“She's mad” Lucius hissed, a sneer in his voice that even through the phone sounded serpentine and bowel crushing.
Copia gripped the receiver tighter, gloves straining like a leathery squeaking rat, fingers tangling in the loops of cording as if unable to escape the words that had been chasing his thoughts for too long.
“Wh-what are you saying?” He said, hushed voice in panick as the pupils in his eyes shrank in cold fear.
“I mean, your little lady has contracted a affliction of the mind and soul- and it isn't of some chemical malfunction in the blood and bone. It's not a curse of this world, Cardinal.” Lucius growled, “This is beyond my medicine.” his throat constricted as he spoke, feeling like the freedoms of his human like form had become a new prison of his own salvations's making. A demon oracle, redeemed from darkness and cursed to live in the Grey matter of humanity, while gifted beyond most measures, could not cast out the thing of likeness of his previous recognition- no, demonic curses are one to the other as a poison to a poison. But unlike some polar relations of anecdotes and cocktails in the alchemic, these do not cancel out. Only heap exponentially upon one another. There was nothing Lucius could do. And it felt like it was killing him.
Perhaps it finally would…
“Surely you must know something!” Copia ushered, voice cracking through the phone as though he were already beginning to weep.
“All I know is I must withdraw my services from this venture. My presence would only, egg on, whatever darkness is plaguing the girl-”
“Be reasonable Lucius, your telling me there's *nothing you can do?”
“Not I!” Lucius barked, fist slamming at the desk in his office where he was calling from, green hellfire crackling along his veins in rage.
“Too many people, myself included have had contact with that fucking Blood Stone! All of you have handled it, all of us are infected! I just happen to be a catalyst, and besides you, Milagro happens to be the weakest amongst us all-”
“She's not weak!” Jim said, clutching Lucius’ desk corners in white knuckled rage-
*Jim and Teddy were in the dungeons of Lucius’ offices, confronting him about his machinations and obsessions, having found that he, and they, we're all being affected by the same malady that was making Milagro go insane- Copia was being phoned into the loop, and Emmanuel and Johan were upstairs in the abbey, frantically trying to make arrangements for Milagro's safe passage to somewhere she might be hidden from even them... Meanwhile Milagro was forced to seek sanctuary at the ministry, while the bloodstone was with Copia,kn the other side of the earth*
Teddy held Jim back at the chest, “Let him talk Jim, Copia needs to hear this-”
“Copia needed to be HERE, this whole time!”
Jim whirled, teeth on edge as a violent rage danced behind his dark eyes like wild fire.
The Preacher Man was on a knifes edge, and he felt like at any moment, either he would slide right through the blade and loose everything, or topple from the brink and loose himself...
“You need to calm yourself!” Teddy snapped, canines bared as his own temper, known to be long fused and short trimmed, flared dangerously, “Copia has been where he's supposed to be, away from here, where he can protect us and get help-”
“Liar, I smell you like wallow-water on a hog, you don't even believe what you're sayin', ya think you're better than everyone, like your high horse shit don't stink!” Jim glowered, sweeping papers off of Lucius’ desk as he went, knocking Teddy's hold on him away, balling fists shoved into his pockets as the Preacher Man sought the dark comfort of the corner of the room, snatching the brandy bottle and swinging it straight muttering, “Go fuck yourself”.
Teddy glared, feeling the red in his face grow livid, and his beast tearing at the bars of it’s cage within.
But Jim was right. Teddy felt like Copia had been far too absent from Milagro's life and care during her time with child, and so soon after their birth as well...
*The twins knew their own father as the red flash in the door to coo and dote on their cherubic faces, and to quickly leave them, fussing and crying at the sudden loss and absence that their own blood knew to be kin. And watching their distressed wailing and constant upset, felt like torture! No, Teddy didnt want Copia here, or just away... he wanted him gone...
*Then again, Teddy Wolfe felt only he was good enough to have earned the right to be by Milagro and her children's side, for to his eyes, everyone but him, had taken his family for granted. He had bonded to them so fiercely, a possessive snarl to any percieved slight was never far, as was the feral roaring in his ears, and he could not close himself from it. As if he were fighting the beast within, which, for the damage he could cause, very well could spell out a fate, dark and terrible, and full of blood and carnage to rival a lycan berserker. Teddy, was also, dangerous... and he knew it... and he hated himself for it. And that hate, made him lash out at everyone like a baited fighting animal, so for now he had to admit, even he couldn't be counted on to keep 'his woman' and 'his cubs' safe. The man' mind was also going, like a mad dog...*
*And now when the woman they all loved needed their strengths the most, it seemed, one by one, every man for himself was dropping out of the race like flies- no one was themselves. No one was all there, everyone was broken in ways darkened unto themselves, and it felt like Milagro was the one most affected- too crazy to be left with her own children, possessed by something abysmal, demented, and possessive beyond any one's ability to pull her back from…*
Lucius continued his phone call with Cardinal Copia, but had seemed to be doing more than that at once, feeling the auras of those around him constant and acrid. Though Grey walking, he was still a deamon. There was an energy feeding him from the combined strife and aggression of these men, and Lucius was tasting every one of them- like swallowing a meal of sustenance that was as disgusting as it was poisoned. And it too was forming changes in him that he could barely control, so subtle was it, that he knew like a frog in a pot, would eventually doom him to a fate in the abyss…
*The road to hell is gentle on the slope, without milestones or signposts*
Glancing at Jim in the corner, stewing hotly half finished down the bottle, Lucius saw the Preacher Man's eyes and hands blackened like a blix from hell. Then his gaze flit over to Teddy who was half seated on the desk, arms crossed and rubbing a hand at his temple, hackles raised and constantly, painfully, shifting between human and wolf's forms...
the subtleties of their maladies were becoming more and more apparent, and the corruption was spreading...
*Like a cancer, crawling amongst them, infecting, corrupting, cell by cell, like a slow dismemberment of self into something…. Monsterous… like a vision of grotesque malformation, wailing and gnashing it's teeth…*
it was clear to the Oracle Deamon how deeply the whole matter was affecting them all, and Lucius knew, that indeed, all of it, was a bad sign…
*
Copia hung up the receiver and buried his hands in his face. The dismal room held coldness and stale air, and the smell of rotted books and bone dust followed wherever he went- settling here on his shoulders, where he stooped over a makeshift table, while tears seeped through his gloves.
The night beyond the window held no hope of dreams and wonder, no music or stars. It was simply dark. And only the flicker of thin pale lamplight from the street beyond, veiled through the forgotten crypt, one place of the few sanctuaries afforded to The Clergy and their Vampiric members. The safe house was old and delayed, like everything inside it, and The Cardinal could feel the emptiness that seemed to fill the air, heavy and malcontent...
“I should never have left…” he whispered. Deep down, what Copia meant was *I should never have gone back*.
A pale hand, shapely and full of youth, slid over Copias left shoulder, a voice smooth and quiet spoke, “We all agreed, it would be safer for you to be here, than there-”
“I know, that's what I said!” Copia gasped, “but I can't protect them from across the world, hiding in some mausoleum like a plague rat in the sewer-”
“This is no sewer, and you are no rat,” The voice continued, a tinge of earnestness behind it, “Believe me. I have seen the world of rats and ‘less-than’ creatures,” the hand was joined by the other, both giving a squeeze at each of Copia's shoulders, “and while you may at times be a rat bastard-”
Copia winced.
“- you are not, a monster, not like what Ive seen.”
“But this, this sickness, it grips me like some clawed thing in the dark, and I can't escape it, no matter where I run.”
“Running in retreat is better than standing by and becoming something you are not-”
Copia closed his sore eyes, watching himself in his mind...
*Remebering the way he pretended to have been fine, indifferent even, all while those at home had suffered from his absence. Hiding in In the limelight, he had found his darkest shame...*
*He had made a mess of things, mistreating Jim as his companion, taking for granted his love and abilities with the dead. The Cardinal had even gone so far as to kill a waitress by blood draining, his appetite known to be voracious, was now unquenchable, and he reacted to it like a fiend, with no regard or remorse in the moment, and expected Jim to quite literally, clean up the mess. Jim had managed to bring the woman back, but he had his own blood hunger to satisfy, and The Cardinal had greedily taken the food from Jim's mouth, having stolen the intended shared feeder from him. And Copia kept on denying Jim the sustenance of fresh flow. And in keeping his familiar, like a bonded prisoner, to drink only from his veins, The Cardinal was mirroring the injustices done to him, reanacting his own traumas when he himself had been a blood slave, once upon a lifetime ago. It was not like him, but his sickly natures were spilling out, for while the Grucifix he had been wearing had housed the cursed stone, the stone's curse was rather simple... it brought out and fed, the worst in those it affected.*
* It summons evils from within... going unoticed until the damage was too great to ignore, and the demonic feeding that posessed it, while granting power, granted also madness *
*The power had gone to the Cardinal's head, the tour had been wildly successful. The erruption of fame and fortune, the masses throwing themselves at his feet, compelled by his silver toungued voice, the grandeur of his presence, and controlled by his will, the warbling of The Cardinal's song had enchanted millions... But behind the scenes and round the trailers, Copia had behaved like a dirty scavenger, latching on to anything that had a bloody pulse, and draining it to death without mercy. He had preyed on the weak and vulnerable, the ones like the network of blood donors, who would let him drain them far beyond what they should, even to an inch of death out of desperation for the euphoria of his venomous bite... even taking them on like disposable lovers, all while *his Jim* suffered in silence...*
*To the public, a charming man of wealth and taste... but two faced was his visage. And in the dark he had been something terrible, something else entirely...*
One of the pale hands left the Cardinal's shoulder, and was brought to the shadows where the younger man stood. The red glow of his eyes, soft, and yet so piercing. He bit into his wrist and stiffened, feeling the way the Cardinal instantly whipped back to latch onto the wound, like a desperate leech, gripping hands wrapped around the presented arm as if it might be taken away. Feral, hating, gluttony at it's core...
Copia couldn't care at the moment, how his companion in the dark looked on with disdain and pity. He was groveling for the blood flowing warm over his mouth, and the soft whimpers and groans leaving him were battering his own ears. The word he embodied, was one he had tried to run from for years- from Nihil, from His Mother, from the responsibility of his calling, and cowering in this place, because Daryn, the man before him, was the only one who could satisfy the blood lust from the sickness crawling in his own veins, the word the Great Cardinal Copia embodied, debased, and internally alone, was
*pathetic*.
"There has to be a way," Copia thought, his dualed mind reaching far and out for answers to the impossible, "there has to be-"
*
"There is" Lucius replied, the forces of his darkness brewing behind the shudder of his barely moving lips.
"But by all the unholy, is such a journey long..."
The Grey deamon smiled softly, an eerie shaddow in his countenance that glowed green, the intensity of which mirrored that of the hellfire that both threatened to consume everyone, and refine them like the crucible of fate, "a plague..." hissed the Oracle deamon, his vision hazed and far, of rats and snakes and spiders and blood, "a plague on all your houses...."
Teddy sighed, seeing the way his friend slumped over like a wilted rose, color faded with the summer gone.
Copia seemed to droop more and more as the days went by. And on the rare days where he was off with everything in the world he could do, it was like there was nothing in the world that he couldn't do, but it came at the price of breaking even more, wearing down.
"Copia," Teddy said haltingly, pecking out the 'saved for special occasions', self soothing cigarette, "I don't want to see you wear yourself down. Just let me help a little huh?"
Copia sighed heavily waving the smoke towardshis face. The scent calmed his nerves. Teddy knew this. Of Course he did. Sweet man he was then, sharing his vices for his friend's sake of comfort.
Teddy jad his back against the plush office chair that seemed to remain an uncomfortably stiff thing for his posture. But he and Copia had this thing where every once in a while, T3ddy would wander in for a shared a ciggy from his own special occasion stash in his own office desk.
"I don't like this. I don't like this one bit!" Copia groaned, feeling the way his bones creaked and protested as he stood up, crossing the room to Teddy at the mantle, "This, mortal coil is so frustratingly slow to take on-" Copia hissed between his teeth as pain shot up from his hip through his spine. His gloved hand clasped at the quivering muscle beneath his palm.
Teddy moved in, rubbing the flat plant of his knuckles on the spot, twisting his fist to try and massage the tightened strings and sinews that pressed against things like nerves and the pain of an aging body. Copia was aging slowly, but it was enough that there would be more days of discomfort ahead, than ones that made him forget he was no longer invisible.
"Th-thanks" Copia grunted, griping the mantle, arching back suddenly as a particularly sensitive spot flared pain signals to his brain.
Teddy frowned but didn't stop. Instead, he softened his touch with a sigh, "There is never a cure for what time does to beings like us. But in that time -" He said, making a soft groan as he flexed strong fingers over the flesh, trying his best to knead around the problem area to make it easier to loosen, like wrangling down Copia's stubbornness. Like how one brushes the end of a ratted nest of hair to ease the mass of tangles down. "Good lord, it's like trying to rub out water from a rock," Teddy teased, trying to lighten the mood. Copia flashed a smirk, "Yeah, yeah, I'm a mess-" "Hey," Teddy interrupted, turning Copia at the waist, his hands finding Copia's arm and shoulders, holding himself close, the way a mentor might try to impress upon his mentor, a thing or two they know...
"You're *Human*. Don't apologize for merely existing."
"Well my behavior hasn't exactly been steller," Copia muttered, gently, but determinedly pushing past, to go to a set of drawers where he kept medications, potions, and talismans. A junk drawer of personal baubles and knickbacks saved for specific occasions that never came. Pawing through them, Copia searched for something to ease his pain in the moment.
Teddy shook his head, "Oh you really are a stubborn jack-ass you know that?"
Copia shoved the drawer closed and held the edges frustratedly, "Yes, I am aware I have problems. Jesus, I AM a problem!" Copia growled, pinching the bridge of his nose, the other hand on his hip as he stewed. Teddy took a calming breath, stealing himself a moment, gearing up to do what needed be done... and came up behind Copia, turning him once more and embracing him fully. Copia leaned in, as expected. Eveb if he still felt fidgety about the affection being given.
*just being nice*
Copia thought.
*Just being real, being here*
Teddy prayed inside.
He refused to let go, letting the wrap of his arms settle into the planes and valleys of the body in front of him, splayed palms and tensed fingers aching, like meeting after too long apart, begging for Copia to see that he wasn't alone.
That being vulnerable hurt.
And, that he was there for him.
But that he should let his friend in.
He should remember that he is loved.
"You are loved dearly, god dammit, you restless thing... you are loved, you hear me. Loved. Hear this and hear it plain lad, you hear me, plain?"
*Why couldn't he just see that?*
Copia's chest hitched as an all too familiar hurt broke him inside, but only let a few tears shed.
Teddy sighed and flexed his arms a little harder around the man. Tightening his embrace at, every, word, so Copia knew not a one was being wasted on his ears when Teddy said,
"You are not a problem Copia. You are somone I love. Please. Don't say such things about the people I love..."
**
It was quiet. But the warmth of the hearth glowed and the scent of soft soap and mild detergent on Teddy's skin smelled glorious. Copia relented. He had to admit. This was... nice. It was
comforting.
And it was the one thing he had been searching for to hold himself together... except he wasn't doing the holding. He had to let someone else tend to his wounded heart, hold it in their hands, share the burden, lighten the load for a moment so he could be here, now, and breathe deep. His jaw unclenched, and his brow wiggled out of its tense grip, and as his face relaxed, he felt that momentary calm that comes when one knows the other is telling the actual truth. No minced words, flattery, or pity. Pure human love. Heart to heart. A brother in his circle. Family chosen.
The blessing to know that experience, that something that only comes from living in such a mortal coil as he inhabited now. Oh, how Copia suddenly felt wretched for taking his aging body for granted, but he wasn't alone in the experience. He had people he loved that loved alongside. And while Teddy's hair had greyed and he looked a bit more like a silver fox than a lycan, he'd been a companion in Copia's unaturally long life. And a fairly good one at that.
Ear twitching a moment, as Teddy huffed a playful note, he pulled back, a hand cupping Copia's neck as he leaned his forehead in, pressing it against Copia's, breathing long and deep. As if in greeting to his soul. Absorbing part of his friend forever. And letting go, and with every exhale, Copia's own shoulders rested down from his ears.
Sharing a woman they both loved fiercely, Milagro.
They stood that way togethwr for a long time...
**
It felt like an utter blessing, albeit a reluctantly received one more often than not, stubborn as he was, but blessed all the same, that Copia had such friends to grow old with, and love their children and chosen families, together. It's a beautiful thing to be friends from far and still be so close.
To share something in pride together. Their creations, Charlotte and Ari.
Sharing a paramour they never seemed to avoided becoming entangled with one way or another. Jim...
Old blood was beginning to stir. They had more years ahead than behind them, in the fight to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.
But they were brothers together in their chosen family. And they were glad they had managed to be alive this long, to come this far, together, and get to see the good times in their lives, the very thing they fought so hard to keep going.
