Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dewdrop is headbutting the wall.

“It hurts,” he groans. “It fucking hurts.”

Every word is marked with a thump of his horns. He presses his palms flush with the wall, rubbing his head there like he could be a cat nuzzling into a friendly hand.

Except the wall is smoking.

“Maybe- maybe not on the wallpaper,” Copia finds himself saying rather absurdly.

Dewdrop glares at him from over his arm, tension stamped into every inch of him. His bare shoulders are drawn up tight around him as he scrapes himself against the wall again, more deliberate this time, not breaking eye contact with Copia.

Copia hears rasping, tearing silk and splintering wood as the damask surrenders to his horns. He doesn’t look forward to explaining that invoice to Sister Imperator when she returns to the abbey.

All of Dewdrop looks cinched, pulled tight and painful and taught. He gives another wordless cry and sinks his claws into the wall where he’s holding onto it like an anchor.

“Stay there,” Copia says, as if he’d be capable of going anywhere like this. His hand fumbles behind him for the doorknob. “I’ll be right back.”

“Go away,” Dewdrop snarls at his back, his words dripping with venom. Copia hopes his eye paint masks how it stings him. He thinks he smells something burning when the door finally closes behind him.

So. Dewdrop is having a problem.

Must be a day of the week ending in y, but this feels different to Copia. When one of the Siblings had called him to come to Dewdrop’s quarters because there’d been a bit of a disturbance, he’d caught an edge in their voice that wasn't usually there for a Dewdrop Wellness Check. When Copia got there, his room itself told the story—gouges in the walls, possessions strewn about, and Dewdrop in the center of it all, panting and headbutting anything sturdy enough to withstand it.

On the other side of the door, Copia adjusts the collar of his dress shirt, turning to face Aether and Cirrus where they stand twitchy and nervous in front of him. They’re the only ghouls who bothered to show up for the all-hands meeting he called, and he hopes bringing them here looks like a request for counsel and not a desperate cry for help. But he has to admit that two out of seven—six, if he’s not counting Dewdrop, and he probably shouldn’t under the given circumstances—is a rather bad start to things, especially since they both look ready to bolt.

“Would either of you like to explain what’s happening in there?” Copia asks, hooking a thumb toward the door. “And where are the others?” He feels vastly out of his element, and this has all the arcane trappings of a ghoul problem, not just a Dewdrop problem.

A heavy moment passes. Aether and Cirrus exchange a look, then avert their eyes from each other just as quickly. Aether fiddles with his left bracelet.

“Ghouls,” Copia warns, impatience flaring, watching their tails flit around their ankles. He hears something heavy hit the ground with a dull thump behind Dewdrop's door, then something that could be a snarl.

“It’s—” Aether starts and then stops, looking at Cirrus in a desperate plea.

"It's complicated," Cirrus says, clasping her hands behind her back, illuminating absolutely nothing at all. Aether nods.

Copia pinches the bridge of his nose and prays to whatever god is feeling charitable for a real answer before the abbey burns down. Of course Sister had to be out of town for this, because the planets have a tendency to misalign around Copia right when it would be maximally inconvenient for him.

“Cirrus. Aether,” he sighs. “I know you have your customs. But—” he falters, not entirely sure what to say next.

His two most sensible ghouls stand silent before him, tails swishing nervously. They remind him of cats when they’re like this, so obviously telegraphing their anxiety.

The thought that he could really press them for an answer—provoke them, corral them, remind them he’s their Papa now—nudges uncomfortably but undeniably at the edge of his mind.

He does not indulge it. He tries again, this time as their Cardinal.

“Please,” he sighs, letting some of his worry bleed into his body language, like maybe that can close the gap between them. “What's going on? Where’s everyone else?”

Cirrus’s shoulders slacken then, just a little. Finally, a toehold. She blows out a breath while Aether stares at his feet.

“It’s- it's very personal for us,” her voice is halting and uncertain. “Papa, it's... embarrassing." She rubs the back of her neck. Aether looks like he might fold in two next to her. “There's not really a good human analog.”

“Please think of one quickly,” Copia says. “Because it sounds to me like he’s about to tear his quarters apart, or set them on fire.” Another thump comes from behind the door, followed by a crash. “Possibly both,” he amends.

“Horns,” Aether says quickly, like the words in his mouth are searing him. “It’s his horns.” He spares a glance at Dewdrop’s door, like he’s afraid he might be pressed up against it, listening. “He’s shedding them.”

Copia considers this. "Like a deer." He says, thinking he understands. The abbey is tucked in the crook of a densely wooded area, and a few years ago he was lucky enough to catch sight of one with a mismatched set of antlers. Dripping velvet, mid-metamorphosis, utterly unbothered while nature worked its strange transfiguration. It grazed peacefully while Copia watched from the cold pane of his window, transfixed.

Another inscrutable look between Aether and Cirrus, thick and heavy as fog.

“Not like a deer.” Cirrus says, very carefully.

✧✧✧

Two years ago, Dewdrop was unmade.

This much Copia knew, in as much as any of them know how this kind of thing happens. The ghouls tell it like this: before Copia was Papa—before Nihil’s untimely demise and his sons’ mysterious departures, before the ground of the abbey beneath Copia felt like a listing boat—the heavy wooden door of Nihil’s office had slid shut with Dewdrop behind it, and something in there had changed him.

The church had needed a fire ghoul, and apparently he’d drawn the short straw. Something—someone, maybe—had unfurled him to his core and stitched him back together with fire at the seams.

Or so the ghouls say, because Dewdrop hasn’t told anyone what happened that day. He came out pale and fever-hot, shadowed around the eyes, with flames in his eyes and at his fingertips.

Years have passed—enough time for the Emeritus family’s final, gasping death rattle—but it’s not an easy thing to be unmade. Dewdrop’s body had grown accustomed to the changes slowly, like a shaken vial settling. It doesn’t usually take so long to slough off the parts of your body that don’t match, but Dewdrop’s stubbornness apparently extends to the molecular level. He’d carried those water horns for longer than anyone, even the ghouls, had thought possible, and now they’re being pushed out to make room for his fire ones.

The last thing to be unmade.

Copia gets the answers he asked for, in fits and starts, in the dark hallway of the ghouls’ quarters.

✧✧✧

Cirrus traces the base of her left horn as she speaks, like she wants to make sure it won’t start shedding when she’s not looking. Hers are small and delicate, looking very much like they’ve always been there. Copia studies them warily from where he stands, looking for seams.

“It’s painful,” she says. “It’s... incredibly painful. We go through it alone as we become adults.” Her finger slides all the way up to the pointed tip. “Or if we... change.”

“I don’t even remember mine.” Aether admits. His horns are thicker and stouter, matching the shape of his body. “I sort of went into the woods and came back out again a few days later.” One hand goes to his bracelet again, fingering the links like they hold the key to a lost memory.

They stand there awkwardly for a moment. Copia has the distinct impression of walking into a very uncomfortable family dinner to which he was not invited.

“Is this,” Copia says, not wanting to be rude, but not being able to help himself. “Is this ghoul puberty?”

Aether makes a sour face at him, but he can see Cirrus narrowing her eyes like she’s really thinking it over. Dewdrop would laugh if he were here, Copia just knows it. But of course, Dewdrop being incapacitated is the entire reason they’re having this conversation in the first place.

“I’m counting that as a maybe,” Copia says, taking in their expressions. “And you can't heal him?” He turns to Aether, searching for a fissure in this he can break open to find an easy answer.

“Papa, there's nothing to heal,” Aether says, exasperated. “It's like—I don’t know. A fever breaking. It has to happen.”

“And you can’t—” Copia fumbles, trying to walk back the accusatory note that he feels creeping into his voice and failing rather spectacularly. “And he’s supposed to be alone?”

Aether studies him coolly. He nods slowly, crossing his thick arms.

Copia’s pushing his buttons, and he knows it, but he can’t not. It's strange; the creatures in front of him look so close to human, it’s easy to forget that they’re not. But here is undeniable proof, as solid and certain as the bone of their horns. Their strange bodies and customs, their sharp tails and sharper teeth. He so frequently doesn’t understand them.

Copia rubs the bridge of his nose again, searching for an answer like it might be hidden inside him.

“This is normal, Copia,” Sister had said to him, in the strange, gray morning after his ascension, when Nihil’s possessions were being boxed up for storage and he’d felt as heavy as an anchor, plunging down to uncertain depths. “The axe to the grindstone. This sharpens you. This is what being Papa is.”

Except that if Copia was being perfectly frank, he didn’t feel particularly sharp. He felt brittle, like the spinning mechanism of the church could grind him to powder if he let his guard down.

Copia feels now—as he often does, with great exhaustion—that his life’s work will be patching the holes that others left before him. Resolving ledgers, sewing the gaps in the tapestry of the church that no one else thought to mend. Sorting. Fixing. Making things right. He’s not going to stop now, especially if it involves Dewdrop.

He makes his decision.

“Aether, in here with me, please,” Copia says, his hand on the doorknob. “Help me take him to my quarters.”

This time, Cirrus and Aether very conspicuously don't look at each other, which feels worse, somehow.

“Papa—” Aether warns, and then suddenly he’s right there in front of him, as imposing as a brick wall. His hand closes over Copia’s on the doorknob, so large it swallows his fist. “Leave him. He doesn’t want you to see him like this.” The tight circle of his fist eases just a little, and his voice is softer when he says, “None of us one would.”

Copia thinks, again, that another version of himself could bark an order, refuse to explain himself, and demand their loyalty. Or maybe he wouldn’t even be here. Maybe getting the paint means that he’s supposed to be in his quarters, letting his ghouls work out their arcane bullshit amongst themselves. Maybe that’s what Sister wants. Maybe none of the Papas before him would have thought twice about that kind of display of power, or the certainty of their actions and choices.

But Copia has no certainty in anything besides the singular focus of the thin, bent body he knows is behind the door.

“The papal quarters still have the original stone walls from when the abbey was built,” Copia says to Aether, surprised to find his mouth moving and a logical explanation coming out. “It’s sturdier than anything in the ghoul quarters. It’ll hold up better than what he’s got in there.”

Aether looks at him carefully, perhaps assessing his intent. Weighing tradition and pride against the broken sounds coming from behind the door.

Copia waits.

Aether’s bottom lip briefly disappears between his teeth as he worries it between them, uncertain. Finally he sighs. Copia watches Cirrus stiffen in the background, clearly disapproving.

“I can lower his pulse,” He says, slowly removing his hand. “If it's alright with him. Just for a few minutes, so we can move him.”

“Thank you,” Copia breathes, feeling the tight cord in his chest loosen just a little.

He opens the door.

✧✧✧

Dewdrop is a bent shape in Aether's arms, making soft, pained sounds against his chest, the crease of his brow unmistakable even in sleep. His slim legs jostle in Aether’s arms as they walk up the stone staircase to Copia's quarters, swaying like cattails in a pond.

His arm slides down from Aether’s neck halfway up the steps, briefly lying limp at his shoulder. Copia watches as Aether carefully hitches it back up, angling himself away from the tight corkscrew of the staircase so Dewdrop’s feet don’t bump against it.

Copia feels something raw and scraping in his chest at the sight. Dewdrop, with every ounce of fire and mischief sapped from him, carried like a kit to a sickbed. He feels ill at the wrongness of it all.

In step behind them as Aether shoulders the door open, he studies Dewdrop’s horns as surreptitiously as he can. He's not sure what he’s expecting—the gory velvet of the deer presses urgently at the back of his mind—but Dewdrop’s horns just look dull.

Aether whispers to him softly as he leans to place him in Copia’s bed, pressing lips to his hairline, cupping his cheek. Dewdrop face crumples as he leans into the touch, mouth gone wobbly, and Copia can’t tell if what he sees there is relief or misery.

Copia looks away.

He hears the soft sound of a kiss between them, and feels the back of his neck getting hot for reasons he does not particularly care to investigate. He knows he’s already intruding on the intimacy of this moment—of this entire situation—but when he searches his heart, he finds no regret there.

He thinks of the line of Papas before him, spreading out in a long, strange chain. Doling out cruelty and kindness in uneven hands. Broken ghouls, exiled siblings, blood carelessly spilled and exalted in the name of—what, exactly?

He didn’t unmake Dewdrop, but the church did. The least he can do now is see this through. He can make it right, or something close to right.

Copia startles a little when he feels a hand on his shoulder, but it’s just Aether, looking resigned.

“He’s going to headbutt all your nice furniture, you know,” Aether says gravely, and he’s so painfully serious about it that Copia can’t quite stop the sudden bark of laughter that rises out of him. Aether cracks a weak smile back, but it doesn’t quite stick.

“I never liked this desk anyway. He’ll be doing me a favor.” Copia raps the surface with his knuckles.

“Papa,” Aether says, suddenly serious. His hand tightens on Copia’s shoulder. “This is going to be bad.” He looks over at Dewdrop on Copia’s bed where he stirs slightly, a groggy little pile of limbs. “It’s worse when we’re older.”

Sobering fear licks at Copia’s ankles, cold and unpleasant.

“He’s going to need to headbutt. To buck. Like you saw,” he says haltingly, like it’s distasteful for him to speak so plainly about it. “He might get sick. He’s definitely going to be mean. He might… need more than you can give him.”

"Like what?"

Copia watches his mouth work, but he doesn't say anything; he just looks at Copia with a fierce kind of intensity.

“Please be careful with him,” he says earnestly.

Copia nods, feeling the weight of expectation on him like earth on a grave.

He’ll be careful if it kills him.

Chapter Text

“Stop looking at me.”

Dewdrop is sullen but awake, finally. He’s on top of Copia’s plush blue comforter, not underneath it—arbitrarily stubborn, as always. With his arms curled around his knees, small in the vast expanse of the bed, he looks a little bit like he’s been grounded.

He flicks his thumb like a lighter and a weak little flame dances there, pale as spent coals.

“I wasn’t,” Copia lies reflexively. Dewdrop lets out an unconvinced huff of air, not even bothering to look at him.

“You were,” he says, but there’s no venom in it, just fatigue. He looks desaturated, like someone cast him in sepia tone, pulled from the pages of an old photo album. He blows gently on his thumb, snuffing the flame, then flicks it to life again.

He’d been in and out of sleep for the last hour, groggy with pain and whatever Aether did to make him slip into sleep. He’s finally a little like himself again, but this is the first thing he’s said to Copia since he got here. It figures it would be rude.

Copia shifts in the chair he’d pulled close to the bed. He hadn’t quite planned this far ahead. There isn't normally uneasy silence between him and Dewdrop. They have an easier rapport, more natural than he has with any of the other ghouls. But this isn't a normal situation, he supposes.

He tries very hard not to think about the acid that had been in Dewdrop's voice when he'd snarled at him to leave his room.

"Your paint," Dewdrop says, looking directly at him now, and Copia almost startles. "Why just the eyes? Shouldn't you be wearing the whole..." he gestures broadly at his own face, accidentally extinguishing his thumb. "You know, the whole… skeleton thing now?" He waggles his slim fingers in front of his mouth, pantomiming teeth.

"Oh, I—" Copia says, hand reflexively reaching to touch his face, expecting paint and feeling only skin, except for the black circles around his eyes. He'd forgotten, again. "Well. It's not very breathable."

"You forgot." Dewdrop says, a smile creeping onto his face.

Copia fidgets a little. “You don’t think your Papa would forget something like his paint, do you?”

But Dewdrop is laughing, surging with mischief. He sits up straighter, eyes suddenly bright.

“Is that the Pope equivalent of, like—you know the dream where you’re in your underwear in front of the class?”

“Do ghouls have that one too?” Copia asks. “Wait, do you—do you even wear underwear?”

“Does that mean that the first person to put on corpse paint gets to be Pope now? Like a tag-team thing?” He twists around on the bed, fingers reaching for the drawer in Copia’s nightstand. “Is this where you keep your paint? Put me in, coach. I’m going to make all crime legal.”

Copia presses Dewdrop’s hand flat on the drawer and away from the knob a little too quickly for it to be casual.

“Oh, where you keep something else, then.” Dewdrop says, taking his hand back. “Kinky. And ow,” he says, shaking out his bruised fingers.

“Aren’t you supposed to be suffering right now?”

“I suffer on my own time,” Dewdrop says archly.

Copia must not be very good at masking the concern on his face, because Dewdrop’s smile falters a little and he exhales, like telling the truth is an inconvenient burden.

“It comes and goes. I feel okay right now. Just have a headache.”

Dewdrop flops flat on his back on the bed then, reaching an arm back to grab the pillow behind him. He holds it dramatically at arm’s length, then drops it onto his face with a whoomph sound. There’s a long, overburdened sigh, and then a muffled “I'm bored,” comes from somewhere under the pillow.

Copia rises from his chair and sits on the edge of the bed, rolling his eyes. “Oh, I'm terribly sorry, would you rather be destroying things alone in your room?”

Copia expects the volley between them to keep going, but Dewdrop goes still for a moment, then shrugs under the pillow. The effect is somewhat lost in the bedsheets.

"Sort of,” a muffled voice says. Dewdrop pulls the pillow down to his chest and hugs it there while he sits up again. "I mean, no. Sorry about that, by the way," he says, and Copia feels briefly like his motor’s turning over without catching because he's not sure Dewdrop has ever expressed anything even remotely close to an apology to him before now.

“You must really be in a bad way if you’re apologizing to me,” Copia says, putting a hand on his knee.

“Ugh, listen to you,” Dewdrop groans, letting his face fall into the pillow where he’s got it clutched against his chest.

“What?”

He raises his head. “If you're going to treat me like a consumptive maiden, can you at least wait on me like one?” He twirls a strand of silvery hair around a finger, pretending to swoon. “Oh, Copia, won't you mop my delicate brow?”

“Papa,” Copia corrects him. Dewdrop sticks his tongue out at him. “And you’d make a poor consumptive maiden. You’re too rude.”

“Maidens can be rude.”

“Legal crime and rude women. Is this your pitch for the papacy? It lacks elegance.”

But Dewdrop just keeps twirling his finger around his hair expectantly, like he’s waiting for Copia to play along, and Copia’s never been very good at saying no to Dewdrop.

“My dear, listen to how you sound,” Copia says with ridiculous flourish, taking the hand from Dewdrop's brow and holding it in reverence. “Allow me to move you to my fainting couch before you succumb to a hysterical fit.”

“Wait, do you really have a fainting couch?” Dewdrop asks, craning his neck around the bed, and Copia laughs, dropping a chaste kiss to the back of his hand in the name of the act.

“Standard issue for all Papas. Can’t have fine lords and ladies with nowhere to faint, now, can we?”

"You've never had anyone fine in this room and we both know it."

"Present company excluded?" Copia brushes his mouth against Dewdrop's hand again, watching him squirm at the tickle of his mustache.

Dewdrop tosses his hair and laughs, bright and impish, and it almost all feels so easy and normal—better than normal, actually—but suddenly he's crying out and curling in tight on himself again, hands scrabbling at the base of his horns.

“Fuck,” Dewdrop spits out, dragging his nails through his hair as he ratchets tighter on himself. His legs bunch up tight, bare feet curling, like he’s trying to make himself as small as possible. “Oh, fuck.”

Panic rises sickly in Copia. He's on his feet in a second. “What do you need?” he asks, hovering next to him, uncertain.

A horrible little pained sound comes out of him, but nothing else.

“Dewdrop,” Copia says urgently, feeling his heart in his stomach.

“God, it hurts,” Dewdrop says, voice wobbly. A little thread of laughter, high and hysterical, creeps in around the edges. “I forgot how much it hurts.”

“This happened before. When you were a water ghoul,” Copia says, suddenly realizing. He’s not sure why he hadn’t thought of it before; the immediate, stomach-churning panic of now had overshadowed everything else in his mind.

Dewdrop nods, still clutching his head, and Copia has a sudden flash of an image: a younger Dewdrop, still small and spindly as a broom, headbutting his mother. He tucks it away for later.

“It wasn’t this bad. Fuck, this burns,” he groans. The flash of a blue eye, shadowed and miserable, looks at Copia in between the tangle of his limbs. “Why’d it have to be—” His eyes squeeze shut and he lets out a little “Ah!”—the sharp, high sound of touching a hot stove, hands scrabbling. “Why’d it have to be fire,” he pants.

“The wall,” Copia says, the gears in his mind finally turning. “Here, use the wall. Like you did in your room.” He's got an arm hooked around Dewdrop’s skinny waist, hauling him up and over to the headboard. He watches his slim fingers grab at the wood there, then move to grab the raw stone wall. They’re livid white at the knuckles, gripping like iron.

"You just wanna—ha—get me into your bed," Dewdrop says with a grunt, resting his head against the stone, horns first. He squares his shoulders, like a runner at a starting block. “Dirty old man.”

It seems like a bad time to mention he’d been thinking the same thing, so Copia says nothing. His hands hover at Dewdrop’s waist uncertainly before finally settling there. Anticipating what, he’s not sure.

Dewdrop lets out a cry as he suddenly lurches forward and headbutts the wall, just as Copia had seen him do in his room before. His horns clatter against the stone violently, guttural and scraping, so forcefully that Copia’s body jolts along with him. His hands still linger weakly at Dewdrop’s waist, bracing like a spotter.

The force of the impact rattles Copia’s teeth.

Dewdrop pulls back, panting, head hung between his arms where they’re supporting his weight against the wall.

And then he rears up and does it again. And again. And again.

For long, terrible minutes, Copia holds onto Dewdrop while he butts at the wall, desperately, heaving, uncontrollably, feeling the rattle in his own bones like an echo. It feels like surviving a hurricane, like all Copia can do is hold on and ride it out until it's over.

Dewdrop’s arms are trembling with exertion when he finally stops, panting sickly, already looking wrung-out and awful.

“I hate this,” Dewdrop says in a small, miserable little voice. “I hate this.” His head dips between his arms, hair falling in a white curtain over his face. “I should be alone,” he says, suddenly vicious. “You should have left me.”

Guilt lances through Copia like a knife sinking deep in between his ribs. Maybe he should have.

Before he can stay mired in that thought for long, he’s tugged forward by the rough scrape of Dewdrop lurching forward towards the wall again. His hands already ache from where they’re curled at his hips, but he’s afraid to move them, like maybe that might be worse.

Dewdrop stops again, sooner this time, like he didn’t get a chance to fully recover. He breathes heavy, head hanging between his arms. Copia watches his delicate chest expanding and contracting roughly. A pair of bellows would be gentler.

He can feel the shame rolling off him like smoke from a fire. It occurs to Copia suddenly that Dewdrop may not have told him about all of this before because he liked his horns—because he never wanted this in the first place, because he didn’t want to give up the last piece of his armor before he was stripped bare by the church, and because it was easier to pretend it wasn’t happening than it was to be vulnerable.

“You know,” Copia says carefully, measured, moving his hands to Dewdrop’s shoulders, hoping he won’t get bitten for it. He smooths his hair back from where it’s fallen in front of his face, revealing the hard set of his jaw, his eyes screwed up tight in pain. “Humans have body parts they don’t need, too.”

Dewdrop raises his head slowly. His eyes flick to Copia, then return to the wall in front of him. Cautiously listening, for now.

“Not horns. Teeth and organs. Things like that. Sometimes we have to get them removed,” Copia continues, and he feels Dewdrop... well, he doesn’t so much relax as let his shoulders drop just an inch, but that’s something.

Dewdrop flexes his fingers against the stone. Copia watches him trace the outline of a crack with a claw. It reminds him of himself, drawing interlocking circles on notepads when he’s on the phone. Doing something mindlessly grounding.

“What happens if you don’t get them removed?” Dewdrop asks.

Copia is quiet for a beat.

“We can die,” he says quietly. “I almost did when I was a very small boy. I—well,” he laughs a little. “I didn’t want to bother anyone. Look.”

Copia slides the fabric of his shirt up from where it’s tucked into his slacks, revealing the softness of his stomach and the pale, silvery curve of a scar just to the right of his belly. A crescent of scar tissue, faded but unmistakable for what it once was.

Dewdrop is suddenly rapt, focused with animal intensity on the bared skin. He bends down, hands outstretched, inspecting. Copia has to close his eyes and take a steadying breath when he feels a hot fingertip trace the scar there. His pulse hammers in his throat.

“My appendix,” Copia says a little hoarsely. He wonders if Dewdrop even knows what that is. He has no idea what organs demons have. “Vestigial. Like vestige. It serves no purpose. Useless, except for when it needs to be cut out.”

“Seems like a pretty stupid thing to have you in your body,” Dewdrop says, but in a gentle sort of distracted way. His fingertip traces the line back and forth, then back again.

Copia laughs, a little shakily, because he’s not really sure what else to do with Dewdrop tracing over his skin like a river on a map. “I agree. I don’t miss it.”

He gathers up his boldness then and reaches out, covering Dewdrop’s bare hand with his own. Their joined hands sit against the warm softness of his stomach.

“Sometimes, our bodies don’t treat us very well,” Copia says, a little more unsteadily than he had planned. “I could have died alone in my room if I hadn’t called out for my mother.”

“Did it hurt?” Dewdrop’s voice comes out in a rasp. His eyes haven’t moved from where their hands sit together.

“Very much,” Copia says. “And more when it was removed.” Dewdrop’s hand is still and warm. Copia feels it on him like a brand, conspicuous and heavy.

“It’s okay to ask for help,” Copia says quietly. Over a landscape of scar tissue, he squeezes Dewdrop’s hand.

Dewdrop looks up and meets his gaze, watery and uncertain, but there’s real fire burning behind those eyes again for the first time all day.

“Will you hold me steady?” he asks, and Copia does.

Chapter Text

The next few hours pass by in a slow, scraping grind, like a stone wheel turning on gravel. Copia stays with Dewdrop, just like he asked. Sometimes just bracing him, hands at his hips like a dancer, and sometimes holding him up entirely while his shoulders sag and he scrapes weakly against the wall.

Together, they figure things out. Painkillers don’t do anything. Hot compresses make it worse. A cool cloth to his forehead helps, though Copia has to soak an entire stack of them and pack them with ice from the kitchen to keep up with Dewdrop’s body temperature, which seems determined to keep rising.

Dewdrop’s still lucid for now, and there are still moments where he’s not quite in so much pain, but they’re getting further and further apart. Now they’re out of ice, and the last cloth went tepid in seconds. Copia didn’t expect he’d actually mop his delicate brow, but, well. It’s a day of firsts.

The weather is caught somewhere between fall and winter, and the air outside is cold and brittle-feeling, but Copia’s quarters are as hot as if he’s got a fire burning in each room. Cracking the windows doesn't seem to help. Copia sweats through his jacket around the second hour and has to wipe off his eye paint by the third. He's barefoot in his undershirt and soft sweatpants by the early evening, which is when his phone rings.

Dewdrop is asleep for the time being, caught in a wrung-out, exhausted sleep, the kind that you wake up from feeling worse. He’s a soft little shape under Copia’s comforter, bare underneath except for boxers—borrowed from Copia, because apparently he really didn’t wear underwear. That had felt strange, but this whole thing had turned so quickly into a runaway train of increasing intimacy that it almost feels perfunctory to acknowledge.

Copia ducks into the kitchen to answer the phone before the ringing can wake him.

“Hello?” he curls the cord around his finger. The church had found out the hard way that modern phones had a bad habit of exploding around ghouls—something about arcane magic and 4G not exactly playing nice. Sparing a superstitious glance over at Dewdrop, he walks further into the living room.

“Copia.” The voice on the other line is flat and tired-sounding.

“Sister,” he says, unsurprised.

Around the crackle of static, she just sighs into the receiver. He can picture her head in her hands, a glass of something dark and strong next to her at her desk, wherever she is.

“Who told you?” he asks, and right out of the gate, it comes out all wrong: accusatory, guilty, like he’s been found out, but he hasn't even done anything, he’s pretty sure.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says wearily, and Copia can hear the exhaustion even from thousands of miles away. She won’t tell him where she goes on her research trips, not even now that he’s ostensibly in charge of this whole thing. “Word has spread that you’ve bedded a sick ghoul. It’s all a bit scandalous, Copia. Don’t you think?”

“Don’t you think,” Copia snaps, feeling ice creep into his voice. “That surely, surely this is not the most scandalous thing a Papa has done, Sister,” he says a little archly.

He lets the unspoken legacy of the Emeritus brothers hang between them in the silence.

“Perhaps not,” Sister allows after a pause. “But you agree it’s improper?”

“It’s not - and I have not bedded - it’s his horns, Sister,” he says, wrapping the cord tighter around his finger, feeling his composure flip over a little Be Back in 15 sign on the door of his brain. “I thought you might know a thing or two about that.”

“And why would you say that?" Her tone is infuriatingly casual now. She can be so hard to read. He squeezes his eyes shut, willing himself to tap into some reserve of patience and finding none.

“Isn’t this your doing? Wasn’t this what you wanted? What did you do to him?”

She’s quiet for a stretch. He thinks maybe he hears her swallowing something, like maybe she needs a little fortification to get through this conversation. He’s starting to feel like he does, too.

“I’m not Papa, am I?” She asks quietly. “I’m not the one making and unmaking ghouls. I’m afraid the person you want to ask about that is dead and buried. Perhaps you can hold a seance with a little plastic board, if you’re so curious.”

Copia scrubs a hand over his face in frustration. “Nihil.”

“He had a tendency to play a little fast and loose with the rules. And his ghouls.” Copia hears what he knows is a swallow now. “I disagreed. As I often did.”

Copia wasn’t expecting that. “Oh,” he says, dumbly. “I didn’t—”

“If you want answers, you’ll have to ask the ghoul himself. I’m sorry,” she says, cutting him off, clipped and sharp.

“Then what’s the issue?” He walks over to the window—the big one in his living room—overlooking the darkness of the forest, growing dimmer and blacker in the setting sun. He can see his reflection through the glass. Backlit by the bright kitchen light, he looks like the world’s most mundane holy figure. The Patron Saint of Improper Ghoul Protocol.

“Copia,” she says in a soft sort of way, more gently than he can remember her speaking to him in months. “I just want you to be careful. I’ve seen you with him. I’ve seen how you coddle him. Do you really think you’re the first Papa to have a favorite ghoul?”

Copia flushes, hot and embarrassed, so much so that it stuns him into silence. But he can’t exactly refute it, either. His reflection stares back at him, the set of his jaw as sharp as a blade. His neck burns.

“I worry about you. You have to lead all of us now, not just yourself. Remember what’s at stake. Remember who you serve.”

He hangs up the phone.

✧✧✧

“I wish I’d spent more time at the library studying,” Copia says, dabbing another rag to Dewdrop’s forehead. “I wish I knew more about ghouls. I was a poor student.”

Dewdrop screws his eyes shut, wincing at the touch, gentle as it is. There had been another long hour of butting against the wall, and Copia can see the exhaustion in the slump of his body.

Copia watches his claws dig into the mattress from where he leans over him, pressing the cloth into the inflamed-looking skin around his horns. If Copia hovers his hand above the skin there, he can feel heat rising like summer sun on pavement.

“You? A bad student?” Dewdrop laughs, then squeezes his eyes shut at the pain. His claws sink right through the pillowtop. Copia mentally adds it to the ledger for Sister to review when she gets back. “Didn’t you get Best in Show more times than anyone else?”

“Do you think I’m a horse? Employee of the month,” Copia corrects. “And it was second most. But that’s all politics. Being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people.”

“So you’re good at kissing ass. Professionally.”

“Dewdrop.”

“Oh, like you’re going to punish me when I’m all half-dead and suffering.”

Copia narrows his eyes, but his annoyance with Dewdrop has an exceptionally short half-life. “I wasn’t very focused on my apprenticeship in the library. There was...” he pauses, grabbing a fresh washcloth and getting another wince in return. “There was a particularly distracting Sibling. I studied all the wrong things.”

Dewdrop whistles, eyes fluttering shut as he lets his forehead be dabbed again. “Pretty Sister catch your eye?”

“Brother,” Copia corrects, not sure why he’s still talking about this. “He had the most beautiful hands.”

Dewdrop smiles with his eyes shut in sort of a dreamy way, like he’s imagining it himself. Copia carefully doesn’t look at Dewdrop’s hands, because suddenly that feels like a dangerous thing to do.

“Mmm, well, I don’t think a lot of this stuff is written down anyway,” Dewdrop says, rolling his neck a little. “You probably didn’t miss much. Ghouls are more about—you know. Weird songs and chants. Dances about history, or whatever. Oral stuff.”

Copia braces himself for the easy joke, but Dewdrop doesn’t take the shot. Instead, Copia watches him suddenly blow a tight stream of air upwards, catching an errant strand of damp hair in front of his eyes. Copia reaches forward to smooth it back and it springs right back, undeterred. Dewdrop makes a frustrated sound, trying again to blow it away from his forehead.

“Could I... could I tie your hair back?” Copia finds himself asking suddenly.

He expects a snarky remark—an insult, maybe, or his hand smacked away, but Dewdrop just looks up at him with grateful eyes.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, thoughtfully. “Just— ah!” he hisses in pain as Copia smooths his hair back a little too forcefully. “Just be careful. Watch out for the horns.”

“I’m very good at careful,” Copia says, separating it into sections. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

Dewdrop has the most lovely hair, the kind that’s nice in spite of how little he cares about it. There’s something sort of incredible about how every part of him—horns, bones, dead cells and molecules—is defiant for defiance’s sake. It hangs in front of Copia in a silvery cascade, straight and glossy and soft.

As gently and surreptitiously as he can manage, he rubs the ends of it between his fingers before he starts, like he’s petting a delicate animal.

"Where did you learn how to do this?" Dewdrop asks, letting his head be moved gently as Copia makes the first braid. A french braid - sturdier than a normal one, and twice as lovely.

"My mother, I think." Copia's voice is quiet. "She died when I was very young. But she used to let me braid her hair."

Dewdrop makes a soft little hmm sound in response, quietly acknowledging but not pressing or investigating further. Copia carefully gathers hair as he goes, combining it with the strands in his hand. Pulling taught and tugging a little, while something approaching order, or maybe beauty, comes to life under his hands.

It’s quiet for a moment—just the gentle drip of the tap that Copia must have left on from the last time he got fresh towels.

“So, if none of this is written down, how do you know about…” He searches for the right wording, just out of his grasp, like it’s water dripping through his cupped hands. “What to do. What not to do.”

He can’t see Dewdrop from where he’s positioned behind him, but he can feel his eye roll. “Why do you put on your dumb paint or grow your stupid mustache? How did you know to do that? I don’t know.” He sounds irritable and tired now, but Copia can’t seem to help himself from pushing just a little bit further.

“Doesn’t it upset you to not have anyone around right now?” Besides me, he thinks.

Dewdrop sighs. “It’s just... the way we do things. Believe me, it's way weirder that you're here.” Copia watches him quietly knead a knuckle into his forehead where it must be hurting again. “Lucky for you, I irreverently defy tradition at every turn.”

Copia wants to tell him that now that he’s in charge, that won’t be the way things are, that everyone deserves a hand to hold when the pain gets bad, and a warm bed to sleep in, and someone who cares to understand, but he knows it won’t come out right.

Instead, he says, “What about Aether?”

“What about him?”

“Well, you two are…” Copia trails off, suddenly feeling schoolboy-shy, like he’s asking a classmate if he has a date to the dance.

Dewdrop looks at him strangely over his shoulder. “We’re what?”

“You’re… close.”

“We’re all close.”

“You’re all—” Copia starts, not sure where he’s going with this, but apparently moving forward all the same. “You’re all with each other? All the ghouls?”

Dewdrop laughs then, disbelieving. “Oh my god, the leader of the Satanic church is such a prude.”

Copia’s heart beats a chugging rhythm in his chest, like it’s not sure if it should speed up or slow down. He isn’t sure what to say. Part of him had assumed, but he’d never put words to it.

“I- I wasn’t sure,” he finishes, feeling childish, but also feeling something go curiously slack in his chest that he didn't realize was tight.

“Not everyone can be everything,” Dewdrop says with a shrug. “We're sort of… communal, I guess?” He says, trying the word on for size, scrunching his nose a little. “We share. More than humans, at least. You’re all so buttoned-up. It’s not a big deal for us.”

He looks over his shoulder, and for a split-second, it’s the real Dewdrop again, eyebrow arching, ready to pick a fight just for the love of the game. He tries to give a little hair toss, and Copia has to tighten his grip on the half-finished braid to not risk losing it entirely. “All that talk about our primitive customs for someone who could stand to look at his own.”

Copia laughs then, because he's got a point. He moves one section of hair over the other, pulling tight, letting the repetition soothe them both.

He doesn’t ask, What did Nihil do to you? But he thinks it all the same.

Chapter Text

When the sun sinks behind the tree tops, when the abbey goes quiet and the moon hangs bright and ominous as a beacon in the night sky—that’s when things go bad.

Dewdrop wakes up from another half-sleep with a gasp, hands tearing at his forehead. Copia, who had been dozing off in the chair next to the bed, jolts awake, feeling stiff and uncomfortable, heart hammering with the dread of being pulled from an unsettling dream into something worse.

“What is it?” Copia asks, clumsy with sleep, standing up so quickly he almost trips. He’s at Dewdrop’s side in a heartbeat.

Dewdrop just shakes his head back and forth, mouth clamped shut, drawn up so tight that Copia feels the pain in his own shoulders just looking at him. It’s like he thinks if he makes himself small enough, the pain won’t find him.

“Bad,” Dewdrop bites out. His tail curls around himself protectively, just like a kit, and Copia feels panic drop like a cold stone in his stomach. When Dewdrop wraps his arms around his knees and draws in on himself, Copia thinks he sees clumps of silvery hair drift to the bed from where he’s pulled them out.

Feeling utterly useless, Copia eases himself onto the bed, and not wanting to jostle him more than is strictly necessary, he carefully slides an arm around his back. He tries not to immediately flinch away at the sick, searing heat of his body. If Dewdrop can bear his pain, Copia can bear this.

“I didn’t want this,” Dewdrop says into his knees, and it comes out as a sob. “Nobody asked—nobody asked if I wanted this.”

It’s not the weight of shame or the anger in his voice from earlier. It’s grief.

“I’m sorry,” Copia says fiercely, trying to fit the force of his rage and his pain into two words and feeling them spill over immediately. “I’m sorry if any of this made it worse. I- I brought you here because I wanted you here.” The words are tumbling out of him like water, uncontrollable and rushing. Dewdrop whimpers, making a wet sound, letting his forehead fall to rest on Copia’s shoulder.

The heat of it is terrifying.

“I was selfish. I wanted to be the one to help you. I wanted—” Copia’s voice snags on something in his throat, the words suddenly feeling too big to fit through his mouth. “I couldn’t stand to think of you alone,” he says, his voice wobbling.

Dewdrop’s fist tightens around the fabric of his shirt. He’s making whining, animal sounds now, broken-off and miserable, his head still rolling from side to side. Copia’s not sure if he can even hear him.

The hair that has come loose from his braid is curling with sweat, damp and wavy at his temples, right next to where his eyes are screwed shut tight. Copia holds him close, pressing a secret kiss to the top of his head where no one will find it. And then another, right above his cheekbone, just for good measure.

His lips come away burning hot. Even for a fire ghoul, Copia knows he’s too warm. Ghoul bodies are remarkably resilient, but they have to have their breaking points, too. It feels like the flames inside him are trying to burn up the water once and for all in one big wall of heat, starting from the inside out.

“Dewdrop,” he whispers behind his ear, trying to keep his voice level against the four-alarm bell of panic rising inside him. “Dewdrop, dear. You’re too warm. Let’s go to the tub, yes?”

He waits for his response. Dewdrop will scoff, and say You only want to get me naked, and Copia will scoff back and pretend to be affronted while he secretly feels his heart get warm and heavy with the aching easiness of it all.

But Dewdrop says nothing, and that’s the worst part. His fisted hand just curls more forcefully in Copia’s shirt, claws poking through the fabric and pricking him a little.

“I’m- I’m going to move you,” Copia says, stumbling over the words a little, starting to feel feverish just from the contact. His chest stings right above where his heart beats.

Muscles aching, he pulls Dewdrop out of his bed and they half-walk, half-stumble to the bathroom. The delicate line of Dewdrop’s back is blistering hot, even against his undershirt. He’s always been small-built and delicate, like a porcelain doll version of himself—like there’s some other prototype fire ghoul out there, larger and clumsier, and Dewdrop is the final product in miniature. But when Copia strips off his underclothes with his best attempt at clinical detachment, he just looks small and weak, like he could snap in two at any moment.

“Is it on?” Dewdrop asks blearily, leaning naked and shivering against the empty tub. His eyes are closed so tight Copia can barely see his lashes.

“Not yet,” Copia says. “Oh, no, Dewdrop, let me—”

Before Copia can reach for him, Dewdrop’s dragging himself in the tub, awkward and lead-limbed. He half-falls in, slumping into the cool porcelain bottom. Before Copia can reach for the tap, his tail’s already there, sliding around the handle and twisting it until water comes spluttering out of the tap. As soon as the water splashes on his skin, he groans in relief, and Copia exhales.

“Better,” Dewdrop rasps, voice smoky and rough, turning from side to side to let the water touch him everywhere. Copia’s glad it’s so late in the year and that cold water is all the abbey seems to have.

Copia leans forward and tests the contests of the tub with his finger. Cold as the deepest parts of the lake. He sinks down to sit on the tile floor, propped up against the wall, watching Dewdrop slowly settle as the bathtub fills.

Copia finds himself dozing against the uncomfortable wall in a half-sleep, dreaming about a forest fire, but then he hears Dewdrop whimpering again and he’s wide awake, eyes burning, heart hammering. He fumbles against the wall until he’s half-upright and knee-walks to the tub.

Dewdrop is groaning in pain, sloshing around like a child with a fever. The floors are damp with spilled bathwater. Copia checks his watch: 11:51. It’s only been twenty minutes since they filled the tub.

He dips a finger in it and immediately yanks it back. Hot. If it was a teakettle it’d be whistling. Feeling very much like he’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, he pulls the cord on the stopper and turns the cold tap back on. Dewdrop’s fragile form reappears by inches as the water drains.

“Is that better?” he whispers, but Dewdrop doesn’t answer. His eyes are screwed shut tight, fingers clutched tight around his horns. Copia fumbles for a washcloth—he can’t believe he still has any left—and holds it under the tap to put to his forehead, but Dewdrop doesn’t even respond. Copia may as well not be there.

He sits back on his heels and takes in the scene. The mirror is totally fogged over now, and even the wooden cabinets are beaded with moisture. Everything feels damp and wet and rainforest-humid. Copia pulls off his undershirt and leaves it in a damp heap on the ground.

Dewdrop’s starting to keen in earnest, now turning his head from side to side, his horns clacking against the porcelain of the tub. A high whine rises in him, a cresting wave of sound, and suddenly, he’s thrashing.

Dewdrop’s body is arching and stiff, every muscle drawn and tense. He jerks in the tub, sloshing hot water over the sides, his tail arcing like a whip. Copia watches with a hand over his mouth as he tries to push himself up. Dewdrop grips the sides with fingers gone white, muscles trembling, then falls back down into the water.

Copia can’t tell if he’s crying or laughing, but he’s convulsing with something. The tears streaking down his face are steaming. It’s like every single synapse is firing at once as he grips his horns, a crescendo of sensation and emotion with Dewdrop caught right in the middle.

In a curiously detached sort of way, observing the cradle of his pelvis just above the draining water, Copia notices that he’s hard.

Something in Copia’s gut twists hot and tight at the sight. The shame that settles there right afterwards feels sharp and self-directed, but not enough to deter him.

His hand is moving before he consciously decides he’ll be doing it.

“Dewdrop,” he says gently, placing one hand on his shoulder as he leans forward. “You- let me help you.”

He reaches down and brushes his other hand against his cock, just a whisper of a touch, experimental, and Dewdrop folds in on himself with a cry at just the brush of his finger. He’s coming instantly, spurting onto his own stomach, gasping. Copia means to draw his hand away—he knows that’s the right response, the sensible, normal one—but instead he wraps it tighter around him, working him through it.

“Papa,” Dewdrop moans, arching into the touch, and Copia is so startled by the acknowledgment that he almost stops what he’s doing.

“Don’t stop,” Dewdrop pleads, voice thin and high and desperate. His eyes are glassy, but they’re open now, and he’s looking right at Copia, pupils round and wet and needy. But he’s still hard, somehow, and so Copia’s pressing Dewdrop’s head to his chest and stroking him more deliberately. It only takes a few tight pumps before he’s coming again, hot and thick all over Copia’s hand this time.

The heat of it is stunning. Copia’s stomach lurches—from surprise, guilt, lancing arousal—it’s hard to parse. Dewdrop’s panting like a dog, his nerves on fire, still staring at him with those big wet eyes. One hand holds his horns while his chest heaves.

“Is this—” Copia starts, not sure what he’s asking, unable to tear his eyes away from the streak of come on his hand. "Are you—"

But then, Oh God, Copia thinks, watching the surface of the water in the tub where Dewdrop’s limbs stick out at sharp angles like a marionette—the water around him is bubbling, steam rising off in waves. His eyes tick upwards and—well, fuck, the horns are smoking now, too.

Heat pulses from cracks in them, like they’re volcanic, almost. He watches in horror as Dewdrop’s eyes roll back into his head. Lucifer help me, he thinks. I’m going to burn the abbey down.

This has to end now, or he’s burning up with him.

His heart’s pumping battery acid as he hauls him out of the tub, soaking himself through with water hot enough to make him wince. Dewdrop’s all but gone limp, just a wet pile of bones in his arms.

The bathroom’s not far from the bed, but it feels endless to Copia, dragging him there, feeling an emotional whiplash on a level that his brain flatly refuses to process. He almost trips over the bathroom threshold, bumping Dewdrop against the frame a little and hissing an apology.

Finally, finally, he manages to dump him into the bed and hauls him to his knees, grabbing his small fists in his own and pressing them to the headboard until they’re forced open and grip the wood there weakly. Copia’s right behind him, a full-body press against the flame of his body, one arm braced across his chest.

“Dewdrop,” he hisses. “Please.”

Dewdrop’s head is still hanging limp, gone ragdoll in a way that makes Copia sick to his stomach. From his position behind him, possessed with the kind of frantic desperation that makes people lift cars, he smacks at Dewdrop’s face. Sobering, rough, open-palmed. Nothing.

Copia’s muscles are shaking from his weight, slight as it is, but he uses his free arm and grabs him awkwardly under the jaw. He pushes his head forward, forcing him to scrape against the wall.

A limp body is exhausting to hold up, worse still to move, and Copia’s starting to feel like his chest might really be burning pressed up against him like this. He’s about ready to start looking for blunt tools to chip the godforsaken things off, when finally, slowly, Dewdrop starts responding.

He makes a confused, pained noise, but Copia can feel his mouth working under his hand like he’s trying to say something.

“I think- I think this is it,” Dewdrop says in a voice so small that Copia can barely hear him. “Help me.”

Panting and sweating, moving against each other in the dark, Copia helps him.

Dewdrop was right. In the end, it only takes a few more scrapes against the wall. When they finally break off—when Copia hears one crumbling snap, and then another, like wood splintering underfoot, it’s almost anticlimactic. The most unremarkable sound in the world, except Dewdrop sobs with relief, sliding down onto the bed, exhaustion stamped onto every inch of him, clear even in the darkness of the room.

Copia slumps down behind him and gathers him up in his arms, holding onto him tight. He fights exhaustion until he’s sure Dewdrop is asleep, until the quiet, hot puffs of breath on the hollow of his neck even out at last.

Chapter Text

Copia sleeps deeply and does not dream. His mind is empty and silent, and he floats there in the black for a long, long time.

The muscle memory of the night before is still there, and when he doesn’t jerk awake with panic and wakes up, instead, when the afternoon sun is so high that it shines directly in his eyeline, it’s utterly unmooring.

“Morning,” a scratchy voice says from next to him. “Or, well. Probably afternoon. Hope you didn’t have any meetings today.”

Copia sits up slowly, feeling sore all the way down to his bones, like his body is one big bruise. He grinds the heel of a hand into his eye, trying to fit the disconnected flashbulb memories of fire, skin, and darkness from the night before into a cohesive narrative.

“Water,” Dewdrop interrupts him, nudging him towards his nightstand, and there’s a whole pitcher there, cool and heavy and beaded with moisture. “I run hot. I mean, you know, obviously. You’re probably dehydrated.”

“Thank you,” Copia rasps, rubbing at his face, his mouth feeling dry and awful. He hefts the pitcher to his lips and drinks deeply, swishing it around in his mouth a little. He pours a little on his hands and splashes it on his face for good measure.

He’s wiping his face with the edge of the bedsheet when he finally notices, his brain working at half speed. Dewdrop’s propped up on one elbow, tilting his head conspicuously, like he’s been waiting this whole time for Copia to pay attention to him.

“Oh,” Copia says dumbly, sitting up straighter and getting closer to take a proper look, and everything comes flooding back to him at once. “Oh. They’re—”

“Pretty cool, right? I think they really elevate my look,” Dewdrop preens, tucking his fists under his chin. He turns from side to side, letting the light catch them. “Normally they’re not so, like, present when you lose the old ones, but I guess they’d been growing secretly under there for a while.”

His old horns had been opaque black, like polished obsidian, beautiful and impressive in a sort of severe way, but now—

“They’re beautiful,” Copia says, awed. Against the pale gray of his skin, they’re a dark, fiery orange, but translucent, like sea glass, and shot through with threads of lighter color. Copia can see yellow, gold, white—maybe even a pearlescent green. They’re a little shorter and thinner than his previous ones, and still a little red around the base. It’s the only sign that they weren’t there all along.

When Dewdrop turns his head, they sparkle, like sunlight on water, or the trail of an ember crackling from fire, right before it burns out.

“I’ve never seen ghoul horns like this before,” Copia marvels.

“Guess I’m just special,” Dewdrop laughs, shaking his hair out, then pulling up the bedsheet where it’s fallen down an inch or two around his waist. The braid’s long gone, and his hair hangs wavy and loose around his face, the white shine of it only interrupted by the orange curve of his horns.

Copia wants to touch them, to feel their cool smoothness under his hands, to braid Dewdrop’s hair again, to check the temperature of his skin—he wants to do a lot of things. But Dewdrop’s already moving, as if he can’t quite let himself sit still—like he doesn’t want to find out what will happen if he does.

If Copia didn’t know any better, he’d think he was nervous.

“You want to see the old ones?” Dewdrop asks. Before Copia can answer, he’s twisting around to the other bedside table—the one that’s usually empty and unoccupied—and presents something in his cupped hands to Copia.

“Your sheets are fucked, by the way. The horns sort of crumbled. It was a mess.”

Copia’s eyes are still trying to make sense of everything, because this is an awful lot to process when you're half-burned and three-quarters-awake, but he laughs when he understands.

“Did you put your horns in one of my coffee mugs?”

“I didn’t pick a nice one,” Dewdrop says, shaking the cup a little at him like it proves a point. “I wasn’t raised in a barn. It already had a chip in the rim,” he says defensively, but Copia’s laughing and can’t seem to stop. The sheer relief of it being over, of Dewdrop being happy and whole and all right, and the absurdity of a little pile of black ashes in his banged-up cappuccino mug is just—too much.

Still smiling, Copia takes the cup from him and peers inside, shaking it a little. It mostly looks like ash or coarse, dark sand, save for a few shards of whatever horns are made out of. It should feel gruesome, but it doesn’t. To see them so inert after that long, terrible day is... strange.

“Would a phoenix metaphor be too on the nose?” Copia asks with a smile, handing the mug back to Dewdrop.

Dewdrop smiles and shrugs, placing the mug back on the table, but he looks troubled. His easy front’s slipping, and underneath, there’s uncertainty.

“Um, so,” he says, meeting Copia’s eyes only briefly before looking at his own hands, like he can’t bear to be earnest and look at Copia at the same time. “Thank you. For staying with me last night,” he says quietly.

The line of his mouth is carefully flat, like it’s carved into wood, but Copia thinks he sees its edges wobble.

“Of course,” Copia says. His voice still feels raspy and scorched, and it comes out more rougher than he intends it to. “I- I wasn’t sure how much you remembered.”

“All of it,” Dewdrop says quietly. “You did... a lot for me.”

The unspoken image of Dewdrop, panting, limbs tense, cock spent on his stomach, lies between them.

Copia opens his mouth, intending to say it was nothing, that he was just doing what was expected of him, that he would have done the same for any of his ghouls.

It’s just as well that Dewdrop cuts him off, because it wouldn’t have been true.

“It would have been bad. Really, really bad. If I was alone.” His eyes are focused on the hem of the fine cotton sheet where he worries it a little between his thin fingers, ash-stained and rumpled. “I was so much younger the last time it happened. It was... different.”

The early afternoon sun is shining through the nearby window, clear and bright and cool. Dewdrop’s horns cast a fractured image of red and gold light over his delicate face as he speaks, halting and uncertain.

“I’m not really good at- you know. Talking. Feelings. That kind of stuff.” Dewdrop is rubbing his neck nervously, his hand climbing to his hairline, his horns. Copia holds his breath. “Thank you for ignoring me when I told you to leave. I’m sorry if it was too much.”

And because Dewdrop has been brave, Copia thinks he can be too.

“It wasn’t,” Copia says hoarsely, feeling his pulse in his throat, wild and fluttering. “It wasn’t too much.” He takes a steadying breath and tries again. “You are not too much.” And that’s a poor way of saying how Copia’s heart feels like a dove freed from a cage whenever he sees Dewdrop smiling, that he would set the whole world on fire before he would let him suffer like that again—but maybe it’s close enough.

“That wasn’t how I wanted that to happen. Last night,” Copia says, feeling like he’s just taken the first step on a tightrope and there’s nothing but air beneath him. Dewdrop's face is carefully blank, but his eyes are round and hopeful. “That’s not how I imagined it.”

Dewdrop almost looks like he’s going to say something—tease him for being so embarrassing, tell him that he was a dirty old man after all— but he just smiles, and his tail thumps happily on the the bed next to him like a cat’s, and Copia knows then that he’s got him.

Copia’s hand circles his face—warm but not hot—brushing his jaw, stroking his cheekbone, climbing up by inches. When his finger brushes the skin at the base of his horn, Dewdrop inhales sharply, but he doesn’t tell him to stop.

“Careful,” Dewdrop warns, sliding a warm hand over Copia’s, so both of them are touching there together.

“Well, I’m very good at careful,” Copia murmurs, moving the pad of his thumb to slide against the cool smoothness of his horn. They’re glassy and cold, like marble. Already, they feel ancient and eternal, like a landmark on his body. When he strokes just a little more firmly, Dewdrop’s eyelids flutter and his mouth falls open, just a little.

Copia leans in and presses his lips to his forehead, feeling Dewdrop sag in his arms in one big full-body sigh of relief. The absence of pain, the anticipation of pleasure.

He wants, achingly, to kiss him. He’s so close he can feel his warm breath on his cheek, and it would be so easy to just let his body lean forward and fit their lips together.

But every part of this entire thing has been wrenched out of Dewdrop’s control: the fire in his heart, the havoc it wreaked, and the choices he hadn’t been able to make. Copia’s not letting anyone trample over his boundaries ever again, not even himself.

He stays where he is, waiting for Dewdrop to come to him.

But he doesn’t have to wait long, because Dewdrop’s hand is already reaching up to cup his cheek. His face is open and smiling and eager, and the fragile flame of his trust almost feels better than the press of his lips.

He's warm, and Copia’s touched him enough times in the last day to know he'd be warm, but this time it’s not the searing heat of a fever; it’s gentle and languid, like summer. Like happiness. Like a fire stoked to life—something in its purest, truest element.

It’s almost like any other man he’s ever kissed, except that it’s not, because there are new and interesting things here, too: the sharp strangeness of his fangs, the heat of his tongue, right at the seam of Copia’s mouth. The faint taste of smoke.

From where they’re sitting, his hand slides down the slim curve of Dewdrop’s shoulder, all the way down to his wrist. His pulse is jumping, and so visceral and so alive that it makes Copia’s throat ache. Dewdrop sighs happily at the touch and his tongue slides into Copia’s mouth, wet and hot. He makes a soft little happy sound, a little trilling chirp, and then Copia’s pressing him flat to the bed, because he needs to hear that again.

“Please let me make you feel good,” Copia says into his hairline, pressing his lips there, his hand trailing down the flat expanse of Dewdrop’s stomach.

“Sure,” Dewdrop laughs, all giddy and relieved, and well. If that isn’t the best fucking thing Copia’s heard since this whole thing began.

He kisses him again, chastely at first, then quite a bit less so.

“I think,” Copia says against his mouth, brushing a thumb over his pierced nipple. Dewdrop shudders when he flicks it, just a little. “It’s possible we may have done some of this in the wrong order.”

“What, this doesn’t feel like a normal first date to you?” Dewdrop laughs.

“Well, I didn’t exactly bring you home before eleven.”

Copia means to tell him to lay back against the pillows—all of them, in a luxurious pile, to arrange himself comfortably, to let his hair fan out in a silver halo around him, saint-like, something that could be on the ceiling of a church. He wants this to be perfect, but he is so desperate, suddenly, and there doesn’t seem to be time.

Dewdrop never dressed after last night, and when Copia draws back the sheet—ashy and ripped and already needing to be replaced, all apologies to Imperator—he’s still naked, taut and delicate and beautiful. He’s hard already, his cock resting thick and eager against the flatness of his stomach, flushed a deep rosy gray.

“Oh, expecting something?” Copia teases, sinking between his legs.

“Mmmm,” Dewdrop says, stretching out one long leg to settle at Copia’s side. Effortless and beautiful, like the elegant stretch of a swan’s neck. Copia wants to measure the angle of his knee, the curve of his lower back, the willowy line of his neck. “Well, someone said he wanted me to feel good.”

Copia can’t even say anything back, because there is no fonder or fiercer desire in his heart. Gently, almost experimentally, he presses his thumb to the underside of his cock so it lies flat on his belly, watching the precome gathered there drip onto his skin. When he pulls his thumb back and his cock springs back up, there’s a slick line connecting it to his stomach.

“God,” Copia says, dazed, feeling arousal sit heavy between his legs. “You’re incredible.”

Dewdrop groans, his legs squeezing tight around Copia’s shoulders. “Obviously, but if you don’t touch me for real, I’m going to actually die this time.”

He’s suffered enough. When Copia takes him into his mouth, the sound he makes feels holy.

He watches him, as much as he can, wanting to know him like this—the way his tail thumps the bed when Copia rolls his tongue on the underside of him, and how the back of his thighs feel when he tries to push his hips upward. That makes Copia smile. Impatient, of course.

Copia pulls off slickly, using his hand while he catches his breath, watching Dewdrop’s narrow hips pulse up into his fist. He is beautiful in his pleasure, and Copia feels with a ferocity that makes his head spin that he wants to map his life around this, around subsuming every single bad thing and making it good. Lighting everything bad on fire so that they can warm themselves next to it.

“Does it feel good?” he asks, unable to stop himself from checking, just a little. He rolls his balls a little in his other hand and watches Dewdrop’s head thump back on the pillow while he nods yes.

Someday, he thinks, dizzy with it, he’ll really make him feel good. He’ll get him good and prepared on his fingers, and slide into him as easy as anything, and Dewdrop will open beneath him, wet and welcoming and warm.

But no, Copia reminds himself, speeding up his hand, not warm; he’ll be hot, burning hot and so slick around him, and Copia will grip him under his knee with a gloved hand and hold him down easily—Satan, he's so slight—and press deep inside him until they’re flush against each other, until Copia’s sheathed in the space Dewdrop made for him, until—

Until he can’t stand it, and he’s saying all of this to Dewdrop, watching him writhe beneath his hand while he strokes him fast and sloppy, the train of his mind and body gone off the rails.

“Would you like that?” he asks, breathing into the narrow crook of his thigh, kissing him there, smelling sweat and come and the sharp smell of physical desire—something not quite human, something ghoul bodies must produce. “Because I would. Very much.”

“Yes,” Dewdrop groans, hips snapping up into his hand, and it’s so good, and so unlike the last time this happened, that Copia wants to stay in this moment forever. But Dewdrop’s voice is trembling with need, so Copia takes him in his mouth again, letting him buck a little, tasting salt in the back of his throat.

"I like it- I like it on my hands and knees," Dewdrop moans. "I want- you to give it to me like that."

He rubs his face on Dewdrop’s thigh, tickling him a little with his mustache. “Anything. Anything you want.”

He’s close. Copia knows he’s close, because he feels a hand circle around the back of his head, tugging his hair with urgency. The sound Dewdrop makes when he pulls off a moment later is broken and desperate.

“I didn’t get to watch you come,” Copia says, voice heavy and thick, stroking him hard now, watching precome drip over his fist. He’s wetter than a human, Copia notices, filing that away for later. Dewdrop squirms beneath him. “Not really. It was over so fast. Will you let me watch now?”

“Please,” Dewdrop gasps. Copia stretches up to kiss him sweetly before taking him back down into his mouth again.

He’s most of the way there already. With Copia’s mouth tight and warm around him, it doesn’t take long. When his fingers curl tight in Copia’s hair and he comes in his mouth, the expression on his face looks something like rapture. The ecstasy of a saint: the holy and the unholy. Copia feels like both as he swallows his release. He rests his cheek on the sweaty crook of Dewdrop’s thigh, feeling like he could stay there forever.

Copia’s own need feels perfunctory—almost forgotten—but Dewdrop’s already nudging at him with his tail to slide off his pants and come closer. He helps Copia move forward on his knees as he scoots back against the headboard, opening his mouth in invitation. Copia has to grip the headboard at the first lick of his pink tongue, forked and nimble and twice as long as a human’s.

It’s over in a few heartbeats. Copia comes in his mouth with a hand resting fondly on his cheek. They curl around each other in the bed, warm and happy and alive.

✧✧✧

Much later, after the sun has set on an afternoon spent mostly in bed, when Dewdrop’s dozing with his back pressed against Copia’s chest, Copia asks him.

“Do you remember what they did to you?” he says into his neck.

The unspoken they floats there between them for a moment, because even in quiet moments like these, the spectre of Nihil is never really that far away. Dewdrop, fidgety, shifts in his arms a little. Copia presses a kiss to his cheekbone and waits. He doesn’t expect him to answer, but he does.

“I don’t remember a lot of it,” Dewdrop says a few moments later. “Just… bits and pieces.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Copia says, ready to drop it, but maybe today’s a day for long-unspoken thoughts, because he can see Dewdrop bracing himself to talk. Copia never noticed before, but he sort of squares his shoulders when he’s ready to be earnest, like it’s a skill he hasn’t practiced very often. It’s terribly endearing.

He waits, and finally Dewdrop speaks again.

“I remember… feeling like my throat was burning. Like I’d swallowed coals. I remember thinking I’d never wanted water so bad in my life.” Copia watches Dewdrop’s eyes close for a moment while he tries to pull the memories out. He has to resist closing his, too, in sympathy. “I kept having to… drink things. It tasted awful. Someone- someone forced my mouth open. Made me swallow things. It burned like hell.”

Copia tries not to react, because it will only upset Dewdrop if his composure drops, but he feels quiet rage rising in him like a tide. He forces it down, because this isn’t about his anger—this is about Dewdrop, and Copia knows what even this small gap in his armor is costing him. He can see it in the jump of his pulse in his temple. So he lets himself ask only one more question.

“Who? Do you remember?”

Dewdrop turns to face him now, smiling a little. He expected this question. Copia can already tell what the answer is going to be from the look on his face.

“Besides Nihil? No,” he says softly, reaching up to press his thumb to little dip in his skin above Copia’s lip. “I bet most of the major players are dead now. Sorry, no scorched-earth quest for vengeance for you.” He considers this for a moment, tapping his lip. “Now that I think of it, wouldn’t I be a better candidate for scorched-earth vengeance? What with the fire and all.”

Copia smiles back, feeling a little admonished at the transparency of his own question, but Dewdrop doesn’t seem to mind.

“I do remember biting someone,” Dewdrop says after a moment’s consideration, smiling dreamily at half-remembered violence.

“Now, that does sound like you.” Copia privately hopes it was Nihil.

“And… someone said something,” Dewdrop pauses, letting Copia brush the hair from his face while he thinks. “Towards the end. Maybe Nihil, or maybe one of the old ghouls. I remember someone saying that this was for the Church. For us to be stronger. That it was what the Unholy Father wanted.”

“You’ll forgive me if I disagree.”

“Yeah. What a load of shit.”

He turns back on his side, and Copia wraps an arm around his chest again, tucking his face into his neck, smelling him everywhere. It’s quiet for a moment, and Copia thinks maybe Dewdrop’s dozing off again, but then he’s turning over, so they’re face-to-face again.

“I looked, afterwards. For scars, I mean. For a sign something happened. Stitches, or new skin, or staples, or something. I couldn't find anything. Fucking magic.” He closes a hand around one of his horns. “In a weird way, it’s sort of a relief to finally have proof.”

Copia kisses him softly then, right on his open mouth, then further down his neck and chest, until Dewdrop is sighing happily and arching against him, because they don’t need to spend any longer in the past, and because Dewdrop shouldn’t want for proof of anything else ever again.

He’ll show him every day, if he has to.

✧✧✧

For a day or two, it goes like this: eating and fucking and sleeping, all the pleasures of a body, with none of the pain. The best kind of indulgence in the absence of suffering. The near-miss exhilaration of brushing so close to what felt like death.

Copia applies his paint every day, pulling his mouth to the side to check the sharpness of the edges. Even though Dewdrop’s on him in an instant, kissing off the black around his lips, it still feels like something that he doesn’t forget. It feels like a great stone has been loosed from a river, and finally the water is flowing again.

They don’t talk about Nihil. Not after that first night.

Sometimes, when Copia watches Dewdrop hold his hand to the fireplace to hurry it along, or boil water for tea in a mug between his palms, or shoot sparks off the balcony to make Copia laugh—sometimes, his wanting to know more gnaws at him so fiercely, there doesn’t seem to be room for anything else left in him. But Dewdrop’s been through too much in the past few days for every freshly-laid stone to be overturned.

There will be time.

Despite the fact that neither of them have spent much time outside his bed, news of Dewdrop’s horns reaches the abbey, and starting the next morning, the ghouls leave them offerings at Copia’s door. There’s whole baskets of it: cheese and fruit and pastries, and a bottle of something purple and viscous with no label that Copia worries about opening. A thermos of dark, hot coffee arrives with a little note, carefully inked with an M next to a heart. Mountain had probably grown the beans himself.

“Is this normal?” Copia says, returning from the door with another armload of trinkets. A vial of spring water from Rain. A beaded necklace from the girls. “All these gifts? After they all ignored you?”

“We seriously need to work on your cultural sensitivity,” Dewdrop says. He’s lying flat on his belly on Copia’s bed—naked, like he has been for days, munching on an apple from the greenhouse.

“Sorry. After they all... ceremonially pretended you didn’t exist,” Copia says, carefully placing everything on the dining room table with the rest of the offerings.

Dewdrop rolls his eyes and takes another bite, but Copia can see the happy flick of his tail from the corner of his eye. “There’s usually, like, a celebration. Y’know, afterwards. Ticker tape parade or whatever. But seeing how we haven’t gotten dressed in three days...”

“They probably got sick of waiting for you.”

“They really should’ve known better. I’ve never been on time for anything.”

“There’s just so much of it.” Copia says, turning over a jar of something from Mountain that looks suspiciously like lube. He places it far away from himself on the dining room table, then, reconsidering, scoots it back a little closer.

“Mmm. You’d think we’d gotten hitched,” Dewdrop says, taking another bite. “Imagine when they find out you haven’t made an honest woman of me.”

“Quite an Eve you are,” Copia says, tracing a finger up his calf. Dewdrop preens at the attention, letting his legs fall open a little. “Original sin looks good on you.”

“If this is how I get rewarded for original sin, I know how I want to spend eternity,” he says around a mouthful of fruit, letting his tail curl snakelike around Copia’s wrist. Copia laughs, because Dewdrop always makes him laugh, because this is close to perfect.

If he could do this forever, he would, too.

Later, while Dewdrop sleeps, Copia walks to the big window in his quarters and looks out at the forest at the edges of the abbey. He studies the black curve of night and the persistence of the evergreens, and feels steadier than he has in a long, long time.

✧✧✧

Life finds a new rhythm afterwards.

Sister isn't exactly happy, because she's never happy, but even she can't find room to protest when Copia and Dewdrop are both doing so much better.

“It's not in my nature to apologize," she says a bit stiffly after a meeting with Copia, once she's returned to the abbey. “But he does seem good for you.”

Copia smiles, saying nothing, tapping his pen happily against his desk. He doesn’t need her approval, but having it anyway—however halting and conditional—is nice all the same.

“I’m not going to give you a speech about vinegar and honey, so don’t look so expectant,” she says tartly as she gathers herself up to leave, but the skin around her eyes tells the story of a smile.

His robes rustle as they walk out the door into the cold, bright winter morning. There’s work to do and a clergy to lead, and a whole long, strange journey in front of him, but there’s a fire in his heart to guide the way.

“I’m not expectant,” he says, taking her arm in his. “Just happy.”