Chapter Text
There’s an ache in Copia’s neck, and all at once, he’s awake.
Pain’s not anything new - after a few decades of bad posture and even worse sleeping habits, the body eventually comes to collect - but something about this feels off. He’s got a twinge between his shoulders that won’t go away, a proper fuck-you to his age and his dignity, like he fell asleep sitting up, but he’s lying down.
He’s mostly sure he’s lying down. He feels horizontal. He flexes his hand tentatively, and - yes, okay, those are bed sheets. Definitely lying down. He doesn’t remember going to bed, but it clearly must have happened - recently too, based on how his eyes sting when he closes them tight and rubs them with the heel of his palm.
There’s light in the room, but it’s muted by the curtains. It’s hard to tell what time it is without looking at the clock, but he has the unpleasant feeling he’s slept in. He sits up, fumbling on his nightstand for his glasses and ends up smacking something round and plastic onto the floor instead.
He leans over the edge of the bed, picking up whatever fell off the table, squinting to read the label. It’s a plastic tub of night cream - La Mer, according to the delicate serif lettering on the label. Almost empty, and much more expensive than Copia would ever buy. He unscrews the white plastic cap under his nose and inhales. It smells delicate and floral and, now that he thinks about it, familiar.
With the creeping, dreadful certainty of a hangover, Copia realizes all at once that he’s not in his room.
Blinking, he takes in the expensive lotion, the cream silk sheets, and the king-sized down pillow compressed flat under his head. This is Terzo’s room.
The only problem is, he can’t remember how he got here.
*
It had been a good night. Copia and the ghouls were fresh off the heels of a good ritual - and not just a good ritual, a really fucking good ritual.
Like most things, it had been Imperator’s idea: a mini-tour around Sweden in the summer, sort of a hometown victory lap before the big tour for a title he still couldn’t quite believe he’d earned yet. Of course, a new tour meant new everything: equipment, masks, makeup.
And then there were the clothes.
“You don’t think it’s…” Copia had held up his wrist, in front of the floor-length mirror, admiring the gold cufflinks glinting at his sleeves. “Preemptive?”
He’d been to the tailor more times in the last three months than he had in his entire life. It seemed everything needed to be lacquered, embroidered, cinched. He could sometimes hear the whispering slide of the measuring tape in his dreams.
Imperator had clicked her tongue and shooed the seamstress away to fetch new pocket squares. She put her hands on his shoulders — not quite motherly, because she was never motherly, but there was something affectionate in the gesture.
“Copia.” She smoothed down the stiff fabric at his shoulders. “What’s preemptive about celebrating something you’ve already won?”
He examined the sharp lines of white paint at his chin. “Gauche, then.”
“You are the leader of a Satanic church,” she’d said briskly, tugging his dress shirt down in a quick motion, so it stood at crisp attention on his body. Her smile was sharp over his shoulder. “Satan help us if you’re worried about being gauche.”
And really, Copia hadn’t fought that hard, because against his better judgment, he did want to indulge a little now that the long, hardscrabble climb to the top was over. Any excuse to throw a party felt like a fresh thrill. The glow of victory still surrounded him everywhere he went like a glamor. It was hard not to get drunk off that.
Or, sometimes, to literally get drunk.
So: The good fucking ritual in question. They’d capped off the tour with a roof-raising, invite-only show at the abbey, square in the middle of the biggest ballroom. It was three stories of glass and arches and stage lights, centuries-old architecture dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era. It was fucking excellent.
The stained glass windows had rattled with the thrum of the bass. Beyond the charmed spotlight illuminating the band, the crowd was a dark chorus, visible only in flashes of light and fire. When Copia took his final confetti-spattered bow, and when the crowd roared back at him in wordless, screaming worship, he thought he finally knew what Emeritus meant.
Right after, there was an impromptu toast with the ghouls, everyone still sweat-slick and buzzing with adrenaline. Dewdrop produced a slim bottle of something purple and strangely viscous that made Copia cough so hard that Aether had to pound him on the back until his eyes burned.
“The only way out is through,” Swiss had said, handing him another cup. “Bottoms up, Papa.”
There was a second round, and then a third, in the kind of burning rapid-fire succession Copia knew he would pay for tomorrow. The ghouls left afterwards for some kind of midnight ritual Copia couldn’t pronounce, but he was just tipsy enough to try. At least they were good-natured when they laughed at him.
“You don’t have enough tongues,” Cirrus had shouted worryingly over the roar of the music of the afterparty, squeezing his shoulder goodbye.“You’ll get there!”
He hadn’t felt drunk yet, just a little warm and pleasantly unsteady on his feet, letting the afterglow of the show and the crowd ebb around him. His reflexes were dull enough that he couldn’t quite manage to stop Terzo arriving out of nowhere from stage left to pluck the champagne flute from his hand.
“It’s an open bar,” Copia protested, watching the drink disappear by inches. The frozen cherry in the glass bobbed up and down ominously.
You could set a watch by how much paint was rubbed off Terzo’s lips. Right then, they’d looked pink enough for midnight.
“Hmm,” Terzo said unhelpfully, downing the rest in one go. Copia bristled with annoyance and drunk, waterlogged confusion. His hand reached out dumbly for his glass, even though he didn’t particularly want it anymore.
“Anything else of mine you'd like? Maybe the shirt off my back?”
“Ha!” was all Terzo said, like it was some big joke. He’d toasted Copia in thanks, just to really rub it in, setting the empty glass down with a suspiciously toasty smile. He’d clearly been celebrating too, though what the occasion was for him, Copia couldn’t say. Maybe just being alive—however conditionally—was enough these days.
He’d slipped his finger and thumb between his lips, and for one absurd second, Copia thought he might be getting ready to whistle. But then he’d dropped something from his mouth in Copia’s glass.
Copia had to hold the glass up to his face and squint to see it right: A stem, tied in a perfect knot.
Terzo thumbed at his lip, inspecting the paint on his finger before looking up at Copia with mischief in his eyes. “Maybe I just wanted your cherry.”
*
That’s more or less where things get fuzzy.
Copia can remember the feeling of being spectacularly drunk, listing and bobbing and feeling sloshy all over. He remembers laughing very hard at something that wasn’t funny, and then feeling enormously tired. And then nothing.
He gives up on finding his glasses and sloughs through the designer debris on the ground to make his way to the bathroom. If he came straight here right after the party, he probably wouldn’t have them, he reasons. He’ll brush his teeth. He’ll wash his face. He’ll tiptoe past Terzo, who is probably passed out on the kitchen floor somewhere, and who he wants to avoid at all costs.
It was simpler when he was gone.
Not better, Copia thinks, guiltily, bracing one hand on the velvet damask wallpaper to sidestep an overturned laundry basket. Not better at all. He prefers whatever strangeness is between them now to Terzo’s absence. But yeah, absence was simpler.
Absence. It makes him laugh, a little, because that’s a sterile way to think of something so visceral and violent, but so is calling it a return, or a reprise, or any of the other sanitized PR soundbites he’s been fed by the Counsel.
Imperator had presented it to him like a cat the morning after his ascendance. His first miracle on a silver platter: The Emeritus brothers, reborn. Copia’s power, cemented in blood. Never mind how they died. Never mind that he didn’t ask for any of it in the first place.
When he’d watched them rise at the ritual she’d arranged — when he’d tried his best to not let his Latin falter, and keep his arms steady, and not let naked horror show on his face, and he’d watched them appearing by inches from square stone tombs full of blood, he hadn’t felt like a leader. Watching them shivering and pale and spitting up gore, he mostly just felt like he was going to be sick.
Since then, he hasn’t known how to act around any of them. Primo and Secondo are easy enough to avoid, travelling half the year on some sort of extended sunset clause, but he can’t escape Terzo. They weren’t particularly close, not really, but that never mattered much to Terzo and his bottomless well of charm.
“My favorite Cardinal,” he’d said brightly whenever he saw Copia. He’d said it to all of them, to every crop of newbie Cardinals, swarming at Terzo's ankles like strays, but it didn’t dull the shine. Terzo’s affection was a renewable resource.
He'd brought Copia along on the Meliora tour to help the ghouls with minor charms and backstage work, which had felt like an especially precious feather in his cap. “You’re here to learn,” Terzo had said sternly, then slipped a flask from the band of his slacks for the roadies to share.
They’d gotten drunk together at half a dozen dive bars that fall, in the sticky-floored, gaudy emptiness of Christian America. Somewhere between the filmy backstage curtains and the vinyl booths of roadside diners along the way, Copia felt something wound tight in his chest loosen just a little.
They weren’t friends, but they were friendly. And then he was dead. And Copia mourned him without feeling like he’d done anything to earn his sadness, and then he was back, just like that, leaving Copia and his five stages of grief to drift rudderless, waiting for land.
They don’t exactly make a card for this kind of situation. For the ex-Pope, ex-boss, ex-acquaintance. It’s a little long for a Hallmark aisle.
But life and death and the silvery scar around Terzo’s neck are sober problems, and there’s only so much room in his head when he’s chugging along at half-speed. So Copia tucks it away to review at the normal time, between 3:00 and 4:00 AM.
If it’s still early enough for breakfast, he’ll slink to the dining hall for eggs and toast and coffee in the quietest, darkest corner of the abbey he can find. He’ll have a miserable Sunday, but well, that’s a hangover, isn’t it?
But that’s the strange thing - if he really thinks about it, he doesn’t feel hungover. Not his usual brand of hungover at least, with the migraines and nausea and a deep resentment for being born. He mostly feels off. A little tight around the jaw and behind the eyes, like someone stretched him taut in places that usually have a little more give.
The marble tile is cool under his bare feet as he scrubs at his face and turns on the tap. Terzo doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would have a spare toothbrush, so he daubs some toothpaste on his finger and does his best, staring at the white flecks in the sink, wondering unpleasantly how often Terzo cleans his bathroom.
He’ll get his glasses and his toast, and he’ll get back to his weekend, no thanks to Terzo, who he feels comfortable blaming for everything right now.
Copia spits into the sink. He lathers up his palms with something expensive-smelling that he hopes is supposed to be used on faces and then scrubs himself dry with Terzo’s hand towel. Then, against his better judgment, he spares a glance at the mirror to assess the damage.
He jerks back at the sight of his reflection.
Well. That can’t be right, he thinks, scrunching up his eyes tight. He probably hasn’t fully woken up yet. Maybe he’s still a little drunk from the night before.
He rubs viciously at his eyes with his knuckles, trying to scrape away the vision of what he just saw in the mirror, because it wasn’t his face.
“Okay, what—” Copia says out loud to himself, incorrectly, because, now that he thinks about it, that’s not his voice. His left hand, trembling, outlines cheekbones and wrinkles that feel decidedly unfamiliar, a whole fucking landscape of unmapped ground.
When he opens his eyes, it’s not his reflection looking back at him. It’s Terzo’s.
*
For a brief moment there, when the whole world had tilted, and his hands had white-knuckled around the gaudy brass faucets, and he was an inch away from the slowly draining toothpaste foam in the sink, Copia’s mind was blissfully clear except for the knowledge that everything was well and truly fucked.
He wonders what Imperator would say at his funeral. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn our dear Papa. He died as he always hoped he would: cracking his head and bleeding out on the bathroom tile of his old manager’s tacky nouveau riche ensuite.
So Terzo isn’t sprawled on the kitchen floor after all. He’s not asleep in the soaker tub, or smoking on the balcony in his robe, or swimming naked laps in the lake, because apparently he is Copia, or Copia never existed after all, or, or, or—
His mind locks up and unspools like tape from a jammed cassette. He needs to get out of here. He’s surrounded by Terzo’s furniture, his clothes, his body. He needs to get back to his quarters, right now. He’ll figure out the rest later.
Copia picks a crumpled pair of sweatpants off the floor at random and yanks them on. His own quarters are a ten-minute walk from Terzo’s, but he makes the trip in five, throwing the door open and making a mad dash through the halls, running with legs that feel numb and prickly, hip to toe. It’s an early morning after a late night for most of the Clergy, so the halls and cloisters are mostly empty. Copia’s never been so grateful for a collective hangover in his life.
When he reaches for his key to unlock the very much locked door, he remembers all over again that he’s not himself, and finds himself in the strange position of wishing he were more irresponsible for once.
“Cazzo,” he swears, jiggling the doorknob, pleading to Satan, or Jesus, or whichever minor religious figure happens to be on duty on Fridays at 9:00 AM. “I swear to Lucifer, if you don’t—”
But whatever he was going to say next is lost, because there’s the familiar metal clunking of the heavy lock, and the turning of the polished brass door handle, and the creaking swing of the door, and then his own face is staring back at him.
“How—” Copia starts to say, but the other version of himself is already cutting him off.
“Oh, good,” the other Copia says. He’s grumpy-looking, squinting against the sun with a washcloth held to his forehead, and with the certainty of the key Copia doesn’t have sliding into a lock, he knows it must be Terzo. “I was wondering where I was.”