held his eyes where they were. Around the edges of his vision, however, everyone began to move. Chair legs scraped across the floor, someone pushed back from the table hard enough that the wood knocked against the wall behind it, fabric rustled, footsteps crossed the carpet in quick, uneven bursts. Shapes moved through the blur at the edge of his sight. He saw dark sleeves. A shoulder. The pale flash of a claw reaching for the table to steady itself. They were getting up. All of them. Moving toward him. And he was still staring at that stupid stain in the cloth like it would give him anything useful to say.

Someone was talking to Severan, but Copia wasn’t listening again. His thoughts had, once again, slipped somewhere else.

But what if the numbers were distance instead? Kilometres. The space the assassin still had to cross before reaching them. A marker ticking down as they moved closer. Twenty three kilometers.

No- that would mean they had only moved one kilometer an hour. That would mean someone moving on foot. But he'd heard a highway. A motorcycle engine. Hadn't he? Or had his brain assembled those sounds from nothing the way it assembled things in dreams, stitching together noise and meaning that wasn't there, that had never been there?

So then, what if the numbers were a code instead? A numerical code? Or something that meant something in Latin that he should know because of his many years of mandatory lessons? Or what if it was something else entirely, something he hadn't thought of and now every hour, a number appeared, and he was running out of time to be wrong about it? What if-

What if it was really just hours?

Twenty-three hours until the assassin reached them.

That conclusion felt correct, somehow. It was a specific, animal feeling in his belly, one that had nothing to do with reasoning and everything to do with the part of him that recognised the apple for what it was before Snow White ever reached out her hand.

He only had twenty-three hours to live, then. 

Only twenty-three hours. 

No. 

Shit. 

Fuck. 

The stain in front of him began to lose its edges. A moment ago it had been small and clear, a neat brown mark pressed into the cloth. Now the colour started to bleed outward, the border of it softening until it looked as though someone had dragged a wet thumb across the fabric. The bowl beside it slipped out of focus at the same time. The rim blurred into something soft and unfocused. And for a moment it looked as if there were two spoons in the soup. One sat where it should, still and bright in the broth. The other hovered beside it, a faint twin that trembled each time he tried to fix his eyes on it. The longer he stared, the worse it became. The bowl drifted further away from him even though it had not moved.

As it happened, his pulse slammed up into his throat, hard enough that he could feel it striking against the inside of his neck. It beat like a tennis ball stuck in a torpedic washing machine. He briefly lifted his fingers to feel his neck, and Satanas, his fingers were really, really cold now.

He was panicking, wasn’t he? Perpetua had told him to talk to someone about that. Several times, in fact. But that was a problem for another day, and the clock had just made that painfully clear. Right now, he needed to hold himself together. To be like Mom.

Copia inhaled again, trying to do that thing his brother had taught him. Inhale, and then hold it … four seconds, was it? He was fairly sure it was four. It might have been six. Perpetua had been very specific about it at the time, when he had been panicking in his office, and Copia had nodded along and apparently retained none of it. 

He exhaled anyway and tried to do it again, and let the slow, even current of the water-glove give him a sensation to fix his attention on.  

“Frater? You’re seeing things again? What do you see?"

That was Ictus’ voice. 

His hearing had improved enough now for him to recognize it properly. The past few minutes of careful breathing had worked. Somewhat. He lifted his head and found her across the table, both palms flat on the cloth, leaning forward with a square-jawed intensity that belonged so obviously to the same bloodline as Severan’s. He parted his lips to answer, but the words caught for a second on the way out, his attention dragging elsewhere before he could form them.

Jacobaea was beside him again, perched on the same chair she had dragged over earlier. One of her hands closed around his bicep and gave it a small, deliberate squeeze, just enough to further anchor him back into the room. When he turned his head, she was watching him with that sharp, inwardly busy expression she got when her mind had started racing ahead to figure out what was wrong. Her eyes flicked across his face first, scanning quickly, then dropped to the water-glove still twirling around his burned hand before lifting again. 

That water glove probably should have come off already. He hadn’t even noticed the twenty minutes had already passed.

"Hey," she asked. "Talk to us. What's going on?"

"Me? Oh, I'm fine,” Copia replied, waving it off with a small, careless movement that didn’t feel very convincing even to him. Pull it together. Pull it together right now. Do the breathing exercise. Inhale. Count to four. And exhale. Exhale, motherfucker. You’re fine. He shifted in the chair and tried to sit a little straighter.

"Don’t worry about little old me, yeah? I'm just- there is another number. A big fat twenty-three. Right on that calendar. And… Yeah. It’s all lit up in red for me. That's what i'm seeing." 

He looked up, and they were all there, standing around the table. All the ghouls except Draziel and the medic he hadn’t spoken much to yet, because those two were always posted somewhere outside. 

The only one who had not moved was Perpetua. He was still sitting at his own table, a little further off, the piece of toast paused halfway to his mouth as he watched the whole thing play out. Copia almost felt the urge to snap at him for that. For just sitting there all unbothered instead of getting up like the others while he was seeing some wild fucking shit. Thankfully Ictus asked him another question before he could call him out.

“A number… Like before. Do you hear any sounds again?" 

Sounds? 

Sounds! Right. The motorcycle. Copia forced himself to reach back for the memory of it. The noise had been clear when it happened, vivid enough that he had almost turned his head to look for the road. But now? He searched for it again and found nothing but the faint ringing still somewhat hovering behind his ears.

“No. That only happened when I touched it. And then I-” He lifted his water-wrapped hand slightly by way of explanation. "Burned my hand. So."

The water in the glove shifted faintly when he moved, the thin current gliding over the burned skin beneath. A few of the ghouls followed the motion automatically. Some eyes drifted toward the calendar pinned to the corkboard. The page hung there exactly as it had before, quiet and unremarkable in the candlelight.

Ravach, who stood beside Ictus, turned his head to look at it as well. 

"He should try touching it again," he said after a moment, thinking out loud. His arms were folded neatly behind his back, posture polite, though the small lift at the corner of his mouth suggested his mind was considerably less so.

“Are you shitting me?" Ictus snapped her head toward him so fast the red-tipped ends of her hair jumped with the movement. For a second Copia genuinely thought she might hit him with her tail again. "You want him to burn his hand again? On purpose?"

“Yes. The previous contact made him hear some interesting sounds. This number may do the same. Those sounds can be clues.”

“That is not worth frying his other hand off.”

“I believe he just shouldn’t touch it for longer than a few seconds. The fire took time before it burned his skin last time. If he touches it now, and we pull him away in time, he will not 'fry' his hand.”

“How sure are you about that?”

“Very sure.”

“Mhm." Ictus looked at the calendar, then at Copia, her jaw working slightly. He could see her weighing it.

Jacobaea's hand, which had been resting lightly on his bicep, shifted. Her fingers moved to his wrist, her thumb finding his pulse point with the ease of someone who had done it a thousand times without being noticed. Copia almost pulled away on instinct. He didn’t want her feeling the frantic, uneven thing his pulse had become. But yanking his hand back would only make him look worse, so he forced himself to stay still and let her take it.

"I don’t like that idea,” Jacobaea said, still watching Copia’s face instead of Ravach. “His hand already has second-degree burns from the last number. If there is a chance he will be hurt, we shouldn’t.”

Ravach sighed. “Don’t be so scared. He will not get hurt. And if he does…” He gave a small shrug, barely lifting his shoulders. The expression on his mouth did not change as his eyes slid to Jacobaea. 

“Well, you’re a healer, aren’t you?”

Jacobaea squinted at him for a second, the look sharp enough to express she probably wanted to throw him through a wall. And for a moment it seemed as though she might answer Ravach with words that were the equivalent of such violence, but the reply died somewhere behind her teeth. She let her silence do the work instead. 

Instead, her attention turned back to Copia. Her eyes moved over him in another quick, practiced sweep. His face first, taking in the colour of it, the tightness around his mouth. The rhythm of his breathing. After that, the hand she still held at the wrist shifted slightly as she turned it in her grip, her fingers sliding to a different spot so she could feel his pulse there instead. He was beginning to realise she relied on touch the way other medics relied on questions. Every small adjustment seemed to give her something meaningful. The angle of his wrist. The warmth of his skin against her glove. The way she steadied his arm while she watched his face, as if the steadying itself was part of the reading. He had the strange, unsettling sense of being legible in a language he hadn't known he was speaking.

Only after, she looked up.

"What do you think about this, Frater? It's your power, so it’s your call."

Right. His call. 

He was meant to be making decisions here. Big decisions. Or not, really. Either way, he was Frater Imperator and this was his call and, oh shit, everyone at this table was looking at him and waiting for him to make it and the ringing in his ears was suddenly swelling again, so much so that Jacobaea's voice had arrived strangely muted, as if someone had turned the volume down.

"I could touch it," he heard himself say. His voice came out stable, which surprised him. "Or - maybe not? But if you all watched me. I think-" He drew a breath, and let it out slowly, and really tried to remember how to breathe. Inhale. Four. Probably four- and exhale. "Yeah. That should be fine. It should be alright."

“Okay, then let’s do it,” Ictus said.

“Oh.” Copia blinked. “Woah, you mean, right now?”

“Yeah, right now. Is that okay?”

“Frater." Severan's voice, lower than the others, from his left. He turned his head and found the ghoul watching him with an expression that had nothing to do with calendars or assassins. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"No, I am, I-" He assembled a smile and felt it arrive wrong, too quick, not reaching whatever it was supposed to reach. "I just- I would just really like to finish my soup first, while it's still warm and all. I'm not a very big fan of ice-cold soup and there's no microwave down here so I would have to send someone back to the van to eh, heat it up again, and I don't want to make anyone do that stuff for me, so if I could first just finish that-"

Ictus cut in. "Won't the number disappear if we wait?" 

"Oh. Right. Good point, ehm… I don't think I know about that for sure. Cause eh, both times before we walked away from it, eh? We never saw it, ehm, un-glow itself." He looked at the calendar. The twenty-three pulsed on, completely unbothered by the conversation happening around it. 

"Then we should do it now. Don’t worry about us having to heat up your food. Ravach doesn’t mind walking back and forth.”

“Excu-” Ravach shut up when Ictus elbowed him.

"I- maybe, yeah… Okay.”

"Frater." Jacobaea interrupted. "How are you feeling about this?"

He turned to look at her, and the room moved a quarter-second after his head did, the candlelight smearing slightly at the edges before it caught up. 

The way she pressed her thumb a little harder into his wrist, and the way she so gently asked the question made it suddenly, completely clear that he probably did not look as okay with it as he wanted to look. Apparently, he was sitting here, surrounded by ghouls who were supposed to look at him and see Frater Imperator , but they didn't see that guy, because his face was apparently doing something else for the last several minutes without his permission. Ictus had told Ravach not to say anything about the assassin for this exact reason. You know how he can get -  and here he was. Getting exactly that way. That thought came down on top of everything else already crowding his chest, and his pulse surged back up into his throat so fast it made him feel sick. 

Focus. He needed to be… He needed to get it together. To show them he could just touch that number and not freak out about it at all.

"Good!" The word came out a register too bright. "Seriously, really good. I’m good. Just a little…. a little spooked, obviously, but that's- ehm, who wouldn't be, right? In this situation. It's eh, magical number. And… It kind of burned me before, so-" He chuckled. It sounded approximately like a chuckle. "It feels like the first time having to poop after butt-surgery. Not that I've had that... But I'm completely fine with it. Touching it. Yeah, because you guys are there."

Jacobaea looked at him for a moment, then frowned.

"You appear," she said carefully, "more than spooked."

“I- don’t think… I’m-”

Did he?

It suddenly felt like standing at the edge of a diving board with a crowd below, the whole pool deck gone quiet while they waited for the jump. And he could feel their patience stretching longer and longer the longer he sat there doing nothing like an absolute buffoon. He could start to feel it crawling over his skin, the way they were looking. Thinking. Probably worrying that he couldn’t handle the pressure. How could they not? He was doing terribly as Frater Imperator. The awareness of that pressed in from every side of the table. 

More than spooked. Yeah. Okay. She wasn't wrong about that.

But what was he supposed to do with that? Say yes, actually, correct, he was extremely fucking spooked and had been for the better part of an hour and would very much like to go home and play Lego Star Wars inside a locked room until all of this was someone else's problem? He couldn't say that. Or should he say that he wasn’t spooked? Because Mom would never say something like that? No, Mom would just sit there with her fingers steepled and her cool face giving away nothing and make the whole room feel like the pressure had never existed in the first place. But he didn't know how to do that. He'd watched her do it his entire childhood and he still didn't fucking know how, and there were people around this table who were obviously concerned and needed him to know how, and he had a burned hand and a power he'd had for three hours and twenty-three hours left of something and he couldn't even get his breathing right, couldn't even remember a four-count V had taught him in a room two weeks ago, couldn't do the one small simple thing that didn't require any skill or leadership or strength at all, just the ability to inhale and hold it and exhale, and he couldn't even do that -

The ringing suddenly crested.

At the same time, Jacobaea's mouth was moving, probably repeating the question. He watched the movement without the sound ever reaching him. He turned his head - the room tilted again slightly with the movement, a slow, greasy lurch that made his stomach register another complaint - and found Ictus talking too, her eyes cutting between him and the calendar, her mouth shaping something he couldn't reach. Shit.

The ringing had filled in all the space where sound was supposed to be. He could hear one thing clearly, only one: his own heartbeat, loud and irregular and embarrassingly fast, thumping away in his ears like it was trying to get out through the sides of his skull. It had stopped feeling like his. It felt like something happening to him, something he was observing from a slight distance, this frantic, undignified knocking that everyone in the room could probably hear if they just went quiet for a second.

Twenty-three hours. Twenty-three hours and he couldn't even breathe. He couldn't hear. He couldn't think. His own heartbeat was drowning everything out and his chest wouldn't open properly and there was an assassin out there, an actual assassin, someone who had been instructed specifically to kill him, and this was- this was his response to that. This. Sitting at a table going deaf from the inside while Jacobaea tried to take his pulse and he couldn't even let her do that without wanting to pull his hand back, couldn't even manage that one small cooperative thing, couldn't manage anything, couldn't-

"That is enough."

The voice came from directly above him. A hand landed on his shoulder at the same moment. Thin fingers, cool even through the fabric of his clothes, curling into the muscle there with a grip that was neither gentle nor hard but simply present. Copia felt a shaky breath leave his mouth upon the touch.

Around the table, the ghouls' attention shifted as one. He felt it before he saw it. Their eyes lifted away from him and rose to the figure standing behind his chair, and the particular quality of silence that followed was different from the one before it.

"What do you mean, Papa?" Ictus asked.

V. It was V.

"Before you try anything," Perpetua said, addressing in a tone so calm that it really did remind him of Mom, "I need to speak to my brother." The pause that followed was very short and not really a pause so much as a door closing. "Alone."

"But the number-"

Perpetua did not move. Did not shift his weight or adjust his stance or offer the room any of the small physical concessions people made when they were still open to being argued with. His fingers curled slightly tighter around the muscle of Copia's shoulder. That was all.

"We are done with that number," he said, "for now."

Two slow pats landed on Copia's shoulder then. It was the same small gesture Copia had been offering his brother since the beginning of all this, in the corridors of the Ministry and the stupid motorhomes and the safehouses. A pat on the shoulder. The wordless version of: 

I see you. I've got you.

Perpetua had been paying attention the whole time.

"Come with me.”

Copia stood up and followed him without thinking twice.