Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Chapter I: 

Blasphemy, Heresy, Heritage.

The first lie was God. The second was family. And honestly? They deserved each other. Realizing it shouldn’t have felt like relief, but it absolutely did.

Everything I was raised to believe—the Church, the sermons, the woman I was taught to call my mother—it was all a goddamn lie. No thunder from Heaven. No punishment. Just… clarity. Which was somehow worse.

She never felt like family. Didn’t look like me, for starters. Blonde, tightly wound, cold as a crypt—like someone taxidermied a Stepford wife and left her on my doorstep. Not even a shred of resemblance. And that maternal instinct? Absent. I got more affection from stray cats outside the chapel.

Uniforms always. The fuck’s a T-shirt? Even pajamas were regulation-issue like bedtime was another sermon. Never any hugs or anything close. Never explained the mismatch in blood or bone. Just tried to beat obedience into my mouth. 

I knew early. Maybe not consciously, but children recognize when affection has to be rehearsed. I simply didn’t want to believe it. 

By adolescence, we screamed at each other too often for either of us to keep pretending.

I'd needed to believe a real mother wouldn't treat her own flesh—the life she'd created—that poorly.

Maybe when I was younger—pre-double-digits—she faked warmth. But it faded the moment I stopped being the wide-eyed child full of wonder and started asking questions. The moment I stopped nodding along and started talking back.

Faith was supposed to be sacred. A surrender. But all it ever felt like was a bad joke—and the punchline was always me. 

They taught science as proof of divine order and history as a road that inevitably led back to Rome. Questions were welcome so long as the answer remained approved. But we could always trust the Book. Everything worth a damn came from the guy upstairs. All-knowing. All-loving. Except when He wasn’t.

And never talk about the guy below.

Lucifer, the Adversary. The great deceiver. Except the serpent had told them knowledge would change them, and it had. I’d asked why an accurate warning counted as a lie simply because God disliked the outcome. 

She slapped me so hard my teeth rattled like loose change. Left a mark for a week and a permanent reminder she was full of shit. 

Couldn’t bite down right for two days, jaw still fucking clicks.

Cracked knuckles. Bruised shoulders. “Discipline,” she'd said. It wasn’t parenting—it was theater. Broadway for zealots. Fraud, top to bottom. Took me years to find a better word for it.

Honestly? I wasn’t even mad anymore.

Lie. But it was easier to pretend I’d outgrown it than admit I still dreamed about breaking every goddamn stained-glass window in that place.

It explained a lot.

The letter came on a Wednesday.

Plain envelope. Tan paper. Wax seal the color of dried blood—like someone had been LARPing Dracula on a budget. No return address, of course. Just my full name, in heavy-handed cursive. I opened it thinking it was some cult bullshit, maybe an exorcist invite. It didn’t say much. A few lines, a name, a cathedral, a sibling.

‘You were never meant to stay hidden. I am calling you home.’

Pressure gathered beneath my ribs as I read the last line. It eased when I read it again. That was irritating.

Sounded like the kind of dramatic shit my biological mother would pull after abandoning me for thirty-nine years. Guess I came by it honestly.

But it fed a seed I’d already spent years watering—the quiet certainty that I never belonged to the Church that raised me. I told myself I'd never believed the Latin I recited or the dogma I'd choked down for over thirty years. That would've made leaving easier.

Another lie.

I had believed once. Enough to build a life around it. Eventually the words became performance—enunciation, pacing, breath placed exactly where the congregation needed it. I could still mean the comfort without believing the promise. Mean the people without believing the institution standing between them and God.

The institution could burn. The people had never been the problem.

What struck me most—what made me actually pause—was the mention of a twin brother. A mirror in a city I’d never seen. A bloodline and name that belonged to me before this one.

And there was this cathedral. The Ministry.

I already knew the history—or the Vatican's version of it. I'd found the first record years earlier buried beneath centuries of confiscations and ecclesiastical commentary. An original Luciferian temple, built after the Fall. I'd dismissed a portion as a metaphor. Mostly. 

I'd known the modern location for more than a year. Knowing where a place stood and believing it had anything to do with me were very different problems.

The letter erased that distinction.

Tried not to brain-fuck myself over it. Really tried. I filled every spare second with extra blessings, extended counseling sessions, and anyone's crisis but my own. Failed miserably. 

That letter lived in the back of my mind every waking second of the day and followed every hour of sleep I managed to get.

I'd left without ceremony. 

I didn’t run, just vanished. Found a small apartment on the other side of Rome, far enough away that nobody from the Vatican would pass it by accident. A crumbling old thing with peeling paint and creaky floors. Radiator screamed like a demon, pipes bled rust. Place smelled like mildew had fucked an ashtray. But hey, it was mine. Fitting, really.

Quiet. Secular. Anonymous. Terrifying.

I didn’t bring much. One suitcase, a half-dead plant, and a stack of library books tall enough to dislocate my spine. The librarian gave me a look. I ignored it.

Nobody on this side of the city knew me as Father. It was the first time in my life I didn’t feel the looming shadow of some invisible God breathing down my neck. No candles. No crosses. No whispers about ankle-bearing harlots. Just silence and the dull hum of city noise leaking through cracked windows.

Silence was worse than sermons, so I drowned it in noise. Bootleg Ministry recordings. Hymns. Occult sermons. Sermon remixes, because apparently blasphemy benefited from a bass drop. I downloaded PDFs of doctrines, ritual breakdowns, fan forums. I even printed photos of every Papa who came before—these dark priests they dressed like royalty and worshipped like rock stars.

Every single one of them had my eyes. That was the problem.

The same fucked-up, mismatched stare. Left one pale as snow. Right one stormy—greens or blues or somewhere in between. That’s when it got under my skin. I wasn’t just interested. I was haunted. It was like the woman knew I'd get sucked in after reading her letter. Knew she didn't have to include much. I'd do the digging for her.

I printed them all.

Papa Nihil. Primo. Secondo. Terzo. Thanks to the very unhinged fanbase for the aesthetic folders. Nihil looked like he crawled out of a coffin lined with cocaine. Primo, Secondo, Terzo—each one a different brand of deranged aristocrat.

I compared bone structure. Eyebrow shapes. Smile lines. They were lean, like me. Slender. Sinewy. They looked like ghosts dressed in silk—regal and fucked up.

And Copia. I focused on him through old footage of when he was a Cardinal, to performances in front of thousands as Papa IV. The twin brother I didn’t know I had. A jester, a puppet, a man who survived. 

Why was he kept in the family while I was treated like the redheaded stepchild? Was it a random pick, or did Mother favor him from the beginning? What made him worth keeping?

My jaw clicked when I clenched it. I shut the footage off. Opened it again ten minutes later.

The Sisters of Sin wore varying degrees of dark makeup and unnatural lip color over relatively normal habits. Brothers wore black cassocks. Cardinals, red. Acolytes looked almost Catholic if I ignored the inverted crosses. 

All the men painted black around their eyes until the sockets looked hollowed out. Strange. Dramatic. Cool in a goth way. I caught myself wondering what my white eye would look like surrounded by black. Whether the face in the mirror would finally resemble the ones on the wall.

Those caught on camera that worked there without being immersed in the ranks wore sharp black suits and these pins with upside down crosses—Grucifix? Something like that. No makeup, though. 

I was going to live among these people. Day in and day out. I had to assume the structure resembled the Church that raised me. Every institution liked pretending its hierarchy was unique.

And then there were the Ghouls.

At first, I thought they were a joke. Not demons themselves—I'd learned better than to dismiss those outright—but the idea that someone summoned infernal beings and handed them instruments. That sounded like marketing. Except they moved like the real things.

Were they demons? Spirits? People playing a role too well? Had someone actually dragged infernal creatures through a portal and forced them to learn guitar?

Then I found this whole Instagram page dedicated to them being ‘unmasked’. Years of them. Previous Ghouls, current ones, a few pictures of the ones that just kept up with the damned lawn.

How the fuck were they all so hot? Statistically, one of them should’ve been ugly, but nope—six-pack demons shredding guitars and banging drums like it was foreplay. I couldn’t stop watching them. Their Rituals, their chemistry, the madness they stirred in the crowd. It was like seeing Elvis in the ‘60s—hip thrusts, crude gestures, every movement loose and natural while fans practically frothed at the mouth.

Absurdly sexualized and yet… comfortable. Each one of them was unbelievably comfortable in their own skin. No invisible authority pressing down from above. No shame attached to every movement. Nobody telling them exactly what a body was permitted to mean. 

It didn't look like a religion. It looked like a cult made of silk, blood, and basslines.

Still. I took it seriously. If I was cursed by this lineage, I was going to learn the terms. I took notes in a stolen missal. Thick leather-bound, gold-foiled, still very much Vatican property. Whoops. That'll get me excommunicated twice.

I sat on my bed cross-legged like a scholar in Hell. The only sounds in that decaying cubicle of an apartment were the whine of my laptop fan trying not to die and the occasional scratch of pen against paper. I called it home for ten months by then. Maybe eleven. I'd stopped counting once the days quit meaning anything. Didn't matter how shitty it was. It was mine.

I'd turned the only wall without a window into a family tree and timeline. Pictures tacked into peeling plaster, lengths of string tying one era to the next. A red-string murder board for ecclesiastical reclamation. 

Notes, translations, and dusty books on obscure Satanic sects covered my bed and every flat surface I owned. Hymn structures occupied an entirely separate pile because apparently I had standards. Printed scores sat beneath the recordings. I understood more of them than I had as a kid—higher, lower, repeat, rest, enough familiar symbols to bluff the rest. The recordings were faster. I listened once and stopped pretending the paper mattered.

Sigils, shit about candles, summoning circles. Incident reports and descriptions that were grotesque enough to border comedy. That might've been insomnia talking.

Okay, maybe the Ghouls really were summoned—or maybe some horny nun just got creative with her candles. 

Either way, I bought it. Half of it sounded fake as Hell, the other half sounded like a dream someone buried under decades of guilt.

I sat there in the center of it all for hours. Days. Weeks. Ashtray overflowing. Fingers stained with ink and nicotine. Same six bars looping until the laptop speakers distorted them into static. I mouthed the words until they felt less like blasphemy and more like muscle memory.

Mental health? Somewhere between dissociation and compulsive productivity. Therapy? Yeah, probably. Not exactly gonna spill my guts to some asshole with a leather chair and a diploma they got from a cereal box. ‘Tell me about your mother.’ Sure—right after you explain how the High Matriarch of Satan’s favorite boyband left me at a fucking daycare run by sadists.

So what did I do instead? Tattoos. A fucking lot of them. My skin used to belong to Them. Now it was mine. Felt more honest that way. 

Mine to mark, scar, defile. And I liked it. Things I’d been sketching for years—sigils, ruined saints, anatomical studies, beasts with too many joints and angels with too few faces. Scripture pulled apart and rebuilt into something honest. Things drawn in margins and notebooks never meant for anybody else’s hands. Images I’d carved into my own mind long before I put them into skin.

It was both a declaration and a denial. A rejection of the old life. A sacred defilement of the temple I’d once been told to guard. They always said the body was a vessel for the divine. Now?

Mine was a canvas for the profane.

I started simple. My spine first—vertebrae rendered over my own, Latin heresies worked beneath the bones. Words I could actually mean now. My ribs came next: a Jacob sheep emerging from blurred black-and-grey wool, too many horns curling around handwritten variations of Lilith’s name and those of the archdevils. Seemed fitting. ‘Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?’

One shoulder became a cathedral overgrown with horns, runes, and nightshade. The other held its twin burning from the inside out. Elsewhere came carrion moths, split reliquaries, an eyeless angel opening its own rib cage, saints decomposing beneath intact halos. Hands reaching from disturbed earth. Teeth where teeth had no business growing. Nothing conventionally Satanic enough to explain away the rest of it. Just dark enough that anyone who looked too closely might decide they’d rather not ask.

My hands? Not yet. I still needed them functional, and losing one to swelling for a week sounded inconvenient as fuck.

All black-and-grey photorealism and blackwork, of course. Had to make the images look like they’d crawled out of my own skin.

It hurt. Obviously. It was supposed to. I liked that part.

There was something so brutally real about the pain. A grounding I hadn’t felt since I fled the center of everything that had ever owned me. A reminder that I still had a body, that I existed. Pain was clean. Simple. No sermons, no hymns, no guilt attached, just needles digging honesty into me.

For most of that year, some part of my flesh was screaming. I was relatively sensible about it—one region at a time, enough healing between sessions to keep the artists from threatening me. Opposite leg, opposite arm. Lower back. Chest. Throat—that one sucked. I rotated around my own body like a half-charred spit roast until most of it was covered. Artfully. Intentionally.

The guys at the shop loved me. Said I had the pain tolerance of a brick wall and the aesthetic sense of a 19th-century Satanic aristocrat on acid. Must've got that from dad. I sat like a corpse and tipped like a sinner. Fair trade. Everybody won.

I slept through half the sessions. Drank with them through parts of the others. It made me bleed enough that they had to wipe twice before pulling a clean line, which earned me a few creative insults but never stopped anybody. We did shots afterward when we were pretending to be responsible. 

One guy choked up after doing the piece that wrapped around toward my throat. Said he’d never tattooed someone who looked more like the thing he was drawing. Took it as a compliment.

Material things. They don’t come with you when you die, but they help you remember you’re alive. The tattoos weren’t just rebellion. They were ritual. They were mine. I was no longer a vessel of silence. No longer the clean-cut, buttoned-up ideal son of a Church I didn’t believe in. I was loud. Marked. Mortal and mythic. Baroque as Hell. And most importantly—finally free. Or close enough.

Still startled me on occasion when I caught sight of myself in the mirror and forgot they were there. Par for the course. Thirty-nine years of reflection didn't disappear because I'd covered it in ink. Deserved.

The phone rang on a Tuesday. Unknown number. California, I thought. 626 area code. I'd already let it ring three times that week.

That day, I was either tired of it or giving in to curiosity. Sue me. I answered on the last trill and said nothing. 

Silence stretched for a second too long. Then: “Is this… Perpetua?”

Oh. That. Right. The name. Latin form of eternity. Dramatic, pretentious, probably accurate. 

“...Who the fuck is asking?”

“You sound like a prick already, sai?” the voice said, a little breathless.

“You sound like someone who accidentally dialed a hitman,” I replied, dry.

“Ah. Sì, actually—no, this makes sense.” Nervous. Italian. Male.

I blinked. “You’re Copia.” 

I didn’t know what to feel. I think I was angry. I think I was relieved. Same thing, some days.

“Ah—sì. Yes. Scusami.” He laughed, quiet and nervous. “I should have begun with this, no?”

“Generally how introductions work, yeah.”

He laughed, like I’d just made a good-natured joke, which irritated me more than if he’d snapped back. Great. My twin’s a golden retriever. Shoot me now.

“I have been trying for days to understand how to make this call,” he admitted. “Is it not every day someone drops a brother into your lap, capisci?”

“Twin,” I corrected automatically. “Let’s not shortchange the drama.”

“Ah, sì. Gemelli. Fraternal.” He breathed another nervous laugh. “Same mother. Different… eh, flavor of spiritual trauma.”

He had a sense of humor. Or trauma had given him one. Either way, I didn’t trust it. 

“So,” I muttered, leaning back into my bed, “what’s this? A formal invitation? A warning? A veiled threat from one of Mother's lesser chess pieces?”

There was a pause. “She told you this?”

“She wrote. I read. A very dramatic letter, by the way. Made me feel like I should’ve opened it in Latin.”

“Eh. She is good at dramatic,” he muttered. “This you will learn.”

“I won’t,” I said. “But I appreciate the delusion.”

Another pause. 

“You must come to the Ministry,” he said, softer. “Presto. Soon.”

That part, I had expected. The dread still settled like dust in my throat. “Why?”

“They need you to take the mantle of Papa. It is not optional.”

A solid heartbeat of silence. Pressure cinched once beneath my ribs. Not pain. Agreement. Traitor.

“You don’t even know me,” I countered.

“I do not have to know everything about you.” He said it too quickly. Too quietly, like maybe he was still trying to convince himself, too. “You are blood. For them, apparently, this is enough.”

That apparently did a lot of heavy lifting.

I stared at the candle flickering on the cracked ceramic dish beside me. The flame bent toward me despite the closed windows, like it was listening. Nosy bastard. Should’ve been my first sign. 

“And what, exactly,” I asked, “do you need me for?”

“We go public with a new era soon. They want a storm, not a whisper. In two weeks, I need hymns. By the end of the month, videos. A presence.” Papers shifted on his end. “I have already told the Ghouls they are helping.”

“You’re assembling a cult and need a frontman.”

“Madonna, do not make it sound cheap.”

“I didn’t. Cults are expensive.”

He laughed again. I didn’t. Definitely a jester.

“And I assume there’s a dress code?”

Copia hesitated, then mumbled something about robes, ceremonial attire, and ‘symbolic echoes of the Papas before you,’ with enough Italian tangled through the explanation that I caught only the threatening parts.

“I have none of that,” I said. “I own a suit. And a silver jacket I wore once to piss off a bishop.” Got me uninvited from the gala. Worth it.

“Perfetto. Then prepare your face. The paint, sì? Begin there. The Ghouls will collect you when you arrive in America.”

Of course it was ‘perfect’. He gave me the address, but I didn't write it down. I’d already memorized it. I’d had months. A year, if I was honest. 

As I hung up, I stared at the flame again, watching it tremble under its own breath.

“…Guess I’m about to play house with the Devil,” I muttered to the empty room. 

I faked a lot of things in my life. I could fake belonging. I always had.

This time would just be louder.

When I’d finally burnt myself out taking notes, counting bars under my breath, and mumbling call-and-response verses into the voice recorder, I decided I needed a break. No—fuck that, I deserved one. 

My reward? Locking myself in the bathroom with a shitty broken mirror, a cigarette, and an array of paints I didn’t exactly purchase with dignity.

I saw a photo—grainy, black-and-white. Terzo, standing in front of a crowd. Terzo, I think. Everyone was screaming for him. Not at him. For him. And I thought, just for a second, what the fuck would that feel like?

I didn’t even bother going to a costume shop like a normal person. Just clicked through the first ten Amazon listings that didn’t look like they’d give me a staph infection and read the reviews like I was preparing for open-heart surgery. ‘Water-resistant’, ‘full coverage’, ‘may cause mild irritation’—perfect.

I plopped down on the closed toilet lid with my supplies like I was some medieval war general planning face paint before battle. Popped the cig between my lips. Lit it. Shook the first little tube of white paint like it had wronged me. Which felt increasingly likely.

“Alright,” I sighed, dragging smoke down into my lungs as I glared at my own reflection. “Aesthetic corpse. I can do that.”

Even my jokes sound like prayers now. I was learning how to wear damnation well.

It was a weird thing to say out loud. I’d never even done Halloween. Ever. Not even during the years I hovered around the Italian punk scene, where everyone wore eyeliner and deadpan smirks like a uniform. I'd always hated the idea of pretending to be something else. The Church didn't tolerate that Satanic behavior.

But this? This wasn’t pretending. This was… becoming. Or some poetic shit like that.

Attempt one: Casper after three lines of coke. A disaster. Too much white. I looked like an extra from a low-budget Kabuki play or a sick Victorian ghost. Uncle Primo, but make it worse.

Uncle was still a weird one to get around, too.

Scrubbed it off. Tried again. Attempt two dubbed: coal miner funeral. This time layered black over my eyes and jaw. Looked like someone punched me.

Attempt three: I lost track of myself somewhere between blackening my eyes and dragging white across my mouth. When I looked properly again, something almost familiar was staring back. The pressure behind my skull had gone quiet. Apparently that meant approval.

I got pissed. Slapped white back on, slapped black over it. Paint was getting into my hairline, my ears, my soul. Bathroom looked like a crime scene. 

The skin beneath my eyes had gone hot and tight. Probably a warning. I treated it like a suggestion. I didn’t stop. That’s the price of learning, right? Or pain. Or desperation. Pick your poison.

I eventually landed on something—minimal, intense. Just black at the hollows of my skull, faded around the outer parts of my face, white ghosting around my mouth and chin, like my teeth had been dug up from the dirt. Neck black too, faded on the sides. Lips painted black. I added little spikes under my nose and along the edge of my bottom lip at the last second, like… fangs—maybe? Or maybe just vibe.

Grabbed the half-skull mask I'd found online and worked Rub ‘n Buff over until it was silver. That saved the look, definitely, when it was strapped over my head.

Snapped a picture so I wouldn’t forget what the Hell I’d done. Stared at it. Zoomed in. Zoomed out. Glared at the little demon on the screen like it had called me a slur. Looked less like a Papa, more like a half-assed ghost in greasepaint. Regal? Not yet. Fucked up? At least I nailed that part.

Then I walked around my apartment with the paint still on, like a man testing body armor. Sat on the couch. Cooked. Took a piss. Glared at the letter from Mother. Opened the door to yell at my neighbor for leaving wet laundry in the washer again. She looked at me, corpse paint, cigarette, half mask, and just shrugged. Either she was desensitized or she was planning my murder. Jury’s out. Fair odds either way.

But the paint held. The listing claimed it could last up to seven days if applied properly. I only needed it to survive one night without it migrating onto everything I touched. 

Slept in it. Woke up. Still intact. Science. 

Sweating would definitely fuck with it. So would my increasingly irritated skin. But a quiet night and some careful touch-ups? It’d work.

Once I had that figured out, I dropped back into writing with a vengeance. Needed at least two hymns to show the Sister and my brother. That was the minimum I'd assigned myself. That was the deal. 

Lyrics covered loose pages. Chord changes lived in the voice recorder because writing them down properly would've taken longer than playing them again.

Naturally, I landed on three I was too obsessed with to edit and six more that were this close to something real. Which was annoying.

A whole fucking album, basically.

Most of it lived in recordings rather than notation—melodies hummed into the phone, chord changes played once and remembered, bar counts scratched into paper when I needed them. Faster that way.

My blood was on those pages—literally, in one case, after I cut my thumb on a broken guitar string.

If I was gonna be their Papa, I wasn’t showing up half-finished. Not a whisper. Not a fraud. 

A goddamn requiem in flesh.

By then, I’d already given them half my body. One more piece before I ran off to join the Devil’s cosplay routine seemed only fair. Finding another tattooist to match a style was a bitch to begin with, but doing that in another country? Yeah, fuck that. Trust was harder than pain.

I wasn’t about to audition a new needle jockey. This place already knew my pain tolerance and my taste in blasphemy.

They didn’t ask questions. Didn’t care where I came from, what I used to wear, or why half my sessions ended with a blood-sugar crash, a fistful of gummy candy shoved into my hand, and three tequila shots after the needle stopped. Just that I tipped well, sat still, and let them go feral on designing religious blasphemy like I was building a stained-glass window across my ribs.

It’s funny. They wanted my face, my name, my blood. The Church always did. But this? This ink? This is mine. Nobody got to vote on it.

That day, we were continuing the piece across my back, carrying the cathedral’s ruined foundations over my right hip and down the back of my thigh. Something big, mostly blackwork and fine-line detail, the kind of shit that required several appointments and an unreasonable commitment to lying facedown.

I didn’t ask questions when the artist said “Mind if my apprentice sits in to observe today?” Didn’t even blink. Apprentices had watched before. Sometimes they learned a technique. Sometimes they learned that human skin twitched even when the bastard attached to it refused to.

What I didn’t expect was her. 

Halfway through hour two—one arm half numb, hip beginning to ache, mouth dry from breathing through the face cradle—I heard her voice behind me say: “Wait. I know that voice. You’re the guy who yelled at me about leaving my bedsheets in the dryer!”

The needle didn’t stop. But my whole body did. 

The artist clicked his tongue when the muscles across my back tightened under the needle. “Don’t move.”

“Take it up with communal laundry,” I muttered.

I turned my head to the side, squinted back over my shoulder, and yep. Sure as shit—Ms. That’s not how the communal laundry works, standing there in horror, holding a sketchbook like a shield. Poor thing looked seconds from evacuation. Apparently, recognizing a neighbor while someone was driving needles into his bare ass-adjacent anatomy complicated workplace professionalism.

She blushed so hard it looked like she was the one being interrogated. “I mean—I wasn’t watching you or anything—God, I just—I didn’t know it was you—I just remember your voice from the laundry room and I—oh my God—”

“You can stop invoking management. He’s not taking this call,” I muttered under my breath. Then, louder, “Relax, sweetheart. If I was gonna smite you, you wouldn’t get a warning.”

She looked like she was about to melt through the floor. I watched it hit her—exactly what I looked like without all the layers, with an inverted cathedral consuming most of my spine, its foundations breaking apart across my lower back, and a saint’s halo cracked disappearing beneath my hairline.

Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Then the audacity: “…You’re actually kind of hot when you’re not yelling.”

I lifted an eyebrow. Bold strategy. Poor woman never had a chance. She said it like I’d been auditioning for ugliest bastard alive and just lost the crown. “You’ve got a shocking lack of self-preservation.”

She nodded, chewing her lip. “Yeah. That’s fair.”

A beat. I lowered my head back into the cradle, smirking. “You free Thursday?”

She squeaked. The artist snorted. Somewhere beneath my ribs, pressure curled with dry amusement. Oh, shut up. It didn’t.

The rest of the session passed in awkward silence, but I didn’t mind. She’d recover. Probably. If not? Her loss. My gain. Seemed fair. 

And my back looked fucking incredible. Priorities.

Thursday came. So did she.

I wore a loose black shirt because half my back was still furious, and she kept forgetting not to put her hands against it. She was cute, fine. A little too much lip gloss, a little too many questions about my eyeliner leftover from scrubbing paint off my face, but it had been awhile, I still possessed functioning anatomy, and celibacy was no longer anyone’s concern but mine. We had drinks. You can fill in the rest.

It was casual. She was ten years younger and didn’t care who I was or where I came from. Look, she wasn’t Ms. Right. She wasn’t even Ms. Two-Night. More like Ms. Thanks for Letting Me Borrow Your Record Player While I Smoked Your Cigarettes. Just liked the look of me. Said I reminded her of some rock star she couldn’t remember the name of. Something about the eyes. They always came back to the eyes. That and the weird calm when I wasn’t talking. Figures.

People mistook silence for peace constantly. Not my problem.

She smoked cigarettes and played records on a busted old stereo that made everything sound like it was underwater. I fixed the left speaker by kicking it once. She called that impressive. Standards were collapsing everywhere. 

She kissed hard, rough, like she didn’t know if she wanted to make out or pick a fight. I let her trace the tattoos on my chest with her nails and didn’t correct her when she asked what they meant. She didn’t really want answers. Just wanted to feel cool for a night. I got it. Simpler that way. Questions were only dangerous when someone cared about the answers.

I was leaving a few days later anyway. Slipped a note under her door. ‘Thanks for the vinyl and the bruises.’

She posted a picture of us on Instagram a week later. Cropped her own face out. Caption said, 🖤 the devil you know 🖤.

Didn’t comment. Just kept moving. I didn’t like that it wasn’t true. I considered asking her to delete it. My face was turned far enough that my left eye caught most of the light and the rest looked like shadow. No collar. No Vatican. No name. I left it alone.

She didn’t know me. Not this one. Nobody did yet.

Maybe I liked it because of that.

Late one night, after a whiskey-fueled performance of Secondo’s old shit and a few of my new ones, I checked the calendar on my phone. Shirt open, cigarette burning itself out in the ashtray, one boot planted on a chair like the apartment owed me an encore. The dead plants in my living room remained unmoved.

Reality. Sobering. Like a cold slap to the face from Lucifer himself. I had to pack tomorrow.

And in less than a month, I’d be setting foot into that place. The Ministry. The fucking gothic Disneyland I’d heard so much about. A place full of rules, ghosts, shadows, secrets.

Pressure settled faintly at the base of my skull. Not pushing this time. Pulling.

The sensation had become more distinct since I booked the flight. Whenever I thought about canceling, it tightened. Whenever I pictured the address Copia gave me, it eased. I’d started interpreting that as encouragement.

That was probably stupid.

Where the fuck was I going to get robes made?

Packing was easy. I didn’t own shit. At eighteen, everything I owned had fit into one case and a wooden box. Two decades later, I’d expanded to two bags and several regrettable jackets. Growth.

Made moving easier. The kind of lifestyle where you stayed up for days writing, fueled by coffee and existential dread, didn’t really breed much clutter. Clutter meant buying things. I mostly bought cigarettes, records, ink, and increasingly questionable decisions. Just scraps of lyrics, clothes that smelled like smoke and whiskey, and a few thrifted jackets that gave me the illusion of style.

That was easy to do when Italy was filled with secondhand clothes from companies too pretentious to admit normal people breathed the same air as their customers.

I threw three pairs of black jeans into a bag like that would cover the full spectrum of occasions I might encounter as a Pope. Papa. Whatever. I’d spent a lifetime in cassocks. A fitted suit felt like cosplay for a character I hadn’t met yet.

Half the suitcase was black, the other half darker black. Revolutionary wardrobe choices. Fashion week at Satan’s thrift store. I tossed in the silver jacket for good measure—because if I was going to bullshit through this, at least I’d do it in something that reflected stage lights. No robes yet, no plan. Just suit, jacket, and that slow-simmering urge to set the Vatican ablaze through a bassline. 

It’d already offended one bishop. Maybe it could become ecumenical.

The mask stayed wrapped in an old shirt, wedged safely between my boots like it might escape. I checked it twice. Not because it was fragile. Because looking at it still gave me the disorienting impression that I’d uncovered my own face rather than made one.

I considered packing the stage makeup, then paused. No. I’d bring the final version, the one that didn’t itch like a bitch or turn me into a crusty ghost mid-set. The cheap stuff could stay where it belonged—under my sink, beside all the other evidence of past mistakes.

I’d traveled before on Church documents and an Italian passport. This was the first time neither the Vatican nor an assignment expected me back.

The flight was one-way. I checked the confirmation three times. No return date. No return seat. No administrative assumption that I’d come back when the work ended.

That felt symbolic, but mostly it was cheap.

The Ministry was still a few towns away, but I didn’t go straight there. Needed a buffer zone. Somewhere to breathe. Think. Decide whether this was genius or madness—or whether it mattered at all.

Mostly, I didn’t want to walk off a platform smelling like commuter sweat and immediately fall into the arms of Satan’s secretarial staff.

So I found a hotel. I didn’t want polished marble or cold conference lighting. I didn’t even look at the nice hotels. Not one of those polished glass things with white sheets and no personality. I found a dive—big and bland enough to disappear in.

Lobby smelled like lemon cleanser and something vaguely fungal. The receptionist barely looked at the name I gave her. Good. I’d chosen it somewhere between the station and the parking lot and still wasn’t sure I’d answer if she called it across the lobby.

The room was small, yellowed, with curtains that hadn’t been opened since the Bush administration. Perfect. No crucifixes, no inspirational landscapes, no stern woman in an oil painting monitoring whether I touched myself. Just mildew and cheap wallpaper. I could breathe. 

Didn’t feel like something I had to choke down. It felt… human. And right now, I needed that. Somewhere Godless to gather myself. Or pretend to.

The pressure under my ribs eased once I locked the door. Apparently even the divine summons respected check-in.

I didn’t sleep.

I sat up in bed, guitar on my knee, mumbling hymn fragments under my breath and trying to hammer together enough to present something when the reckoning came. Something about fire. Wrath. A kiss-off to every man who ever wagged a finger in my face in the name of God. Just vibes and fury. I didn’t even write anything down.

By the time I switched to the bass, I still hadn’t written anything down. I’d just finished tuning it in my lap when someone knocked. 

Not a polite knock either. A fuck-you knock. Two solid hits to the door, one short punch after, like punctuation.

I frowned. I hadn’t ordered anything. Didn’t know anyone. And Satan’s emissaries didn’t usually knock unless it was ritualistic. I thought. I half-expected it to be a priest, a cop, or Lucifer Himself. Either way, I was about to swing first and ask questions later. I ripped the door open, ready.

A guy leaned against the frame—leather jacket, long brown hair, mustache, and the smug look of someone who got into trouble just to stay warm. A white guitar pick flipped over his knuckles, vanished, then appeared between two fingers. Pale hazel eyes dragged over me once. Sharp. Appraising. Dangerous only if you were made of common sense. 

“Who the fuck are you?”

He smirked. “Your lead guitarist. Congrats, asshole.”

I blinked. I was expecting Satan, not someone in a leather jacket and a judgmental jawline. “You’re a what?”

“Guitarist. Lead. Band.” He tilted his head, chewing gum like it was a dare. “Papa’s band, remember? You.”

“No one told me I had a band.” No one told me they arrived looking like real fucking people. Thought they came in smoke machines. 

I knew there was a band. I’d watched them behind three different Papas often enough to recognize the way they moved beneath the masks. I just hadn’t expected one to turn up alone in a leather jacket, flipping a guitar pick at me like Satan had outsourced recruitment to a dive bar.

“Ghouls. You’ve got ’em. We’re real. Surprise.” The pick vanished between his fingers. “Sodo.”

I recognized that one. Some nickname the fans had attached to the lead guitarist and repeated until everyone treated it like fact. Apparently he found it funny enough to use.

“The rest’ll be here in about fifteen,” he continued, like there wasn’t an active war in my skull.

I stepped back into the room and gestured. “You wanna come in and act like that?”

He was already past me before I finished the gesture, door kicked closed behind him. One second at the threshold, the next halfway across the room. I decided exhaustion had skipped a few frames.

He looked around like a cat casing the place, then flopped down on the bed with no regard for the state of the sheets. “So,” he said, “you write anything that doesn’t suck?”

I had written. A lot. I hadn’t notated shit, but most of an album lived somewhere between my frontal lobe and the last dregs of nicotine in my bloodstream. Lyrics. Cadence, tempo, guitar breaks. I knew every piece of it, even if I couldn’t hand them a sheet. But he was already poking through my gear like we’d known each other for years, not waiting for an answer. Or already expecting a certain one.

Sure enough—fifteen minutes later, the room exploded. Privacy died instantly. “Six-eleven, right? You got the new guy? He’s got our demo?”

More people. More flesh and blood Ghouls.

Every one of them looked offensively put together for people hauling equipment through a fungal hotel before noon. Not polished, just unfair. Bone structure, eyes, movement—all of it half a degree too deliberate until they forgot to perform normal and someone’s head snapped toward a sound too quickly.

Their eyes caught the miserable overhead light like animals beside a road. Right. Normal musicians. Sure.

Six more bodies followed into my room. Instruments, cables, cases. An amp balanced on a luggage rack. A keyboard where my duffel bag used to be. They didn’t feel summoned. They felt inevitable. Like the universe was in on the joke, and I was the punchline in corpse paint.

The tallest carried enough of a drum kit to qualify as structural support and said nothing. Another came in behind him humming under his breath, bass case in one hand, coffee in the other. A mustached man announced that the lobby clerk had invited him upstairs personally—a claim immediately disputed by everyone who’d witnessed the interaction. 

Then two women swept in around them: one already talking to the keyboard case like it had inconvenienced her, the other quietly untangling a cord she’d somehow acquired between the elevator and my door. Last came a narrow bastard with light brown eyes and the alert, delighted expression of something that had just found an unlocked pantry. 

They kept coming like it was a frat house and I'd somehow rented the common room.

Without the masks, I didn’t know their faces. The bodies were another matter. The tallest one had the same impossible reach behind a drum kit. The bassist carried himself with the same loose quiet I’d watched beside Copia. Shapes I knew from stage lights, abruptly given skin.

“Is this a real hotel?” One woman asked, looking around like she expected to be haunted.

“Dunno,” mumbled the goliath setting down the bass drum. “Kinda smells like regret.”

Sodo jerked his thumb at me. “This is our new Papa.”

They talked fast, called out to each other mid-sentence.

“Damn.” the light-brown-eyed one looked me over. “He’s kinda short.”

That caught my ear. Short? Bitch, I’m stage-sized. Ask Freddie Mercury. I was the same fucking height as three previous Papas too, goddamnit. National average as far as America was concerned.

I glared before I corrected it. “I will sacrifice you to Satan… and not in the fun way.” Didn’t know where that came from. Seemed popular, though. Felt right.

“Oh, I like him.” The blonde woman said. “He’s got the spirit already.”

“Fuckin’ A. I've seen enough. See you tomorrow then,” the tall mustached one announced, already turning toward the door.

“We haven’t met him yet,” the bassist said.

“I’ve met enough.”

“Tomorrow where? Here? Outside? The fucking Ministry?”

No one answered. 

Apparently that was the dismissal. Half of them started filing back into the hall, carrying none of the things they'd brought in.

Tall-mustache disappeared into the hall. The giant followed without taking the bass drum. I stared at it. “Is he coming back for that?”

Someone answered. Or they all answered at once, which might’ve been worse.

I stared at the door for a minute. Then at the half of a drum kit set up at the foot of my bed. Instruments, cables, cases, and enough portable recording equipment to turn my mildew box into a felony against acoustics.

…Were they planning to actually record here? Good God, I hoped not. Just go to sleep. Maybe they'd be gone when I woke up.

The next morning, they came back. Of course they did. Loud knock, louder voices, enough additional equipment shoved through the lobby to finally make the receptionist request an explanation. 

Tall mustache gave her one. It involved a Christian youth retreat, two missing choir directors, and a regional handbell competition.

We were asked to leave by eight-fifteen.

By nine, they had me inside a rented rehearsal room above an auto shop, which was apparently where this meeting had always been intended to happen. Useful information. Would've been more useful yesterday.

They were chaos in human form, smelling like weed and breakfast burritos, and somehow made it work. They clicked into each other with the casual ease of real musicians, like they’d been doing this longer than I’d been breathing. No sheet music, no preamble, just—boom—band. 

Kinda neat. I’d give it that. Never had been this close to a band before.

I gave them the gist when prompted. The big one found a rhythm in the first thing I tapped against the windowsill and built bones beneath it. The bassist caught the beat before I finished humming it. Sodo argued with the guitar break, played it louder, then admitted I’d been right without using any words that resembled an apology.

The dark-haired woman found the synth rise by feel after I  hummed. The other corrected the shape under it, gentle enough that the first woman only glared for three seconds. Tall mustache tried percussion, backing vocals, and someone else’s guitar before anyone told him to pick a fucking station. The other guitarist heard the unfinished space between Sodo’s lead and the bassist and shoved rhythm into it like he’d been invited.

They watched me. Listened, even.

I waited for someone to interrupt. No one did. Strange.

Sodo kept nodding. The keyboardist made a few quiet adjustments. One of them commandeered my guitar. Another stole the bass and tested the progression I’d been trying to explain.

“You’re not bad,” someone muttered. “This could be something.”

“Eighties glam rock.” The wavy-haired guitarist looked delighted. “Here for it.”

I’d barely muttered three half-dead metaphors, and they turned it into a fucking psalm. Meanwhile, I was still trying to remember what day it was.

The lighter-haired woman commandeered the tiny writing desk and covered a page in marks that looked professionally hostile. When she finished, she handed it to me.

I stared at it. Bars. Notes. Time signatures. My music, allegedly, dressed like it had a job interview and a mortgage. Weirdly sobering, like I had done this on purpose. “That’s what you did?”

“That’s what you did.”

“Could’ve drawn a fucking map.”

Her mouth twitched. “You don’t read music.”

“I read music fine. This is paperwork.”

She took the page back without laughing at me. “Play it again.”

I did. She followed every change with the tip of her pencil. Hard to ignore something when somebody else took it seriously.

Onstage, Ghouls were masks. Fog. Smoke and fire shaped around instruments. Even the so-called unmasked photographs online made them feel like performers who disappeared when the lights went down. 

These assholes stole my cigarettes, argued over chord progressions, and left a bass drum in my hotel room. 

Somehow, that was stranger. 

But they played what I hummed, took what I offered, and made it better. And I just stood there in the corner of the room, jacket half on, brain trying to calculate when the gimmick had stopped being a gimmick and become my fucking life.

I assumed I was supposed to be a mask. A myth. Something impressive enough to distract from the machinery. Instead—I was in a suit. Above a garage. With a full band tuning up to the sound of my hymns. And I realized—fuck me sideways with a censer—I’m actually in a fucking band. Apparently this isn’t a fever dream. 

Forty years of priests telling me rock was Satan’s foreplay, and here I was, leading the orgy. The Papa-Pope of a circus of heathens.

They didn’t even hesitate. They took up the space like it was theirs. Maybe it was.

Once they all left, I actually slept. Not well, but it counted. More than I'd gotten lately.

I woke the following morning sideways on the couch, neck aching beneath the hotel’s dingy yellow light. Or maybe from hunching over my notebook all day trying to transcribe notes I never wrote down in the first place. The room still smelled like guitar strings, smoke, and cheap pizza. 

Coffee from yesterday was cold and bitter. Left it on the nightstand like a dumbass and nearly knocked it over trying to slap at my phone. Missed. Hit the lamp instead. Got it on the second try. The screen hurt my eyes.

[email protected] → [email protected]
Subject line: The Hour Is Upon You.

Simple, dramatic, and yet somehow still completely dry. I unlocked it.

She’s gone. You’ll need to come in.

That was it. No name, no goodbye, just Copia’s signature line at the bottom like he was signing off a grocery list. I stared at the screen for a full minute. 

Scrolled down. Nope—nothing else. Then back up again. I even checked the sender like it might be fake. Nope. Real. Somehow he’d gotten my email. Probably sold my soul to Google like the rest of us.

The woman who’d sent the letter was gone. The throne had been hers. Now it was empty.

I’d expected something… louder. Flashier. A phone call, a blood moon. Thunder rumbling across the cobblestones—something that sounded like God weeping into his coffee. Instead, it was Helvetica and an early morning guilt trip. Not even bolded. Just Helvetica. Guess that’s what the apocalypse looks like in Gmail.

There was a strange ache in my chest, but no room to feel it. Just a low fog rolling in across the sternum, setting up camp and pretending it had always been there. Never met her. Apparently that administrative oversight was permanent now. She’d found me, summoned me across an ocean, then died before I could ask what the fuck she thought she was doing. Efficient woman. Barely even knew she existed before kicking the bucket.

I put the phone down. Picked it up again. Read the email once more as though another sentence might appear if I annoyed it long enough.

Nothing. My throat tightened. I swallowed until I could pretend it wasn't noticeable.

Then I got up, shoved my hand through my hair, and paced the room like that would make sense of anything. Dodged cords and abandoned instruments like they were goddamn landmines. Almost went down face-first thanks to someone’s wah pedal. Fucking hazard.

I didn’t cry. Didn’t even try. But my throat still felt like someone had their hands around it.

Just made more coffee about it. I guess that’s how grief works now—emails and caffeine. Didn’t get long to sit with it. Barely hit 7 a.m. before a knock hit the door—sharp, staccato, already familiar. Not even surprised. Swung it open.

The Ghouls flowed in like smoke. Loud, casual, like they owned the place. Like they knew this was their new haunt now. Didn’t even wait for an invite, just swept in with snacks and enough energy to fuel a low-grade exorcism.

I should’ve been annoyed. I wasn’t. 

Tall mustache started lying about where he’d found the pastries before the door shut. Brunette argued with him around a mouthful of one. Sodo kicked a cable out of his path. The giant caught my elbow and steadied me before I even realized I’d stepped on a cord.

The room filled. The pressure in my throat loosened enough to breathe around. Useful bastards.

Everyone took their same places they had yesterday like we were in a goddamn sitcom and I was the reluctant straight man. Except the lighter-haired woman—the one who’d been bouncing between percussion and keys—paused in front of me and held out a few sheets of paper. “Here. I fixed your time signatures. Hope that’s cool.”

I took it, brows pulling. Stared at the bars and notes and marks she’d scribbled with actual damn precision. “You fixed them?” I asked, slow, half-awake.

“Your time signatures.” She shrugged, sliding into her seat and flipping open her own copy. “Yeah. Kinda lived in my head after last night.”

I looked at the page as though that distinction made it legible. “Naturally.”

“You write catchy shit, Papa.” That came from tall-mustache. My brow twitched at the title. Still not used to it. Still felt like someone else’s name.

Papa. Like a kid naming their goldfish. The name stuck the second they said it. No testing its weight. No waiting to see if I answered. As if complete strangers could label me, hand me a church and a band, and trust me to become whatever they’d called me.

Weird shit. I answered anyway.

Didn’t remember leaving the hotel with them. One moment I had cold coffee in my hand; the next I was back above the auto shop with an illegible score and seven Ghouls tuning around me.

They started playing on cue—a quick tap from the giant on the snare. Right into Lachryma like they’d been born rehearsing it. Creepy. 

The first four bars meant nothing in my hands and everything in my ears.

A fucking machine. And it was actually good. Disturbingly good.

I hadn’t given them notes. Not useful ones. I’d paced barefoot across a hotel room describing what the music needed to do—rise here, fracture there, leave enough space for the voice to sound lonely before the guitar buried it. They understood.

A proper plague song. Just like I meant it to be.

Second or third playthrough, I was giving out cues without thinking. Humming where I was supposed to sing, snapping out the meter changes, stacking vocals where they'd hit the hardest. I growled something unrepeatable at the rhythm guitarist, and the bastard somehow played it correctly. 

The bassist grinned mid-tempo shift. Low, haunting rhythm weaving under the guitars like a slow descent into something humid and wrong. They all read me like scripture, then played me back like blasphemy. And I didn’t hate it. Pack instinct, hive mind—like wolves if wolves chain-smoked and tuned guitars. 

“Alright, alright… maybe you do know what you’re doing, boss.” Sodo announced while he lit up.

Boss. That felt less alien than Papa, somehow. I’d take it.

We ran Lachryma six more times. Got into Satanized and, fuck me, it sounded better than when I first banged it out in my kitchen at 3 a.m. like a wine-sick heretic. It was heavier now, sharper—dread, not hope. Just how I wanted it.

Satanized twelve times, at least, until their energy started to flag and someone yelled about food. They left like they arrived—all noise and unholy rhythm.

The wavy-haired man flattened a piece of paper and shoved it in my face on his way out. I flinched, took it, squinted. It was handwritten. 

“Okay, so just so you don’t look like a total idiot—Sodo, Swiss, Cirrus, Aurora, Mountain, Phantom, Rain—got it? Cool. See you tomorrow, bitch. We’re recording.”

Door clicked shut behind them. Twice. Had to be pulled just right. I blinked. Looked down at the paper again like it was a ransom note. They said it like I was supposed to memorize a Pokémon evolution chain. Every clergyman from my childhood would’ve had a stroke if they knew I could rattle off seven Ghouls like reading a Pokédex entry. 

Evolution was a sin, and apparently so was being funny. Whoops.

Late into the night, I researched them and whatever the fuck their deal was. The fans called them by the names on Phantom’s list, all supposedly tied to the alchemical elements they represented. Nicknames, I assumed. Stage handles. The infernal equivalent of naming yourself Razor because you owned a leather jacket.

Suddenly, the elemental shit made sense. Dangerous feeling.

Holy balls, tired wasn’t even in the same fucking galaxy.

My alarm went off like it had a personal vendetta. I cracked one eye. The other required manual intervention. Had to pry it open with my fingers and hold both wide like I was trying to win a staring contest with the Holy Ghost. 4 a.m. Illegal hour. Fuck me sideways and call it liturgy.

Alright. Let’s fucking go, I guess. Worst case, I die on the floor.

I swung my legs off the bed, missed the mark by about three inches, and half-collapsed onto the floor. Felt earned. Got back up on sheer spite. I didn’t even take off my boots. Or my gloves. Or the damn face paint. No wonder I felt like a haunted mannequin.

I dragged myself into the bathroom and the mirror greeted me with a tragic scene: smudged black paint crusted under both eyes. Looked less like a Pope and more like a raccoon crime scene. Red eyes. Suit collar half popped. So yeah—slept in a full uniform again.

I stripped everything off in a trail and stood in the shower like a corpse getting prepped for a burial. Ice-cold. No mercy. That finally woke me up, even if my soul tried to exit stage left. Old habits. 

I used to be the kind of guy who knocked out by 8 p.m. like clockwork. Back when I was a nobody. Back when my life was still dictated by repetition and quiet. Back before I got dragged into all… this.

This was raising the dead. Against their will.

I scrubbed the worst of the paint off, mostly gave up halfway through, and pulled on a clean black T-shirt and dark jeans that looked just presentable enough not to get scolded. Half-buttoned the jacket. Dragged the gloves back on.

Outside, the air bit at my damp neck. Still dark, not even early birds were up. I flagged down a taxi with a hand that felt like it belonged to a different person, climbed in, and slumped like somebody pulled my spine out through my ass.

The Ministry apparently had two recording studios.

One was new—some swanky, state-of-the-art facility funded by merch money and blood rituals or whatever the Hell. Private driveway. Tinted skylights. Catered coffee. The place for polished albums and carefully constructed media days. 

Then there was the old studio buried somewhere inside the Ministry itself, probably under three centuries of dust and the direct supervision of a cryptkeeper.  

They’d booked the new one. I’d never set foot inside any recording studio before today. Didn’t know how I felt about starting with the expensive one. 

By quarter to five, I stepped through the front doors when I arrived, squinting against the harsh interior lighting—and the first thing that hit me was the smell of espresso. Almost dropped to my knees and confessed. Best goddamn sacrament I’d ever smelled. Finally, a religion with priorities. 

A Sister was setting cups out near the back kitchenette like some holy angel sent from the dark realms. Bless her caffeine-soaked soul, that woman was holier than any bishop I’d ever met. I walked straight past her, grabbed a cup, and downed half of it without even muttering a word.

The lounge area was cleaner than expected. Vinyl plank floors, all matte black and red accents. Framed photos and vintage gig posters lined the walls like a museum exhibit: the Papas, the Ghouls through different eras, obscure backstage candids. And there—tucked to the side of one giant frame of Papa Nihil blowing the life out of a saxophone—stood a much younger Sister Imperator. My mother.

Cool.

I swallowed more espresso and ignored the tightness in my throat.

The Ghouls were already there, scattered across the room like an unsupervised field trip. I didn’t look at them. Not really. I just kept my gaze somewhere near the espresso machine and let my free hand curl into my jacket pocket. Fingertips brushed the folded lyric sheet tucked there. Creased and refolded, memorized a hundred times already. I wasn’t going to need it. 

“Did he even go to sleep?” a soft voice asked.

“I don’t think that’s intentional eyeliner,” another Ghoullette whispered. “I think that’s regret.”

I didn’t blink. Didn’t know the answer. Half my life was just muscle memory in a collar. The rest was nicotine.

Rain—the bassist—moved across the floor like he was underwater, plugging in cables with the quiet poise of a saint. Rhythm guitar Ghoul—Phantom, I thought; wavy hair—leaned against the wall, holding his guitar like a rifle and sipping something violently red from a hip flask. Smelled vaguely like Mountain Dew. Sodo had found something on the console that clicked and was pressing it with the focus of a man trying to get murdered before sunrise. 

Click. Click. Click.

My eye twitched out of its own free will. Swiss was eating Doritos straight from the bag and somehow polluting the air with powdered cheese. Mountain—the tallest by an insulting margin—stared at him like he wanted to bury him under a glacier. 

The Sister in charge—small, sharp voice, tight hair bun, clipboard—stepped through the glass doorway and called out, “Recording room’s prepped. Vocals. You’re up, Papa.”

Of course they wanted to get the new guy out of the way. Weren’t instrumentals supposed to go first? Whatever. Maybe this was a guide track. I wasn’t about to expose the fact that I had no fucking idea. I had caffeine in my blood and adrenaline in my throat.

Phantom ducked into the booth ahead of me, subjected the mic to his own deeply unhelpful sound check, then winked and slithered back out like the little chaos gremlin he was. 

I slipped in behind him. Closed the door. Exhaled. Swiss muttered to Drummer Ghoul—Mountain, “Let’s see if the heir actually earned the crown or just inherited the microphone.”

If I sucked, would they say anything? Probably.

The booth was smaller than I expected. Quiet. Walls padded so tight it felt like a coffin. This wasn’t just humming lyrics in my room on a quiet night when the other priests were out cold. It wasn’t standing in front of a couple and officiating under the guise that God came first. Or even sitting too long in confessional listening to people list the way they breathed wrong. Being boxed in brought me right back to it, anyway. Unfortunate wiring. Different box, same feeling.

I took one last sip of espresso, set the cup down, adjusted the mic stand with a practiced twist, and slid the headphones over my ears. Pulled the note out of my pocket. Read it one more time—Verses. Didn’t need them. Already memorized.

Stuffed it back in and cracked my knuckles. Cleared my throat. Red light came to life overhead like a dark omen. 

Static. Metronome. The cue track loaded—and then, oh, Jesus-titty-fucking-Christ. The opening hit through the headphones raw and ugly and already disturbingly close to what I’d heard in my head. Apparently they’d been been here long enough to lay down a rough track before I arrived. 

My lip twitched before I stopped it from going further. I stared into the corner of the booth like it was going to give me answers. Let my brain go blank. The music really started.

I sang.

The first take felt like dragging glass through honey. Rough—off—like I was sleepwalking. My voice didn’t break, but it didn’t live either. I hated it. I didn’t bother to look up, didn’t check the glass to see who was watching. Ran a palm down my neck and closed my eyes. Alright. Let’s try again.

Second take—I let it crack open. No thoughts, no image, just the weight behind the lyrics. All the years of pressure. All the shit I’d shoved into silence. All the insecurity I’d dressed up as performance. I let it go. The second verse rolled around and I dropped into that smooth, ruinous baritone—and that chorus? That fucking chorus howled.

There you are.

The little red light over head clicked off. My eyes flicked to it, then away. Maybe I didn’t hate this. Maybe that’s the dangerous part.

There was radio silence for a minute afterwards, which I was fine with. Until Phantom’s voice cut through the speaker in the room and my head snapped toward the glass to see him hunched over, an amused expression on his face. “Did you take the dick out of your mouth for that one? Damn, dude—recording, not summoning the Legions of Hell.”

I exhaled through my nose. “Why? Hoping I’m warming it up for you?” Even threw a kiss his way.

He blinked. Then a wide grin cracked his face and he fucking lost it. Everyone did. Cackling like lunatics. I got a compliment and made them laugh—if this was hazing, I could live with it. I smiled to myself and shook my head, glancing back at the door like it might be locked and I was trapped here. Thank you, years of being an altar boy.

Phantom had left the talkback open, so I could still hear them through the glass as they got ahold of themselves. Noisy, unfiltered, overlapping voices like kids after a sugar crash. Not sure if I impressed them or fooled them. Not sure which was worse.

Aurora and Swiss were harmonizing with the long note I’d hit mid-verse like they were trying to replicate it with their mouths full of marbles. Sounded like two ghosts gargling mouthwash, but hey—they tried. 

Rain muttered something that sounded vaguely like ‘he doesn’t suck.’ High praise, apparently. Mountain was already scribbling tempo shift notes in the corner of a pizza coupon he’d found in the trash. 

Cirrus asked the room quietly, “Do you think he wants to be good at this? Or is it just muscle memory?”

And I… I just tried to breathe for a minute. Because this was my new reality.

Surrounded by people—I think—and stuck in this weird Frankenstein love child of a church and a record label that flirts with the End Times. I never expected much out of life, and maybe this was my penance for that. Now I had about a dozen hats to wear and no instruction manual. Love that for me. Couldn’t even pretend to be surprised by it.

Eventually, I peeled off the headphones, set them neatly on their hook, and stepped out into the warm hum of studio lights and chaos. The same Sister I hadn’t greeted earlier was already hovering with another espresso and a glass of water. I nodded to her this time. Better than getting bad news in Helvetica. This part of the Papa gig? I could get behind it.

Same espresso. Same bitterness. Different taste.

By the time I dropped into the only open chair, the dark behind the tinted windows had thinned into morning. Silence fell. Then came a low, violent rumble. 

“That was me. I’m due for about forty tacos and a tequila,” Phantom announced, hand in the air like he was ordering from the universe. 

I side-eyed him, but honestly? Not the worst idea.

“Can we order something?” Swiss said, still hunched over the console as he started pulling up audio files. “I gotta eat literally anything other than the shit here—no offense, Sister—while I have the chance.”

The Sister didn’t even look up, just slid another espresso toward him and walked away.

“I’ll order pizza,” Sodo mumbled, already pulling his phone out. “But you better actually have cash this time.”

“No promises.” Swiss grinned.

“None of us carry cash,” Aurora chimed in, unapologetic.

“That’s why I always end up paying,” Sodo groaned, already dialing.

Morning burned into afternoon while the pizza order became an argument about money. By the time the boxes arrived, we had replayed the second verse enough times for it to stop sounding like language.  

Phantom and Mountain were playing back beats and fills to find transitions that felt like punches instead of bridges. Swiss was dragging and lining up vocal layers with Cirrus until it sounded like ghosts harmonizing in a distant monsoon. Rain kept quietly tweaking bass tones and somehow managing to steal one of the studio chairs every time someone stood up for more than three seconds. He looked happiest when nobody was talking to him.

Caught Phantom watching me out of the corner of his eye while Rain tuned up. Like he was waiting to see if I’d break. Or stay. I hovered—close enough to listen, far enough that I wasn’t breathing down their necks like a cop at a house party.

And the thing was—when I did speak? They listened. Actually listened. Somehow, the words that fell out of my mouth carried enough weight to tilt the whole discussion a different way. Not because I was in charge, but because I knew my shit. Because I'd lived a life so violently surrounded by music I wasn't supposed to love. Because I'd studied them, even before I knew what we were to each other.

And when Aurora, Swiss, and Cirrus decided they wanted to re-record some of their vocals to harmonize with me instead of the other way around? That wasn’t just approval. That was a goddamn trust fall. Score one for the blasphemous bastard son.

Eventually the pizza came.

The smell alone could’ve raised the dead. The Sister dropped the boxes off like a dealer avoiding a sting and disappeared into the walls again. Sodo snatched the first slice, Phantom followed suit, Rain just kept plucking at his bass, unbothered. Unhurried. Mountain, wordless, leaned forward across the back of the couch, reached right over Rain’s head like it was the most normal thing in the world, and handed me a slice. 

Rain didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink. Just kept playing.

“...Thanks,” I muttered. Big guy was a silent freight train. Wouldn’t surprise me if he handed communion wafers out the same way. 

He nodded once and sat back like he hadn’t just passed food through a portal.

Everyone ate. It wasn’t quiet—but it was comfortable. And when they all finally filed out one by one—Phantom yelling something about needing to ‘wipe his soul off,’ Swiss flicking a Dorito crumb at Sodo’s head, Aurora and Cirrus debating whether or not they could smuggle wine into the vocal booth—I stayed behind. Just a little longer.

The room was finally quiet, but my head wasn’t. I sat down in front of the scattered notepads and console controls, elbows on knees, fingers brushing the edge of a lyric sheet I didn’t remember actually writing. I stared at it, blanked for a moment. Then I exhaled. Full, deep, all the way out, like I’d been holding it since I walked into this world. My shoulders dropped. 

For the first time since this whole mess started and that letter arrived, I wasn’t bracing for impact.

The next morning they all came to collect me and their instruments. Presumably in case I tried to escape and they needed to beat me back into the van. I was more ready for it this time. In the way you’re more ready to get hit by a car the second time—it still hurts, but at least you know to brace and when to accept your fucking fate.

On the ride there, not one of them shut up. Except for drummer Ghoul—he was cool. Giant, quiet, stoic, gave off the energy of a forest god who accidentally wandered into a metal band and never left. Smacking cymbals instead of mortals. When he did speak, it was slow and gravelly, like he was chewing words before releasing them into the wild. Respected that. Man seemed professionally unbothered. Might’ve been the only ordained adult in the vehicle, and I was technically the Pope.

Phantom wasn’t physically moving, but his jaw rattled like a wind-up toy someone had cranked past the manufacturer’s recommendation. Commentary on everything: the road, the clouds, my pants, a bee. Someone sneezed three lanes over and Phantom offered them tissues through the windshield, climbing over people like this was a regular occurrence.

“Y’know what we should do? We should do a stripped-down version of Satanized with kazoos. Just one show. One. Just to fuck with people.”

A few of them snickered like it was an inside joke. Maybe it was. “No.”

“You didn’t even consider it.”

“No.”

Rain had already been giving me shit before I even opened the van door. “Nice of you to actually wear something that isn’t a silk pajama set today, Your Papal Highness.”

I didn't own silk pajamas. Should, though. Probably comfortable. Maybe that’s what success feels like.

“Eat a dick,” I muttered without thought. Not particularly papal of me. Then again, neither was the dick-eating. Sue me.

“We call those drumsticks, thank you,” Phantom chimed in.

“That joke didn’t even work.”

Rain answered: “Didn’t have to. Still fun.”

Cirrus—one of the keyboardists—was the perfect chaos co-pilot. She started calling me ‘Your Unholiness’ in a tone that made it sound like an endearment. She flicked a phantom tambourine in the air while offering unsolicited opinions about coffee brands, ritual tempos, and whether or not I looked like I’d survived an exorcism that morning. Jury was still out. I’d survived enough of them to know the symptoms overlapped heavily with needing coffee.

Aurora, on the other hand, was trying to help. Genuinely. Kept nudging a small notebook toward me. “Okay, so I color-coded it. Phantom’s in red because of obvious reasons. Sodo’s in black—he insisted. Cirrus is the one who writes like a Victorian ghost.”

Obvious to her, maybe. I wasn’t asking.

“This is... helpful. And worrying.” I murmured back. At least I knew now I was calling them mostly by the right names in my head. Still wasn’t going to risk it out loud just yet.

“Oh! Also, Phantom can play violin. Don’t let him.”

“...Got it.” Was it like feeding a gremlin after midnight? Did I even want to know? Probably not. Violin-related injuries sounded administratively embarrassing. I had enough problems without adding weaponized Vivaldi.

Swiss—Swiss was the worst in the best way. He could sing. Really sing, as he proved yesterday. And he knew it—every word out of his mouth sounded like an advertisement for expensive headphones and bad decisions. He sat beside me and offered me a Tic Tac like it was a contract. Probably was.

“Just so we’re clear, new guy,” he said, tone velvet-smooth, “if you ever need me to stand stage left and look beautiful while moaning harmonies into the abyss, I am your man.”

“I already regret knowing you.”

“That’s fair. But you’ll miss me if I go.”

I snorted at that. Bastard had enough confidence for all of us. Probably kept spare reserves in his pants.

I didn’t trust them. I couldn’t. But—it didn’t feel like walking on eggshells. It felt like being dropped into a card game halfway through where everyone knew the rules but was willing to let me cheat until I caught up. It made me feel… less like a puppet, or a prophecy, or a pawn in someone else’s show.

Better than the life I led before this.

When we pulled into Ministry grounds, the van veered off into a back lot beside a wide stone courtyard—shadowed and half-swallowed by a gated graveyard.

Graveyard. Mausoleum. Morgue. Just how many damn dead were there? Seemed excessive.

I drifted toward the fence like I was approaching a crime scene. Just off the path, careful, quiet. It felt like one. Just not one anyone else seemed to notice.

The building loomed like a cathedral carved from punishment itself. Massive. Heavy. Beautiful in that kind of way that made your stomach twist. Stained glass darker and taller than anything I'd ever seen—stretching skyward like it meant to slap the pearly gates in the face. Arches curled like ribs over hollow lungs. Weathered stone made it feel older than time. A fucking gothic dream house.

It looked oppressive. And inviting. Like a haunted mansion on Viagra. And yet… it pulled. Something low and slow thrumming through the grass. Not a presence above, watching and judging—no. This was something beneath. Breathing through the dirt. Curling its fingers. 

Not over my head. But under my feet.

It felt like standing on the edge of a horror movie basement. You know you're not supposed to go down there. But the music is already swelling.

They were unloading equipment onto the open stretch between headstones. Fog machines and lights were already waiting there, along with four people I didn’t know. A skeleton crew. Literally and figuratively. 

Okay. I could work with that.

I made my way over toward the setup, fog already curling around my boots like something half-alive. The crew had parked light rigs behind certain headstones—some cracked, some pristine—and pointed them low through the mist, coloring it in streaks of amber and red. A few of the lights shifted slowly, like the set was breathing. Eerie, but somehow gentle. A showman's séance. Kinda fucking beautiful, in its own way. Didn’t love what that said about me.

They’d arranged a circle of crumbling stone markers like a broken ritual, maybe on purpose, maybe just luck. A few guitars leaned against a headstone that read ‘BELOVED FATHER’. A single mic stand was stabbed into the dirt like a sword in the grave. 

The whole thing looked like a dream someone would have on morphine five minutes before meeting God and demanding a refund. 

I didn’t have to do anything yet. I was just supposed to ‘get a feel.’ Maybe try on the robes if they showed up in time. Let some kid roughly my height stand there while they tested camera angles. Fine by me. Less chance to embarrass myself. So I stood off to the side and looked past the lights, toward the building itself.

It was different than I’d imagined. Not just the size, though that was shocking in its own right. The thing towered over the courtyard like some ancient sleeping beast, all stone and iron and glass and bone. It was dark. I wasn’t used to that. Not just in color, though yes—it was a black silhouette against an already gray sky. But I mean dark. It felt like something shadowed had built it, with full knowledge of the sun but absolutely no interest in pretending it cared for it.

Back in Rome, I’d grown up in bright places. Gleaming churches, gold-plated halls, buildings so obsessed with appearing holy they practically screamed it at your corneas.

This one didn’t scream. It waited.

Not silent, not quite. I could almost feel it exhale when I looked at it too long. Like a disappointed father watching from the porch as his runaway son finally trudged back home after curfew. Muddy. Changed. Late. But not unrecognizable.

I knew that breath: it wasn’t angry. It was tired. About fucking time, it seemed to say. A higher power underground. Still had a stick up its ass, apparently. Nice to know divinity was consistent.

Alright, big guy. About fucking time indeed.

I wasn’t sure where the Ghouls had vanished while I’d been lost in my head like an idiot. But when they returned, it was less of a walk-on and more of an emergence—like the underworld was stage-managing the whole thing. Black skin suits etched with skeleton patterns, rhinestones glinting like teeth under the floodlights. Their chrome masks were glossy obsidian, each molded with its own sharp, grotesque flare. Top hats, sheer veils, bat wings tucked under the girls’ arms like some warped homage to modesty—Christianity flipped inside out and dragged through the graveyard.

They looked... good. Alarming, but unified. Like a funeral procession had discovered choreography and a merch budget.

Weirdly, they even matched me—which was impressive considering I’d thrown my look together on the floor of my hotel room an hour ago. It was almost like the seamstress had known this moment would come, like she’d been waiting for this iteration of us.

I’d painted my face—again. Hands a little steadier this time. I’d stopped flinching at my reflection, even started to appreciate the mask I was crafting. Stockholm syndrome in the mirror, maybe. I wore all black beneath the silver jacket, slid on a pair of better leather gloves I’d forgotten I owned, and laced up my good boots. No robes. No collar. But I still looked the part.

Someone brought me a rhinestone-ribcage tie tack. Hesitated just long enough to drop it in my palm like I might bite. Fair. Subtle. Horrifying. Perfect. Felt like royalty among the crypt, like I belonged here.

The four-man crew moved with quiet efficiency, adjusting drums and tuning guitars like they’d done this a thousand times, bones creaking. Maybe they had. Maybe they lived here, ghosts of the Ministry who never left. Maybe no one ever really left once they were brought in through the gates. Bet the benefits were shit.

Sodo halted beside me, cigarette balanced between his teeth, another held out like a peace offering. “Ready to actually sing and dance, old man?”

I snagged it without hesitation, lit both. Chivalry wasn’t dead. Just chain-smoking next to a manicured demon. “Don’t got a choice, mustache.”

He chuckled, something sharp and warm in it, and wandered off when someone started barking his name across the clearing. For the first time since meeting them, I wasn’t trying to be funny. Wasn’t folding myself inward, either. Wasn’t trying to be anything. 

Soundcheck buzzed around me—snare cracks, bass thumps, low murmurs from the crew. One full performance, they’d said. The rest would be mimed. Lights, fog, playback, done.

My heart wasn’t steady. It hadn’t been since we passed the graveyard gates. Anxiety gnawed inside me like a starving thing. Not fear, exactly—closer to adrenaline, performance mode, the same nauseous anticipation I used to get before stepping up to the pulpit, staring down a sea of believers and smiling through my teeth like the truth didn’t make me sick.

This wasn’t so different. They didn’t know me. Not really. They were expecting fire and brimstone, something divine. Something unholy. ‘Not a whisper,’ Copia had said. My gut churned. They wanted passion. They wanted a show. Good thing I’d spent decades in choir lofts, on stages, in temples. I knew how to fake divinity. I could summon it with a look and convince you I was born to it.

Which, allegedly, I was.

I exhaled and looked back at the Ghouls. The moment the playback cued for their test run, they transformed. Instruments in hand, they moved like they’d been puppeted by some ancient, Hellish force. Exaggerated, theatrical, alive. Every note, every beat—intentional. Possessed. Show-offs.

And me? I was starting to feel it. That click. That crawl under the skin like something inside me remembered how to burn.

Yeah. Okay.

The moment the intro struck—low and crawling, like a storm rolling in over some doomed hill—I let go. I stopped thinking. Stopped pacing. Stopped checking my goddamn jacket seams or wondering if the Sisters hovering at the edge of the field could see the tremor in my hands.

The fog machines woke with a low hiss. Crimson and purple light bathed the old brick, catching in smoke that moved like it had intention. Like Lucifer himself was exhaling through the cracks. 

I found my place among them. It wasn't just a performance. It wasn’t even really a song, not the way I’d originally heard it in the demo files.

It was ritual.

We moved like a unit, the Ghouls and I. I wasn’t directing, I wasn’t reacting. I was with them. The rhythm. The tempo. We hadn’t agreed on any of it—it was instinct, and I matched them. Heartbeat to heartbeat. 

The chorus hit and my voice broke out of me like it had been caged too long. Bleeding passion, venom, soul. Theater, sure—but this felt real. The kind of real you get once in a lifetime if you're lucky. The kind of real that unearths the past, drags it into the light, and tells it to dance.

From the corner of my eye, I caught movement. OOne of the Ghoulettes twisted toward me a heartbeat before I moved, and I fell into the same turn like we’d rehearsed it a hundred times. We hadn’t. She just knew where I’d be. We were a fucking hive mind. I couldn’t explain it.

I think Phantom said, ‘Holy shit,’ under his breath once, but I didn’t turn my head. Didn’t need to. I felt it. Felt the click into place, the beat that held us all in its teeth.

The woman behind the lighting board shared a look with the cameraman. She smirked, and my mouth answered before I thought better of it. 

There were Brothers and Sisters peeking from between courtyard hedges or shadowed archways—watching us work, watching me prove I wasn’t just some relic brought in to fill a coffin-shaped vacancy. The sound had drawn them out to see who the new guy was. And I didn’t give a shit. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t trembling.

I felt fucking invincible.

I’d faked divinity for decades. But this? This didn’t feel like pretending.

The track ended. The final beat bled into silence and I was left with the taste of smoke and metal in my throat. My pulse rang in my ears. My spine buzzed.

Someone clapped. I looked toward the sound, dazed, half-drunk on whatever the fuck had just happened. Was this it? What every Papa before me had felt when the music took hold? 

My palm pressed to my chest as if it might somehow steady my heart. My throat burned. My ribs ached. I was sweating. Couldn’t stop smiling. Annoying. Apparently, I’d forgotten breathing was required between verses. 

Phantom was grinning—genuinely, now. “Not bad,” he muttered, flicking his pick toward his amp before giving me a nod that looked suspiciously like respect.

I didn’t say anything back. Not bad? That’s Ghoul for ‘holy shit, Dad might actually know how to fuck.’ Because it wasn’t just not bad. It was mine.

Then the actual filming started.

Which took hours. The late-into-the-night kind. The kind where the air got colder, sleep got dangerous, and even blinking felt like a gamble. The fog started to feel like part of the atmosphere rather than a prop.

When the Ghouls hit that loopy, delirious point, Phantom started picking out ‘Despacito.’ The others joined in because apparently none of them feared death. I wasn't even surprised. Prayed for it to stop. Nobody listened. Crossed myself out of habit when it hit the chorus for the third fucking time. Old habits. Desperate circumstances.

Eventually, someone declared a break for supper. Catered shit a couple of Sisters dropped on a collapsible table near the trailers. That was about when I remembered I had a body with needs. And among those needs: food. Warmth. A new spine, maybe. Christ on a cracker, my feet felt like they’d been auditioning for a snuff film. Everything below my knees was filing complaints.

The food wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t great, either, but it had more flavor than what I’d gotten used to—airplane meals, hotel buffets, whatever cup of coffee I’d forgotten to finish six hours earlier. I’d eat it without filing an official complaint.

I’d just sat down on the edge of a prop crate with a tin container of mystery meat and roasted potatoes when she arrived. The seamstress. You could feel her before you saw her. The air didn’t chill—it sharpened. Like I’d just been called into the principal’s office.

For a second, I felt like a child again. One word away from punishment. One breath away from getting this all taken back.

She was an older woman with the most unimpressed expression I’d ever seen—like the kind of person who'd survived three wars and still found your existence the most irritating part of her day. Definitely the type to make grown men cry with a single raised eyebrow. Half-tempted to call her ‘mom.’ Everything about her said she wasn’t here to make friends. Or small talk. Or excuses.

A little scary. In a good way. Probably still had grown men volunteering to get on their knees. 

I set my container down immediately. Gave her my full attention because, frankly, it felt like I might get slapped if I didn’t. She didn’t say hello, just unzipped the long garment bag like it was a surgical procedure.

Inside was the robe. Or robes, plural. Layers of the damn things, including a long cope that looked built for dramatic entrances and little else. Funny. No Copia tonight, just the seamstress. Guess even he knew better than to babysit me this late.

It was… fine. Plain. But not in a bad way. Deep, regal purples edged with black lace. The fabric moved like water even when still. A repeating Grucifix pattern ran down the front, subtly stitched like shadow work. Just a touch of silver at the seams. It felt heavier than it looked—formal, layered, traditional.

Functional, thoughtful. Understated. Which is priest-speak for boring as shit. Fixable, though. I was already cataloguing things I could add. Or request. Could I stitch in my own accents? Was that a sin here? Would the Sisters tackle me mid-stitch for heresy? I made the rules now—right? 

...Or was that Copia’s game still? Could I get a goddamn manual, please. Apparently infallibility didn’t come with onboarding paperwork.

“I used Frater’s dimensions, assuming you’re the same fit,” the seamstress said flatly, like it pained her to acknowledge my existence. “He said you’d want something understated.”

I blinked. 

“That little shit,” I muttered. Out loud. Unintentionally. Probably. For half a second, I swore I saw the corners of her mouth twitch. A ghost of amusement before the steel mask slid back into place.

“Thank you, ma’am. They’re beautiful.”

“My pleasure, Papa,” she said, just enough bite in the honorific to make me want to sit up straighter, like she’d sewn the title into every seam and dared me to wear it right. And then she was gone, boots echoing against stone as she vanished across the grass like the final scene of a film reel.

I looked at the bag in my hands. Heavy, dark, full of expectation. Then back at where she’d gone. Then back at the bag. Again. And finally just hooked it on the nearest coat rack.

It was already crowded with other bullshit—spare cloaks, a fog machine cable someone looped the wrong way, a pair of sunglasses that definitely weren’t mine. Another garment bag hung behind them. Silver flashed through the open zipper. A jacket.

Not just any silver jacket. My jacket. Or—my jacket, but new.

Same high-end brand. Same perfect structure. Grucifix stitched into the back in thread so subtly iridescent it only showed up under the right lights. From the elbows down, though—black. Hunter-style. A matching metal skull set into each cuff. I turned back the lining and found the unmistakeable patch stitched inside: ‘FUCK YOU’.

Big-ass letters, beautiful craftsmanship. I’d caught glimpses whenever Copia flashed the lining of one of his jackets. Every damn one carried the same velvet insult. A strange little gift from a twin who’d built half my new life before ever meeting me in person.

My mouth did something dangerously close to smiling. No sentiment for my old one. Didn’t care at all. This one? Nicer. Better. Mine now. Fair’s fair. Like slipping into someone else’s skin and finding out it fits better than yours ever did. Put it on immediately. Ran gloved fingers down the lapels with a flourish that felt far too natural. 

Another piece already waiting for me. Something else I could leave behind. Metaphorical bullshit. Shame the rest of it didn’t come off with the jacket.  

I turned back toward my food, container still warm enough but sogging with condensation, and watched the Ghouls descend on their own supper with the enthusiasm of starving wild dogs. Plates clattered. Laughter bubbled. Phantom made a noise I assumed meant approval but sounded distressingly orgasmic.

Rain lifted the robe sleeve still hanging nearby and let out a low whistle. “Damn. This might be the sexiest thing the Ministry’s ever funded.”

“You saying that ‘cause you helped pay for it?” Sodo teased with a full mouth.

Rain shrugged. “I’m saying that because if I had legs like his, I’d be walking around in that shit all day.”

“Legs and that ass,” Swiss chimed in.

I shot him a look. “You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

Swiss only smiled and changed the subject. “You’re welcome for the food, by the way, Papa.” 

I raised my brows and gave a solemn little nod. “Gratitude noted.”

Mountain was holding up the cope to the light now. “Is it cursed yet?”

Aurora snorted. “Everything is cursed if you touch it wrong.”

They all broke into laughter. I let it wash over me.

They were loud and irreverent and ridiculous. And yet somehow, in this cold stretch of darkness just before we were meant to resume filming, they moved like a unit. Phantom leaned into Rain’s shoulder. Cirrus passed Mountain a napkin without asking. They were a pack, a swarm, a something. Didn’t have a word for it yet.

And weirdly, so was I. Weirdly, I belonged. Somewhere between the food and the fabric and the hum of laughter in the fog, I stopped feeling like I was playing dress-up. And started feeling like I could make it home.

Someone pressed a little wax capsule into my palm and told me to bite down before the next take. No ceremony. Just vampire, here you go, as though Lucifer’s church kept emergency blood beside the spare batteries. I crushed it between my teeth, tasted syrup and metal, and smiled for the camera. 

Then came the well and the vampire wings, because apparently subtlety had died before I arrived. Nobody explained the well. Nobody explained the wings. I’d stopped asking questions several costumes ago. 

When they called us back, I gave the robes one last look. If I was going to wear a crown, it sure as fuck wasn’t going to look like a hand-me-down. It needed more. A lot more. Understated, my ass. I was going to make it mine.

Three days. Three fucking days. Felt like three months. And we still had to film Satanized in some premade set that they dragged a confessional into.

I didn’t even remember what country we were in anymore. America. That’s right. There’d been too much movement, too much noise, too many hands adjusting collars and mics and shadows and spotlights. I’d been called ‘Papa’ so many times my ears were ringing with it, but not in a reverent way—more like the way you shout at a stray dog to make it stop chewing a power cord.

The hotel was quiet now. Too quiet, almost. The kind of silence that feels earned, like something heavy got exorcised and now the walls are letting you mourn in peace. Rare thing.

I sat on the edge of the bed with a towel wrapped around my shoulders and the last smudges of paint still clinging to my cheekbones. I’d gotten the worst of it off after the shoot, but the stuff never really came off clean. Not where you could see it. Not where it mattered.

Bathroom light flickered once, then steadied. I stared into the mirror like it owed me something. It blurred. I blinked harshly to bring it into focus again. White and black smears. Tired eyes. Damp curls trying to reanimate into their usual chaos. The jacket I’d worn in the video was folded over the armchair—silver, with a flare of black like an afterthought. Loved it already. Looked better on camera than it did on the hanger. Probably looked better on me than I wanted to admit.

My throat was raw, and every square inch of me ached like a bitch in platform heels had stomped me into the floor. I didn’t feel like a priest—not really—and I sure as Hell didn’t feel like a frontman. But I didn’t hate what I saw. Which was either character growth or brain damage. Probably the latter.

I leaned back on the bed and picked up my laptop, scrubbing at my face with the towel one last time before giving up. I queued up the rough cut of Lachryma. Just to skim. Just to confirm it was garbage and my sleep-deprivation-fueled self-loathing was entirely justified. 

Except it wasn’t.

The opening shot was a little cutout castle that somehow worked. Then it was the Ghouls.

Then me. Painted, sharp, skull gleaming like something alive under candlelight, jacket glinting. Back straight, chin lifted, bloody teeth flashing when I smiled, eyes like I knew exactly what I was doing—which was hilarious, because I hadn’t. 

But the second I opened my mouth…

The second the vocals hit and the band swelled behind me…

I saw it.

Sodo flicked his head with the beat and cut in like the fucking demon he was. Phantom had that feral rhythm thing he did, all teeth and fluid fury. Rain was steady as a damn heartbeat. Mountain’s sticks blurred in time. Aurora and Cirrus harmonized like they’d rehearsed with angels and spit in their faces after. Swiss, off-center and magnetic, held the background together with that smug lilt he had no right to pull off.

And me…? Hell’s ball sweat, I didn’t suck. Well I’ll be damned. I watched my own face sing like it meant something. It almost looked like something people might actually pay to see, instead of throwing holy water at the screen.

I blinked hard. Rewound it. Watched it again. Still didn’t suck. Still gave me chills.

“Fuck me…” I muttered, letting the towel slide from my shoulders as I leaned forward onto my elbows. “It’s actually good.” 

I’d thought I was going to be a Pope. Instead, I was a frontman. Nobody had warned me there was a difference. Guess that makes sense. I’ve always been better at screaming over the silence than listening to it.