Chapter Text
Coco expected the day to be ordinary.
Which was, in retrospect, a deeply optimistic thing to expect.
She had woken up at the right time, had dressed herself and combed her hair, and made it to breakfast without knocking anything over (which was something she was privately tracking as a metric of general functioning). She had said good morning to everyone at the table with her usual bright smile. She had eaten the lovely breakfast Qifrey put out with a bow and a 'thank you for the meal, Master Qifrey!'. She had listened to Tetia cheerfully narrate a dream she'd had about a talking fish with very strong opinions about other species he saw around the ocean, and laughed at the funniest parts.
She had told herself that everything was fine. It was fine. She'd felt worse before.
Which was true, he had absolutely been worse. Due to her issues, worse was practically a hobby at this point.
So she just bit down a wince at the stabbing pain her gut, and she maintained her usual expression when the headaches hit. Easy peasy. She was just having a bad week. A bad week that had now been going on for approximately a month and a half, but the important thing was that she was still functioning, still learning and still working on The Problem.
After finishing her plate and offering to help her teacher with the dishes, she had gone upstairs with Agott after breakfast to the room they shared and sat down at her desk. There, with a frown, she opened her workbook to the page she had been on yesterday.
And all she could do was… stare at it.
The desk she called hers was built into the wall low and flush with the stone. It had a colorful cushion on the floor for sitting and two pegs along the side for hanging things, though she barely used them. Hers was on the left, while Agott's was on the right, which meant that when they were both working they faced their respective walls and each other's backs.
Today her face was doing a lot of things she would prefer Agott not see.
She pressed the blunt end of her pen to her lower lip and looked at the sigil diagrams and tried, genuinely tried, to make them mean something. They were not complicated, she had read this section three days ago and understood it perfectly well then. The material had not changed. The problem was not the material.
She was just so hungry.
That was the truth of it. The entirely inconvenient truth. She was hungry in the bone-deep, animal way that had nothing to do with the meal she had eaten at breakfast.
The nausea that came with it was the part she liked least. It sat low in her stomach and pulsed, slow and insistent. It made the ink smell sharp. It made concentrating feel like trying to read through glass that was just slightly smeared.
She pulled at the hem of her sleeve, folding it back over her wrist and then unfolding it.
Okay, she thought. Think.
The problem, she had decided some time ago, was not that there was no solution. The problem was that all the solutions she could currently see had significant drawbacks, and she had not yet found the angle that made one of them actually workable.
Option one: Qifrey and Olruggio's personal blood supply.
She had been thinking about this since Qifrey mentioned the blood bag system a week ago. They were vampires, and they lived here. Therefore the supply was here, somewhere in this building, accessible to someone small and quiet. One problem, one solution, clean and direct.
She had talked herself out of it fourteen times. She was currently working on fifteen.
The issue wasn't finding it. She knew the layout of the atelier reasonably well by now. She knew the rhythm of when Qifrey and Olruggio were occupied and when they were likely to wander, knew how to look like she was going somewhere specific even when she wasn't.
The issue was what happened after. Qifrey noticed things, not obtrusively, but with the quiet, total attention of someone who was simply very good at being in a room. And Olruggio noticed things differently, a kind of calm, direct focus that went straight to the thing you were hoping it wouldn't. If bags went missing, if quantities shifted by even a small amount, one or both of them would notice. Notice led to questions. Questions led to a conversation she was not ready to have.
She needed more information first. She needed to understand what the actual consequences looked like under vampire law for an unregistered fledgling who had been living undocumented in someone's atelier for months, before she said anything out loud to anyone. She needed a real plan.
She drew a small spiral in the margin of her workbook while she thought. Then a slightly larger one around it. Three smaller ones orbiting the outside.
Option two was the one she kept coming back to despite her better judgment, which was already a sign she should examine it more carefully rather than less.
The Great Hall.
She had been there, and it had been enormous and full of witches. It was extraordinary in every way, but what she kept thinking about was not the architecture itself.
She had spotted vampire witches there. Not many, but enough. And if they moved through the Great Hall with any regularity, then someone running the Great Hall had presumably thought about what they needed. Institutions were like that.
There was probably a supply there. A blood bank, or something like one.
Probably was doing a lot of work in that sentence and she knew it.
The practical obstacles were also considerable. The Great Hall was only accessible through the atelier's windoway. Then she'd have to navigate an enormous building full of witches and find a facility she had only inferred existed. Then getting back out. Then she would need to get back home without anyone noticing how long she'd been gone.
It was a bad plan. She knew, logically, that it was a bad plan. She also knew she would not stop thinking about it until she found something demonstrably better to replace it with.
She added another spiral to the constellation in her margin.
Behind her, Agott's pen moved with its usual precise, even rhythm. The room was quiet, bright and still, and usually she would have enjoyed it. But the nausea pulsed again, and she forced herself to breathe through it.
While she thought, she started rocking. Just slightly, just side to side, barely anything at all. The movement soothed her more than she'd ever admit, and her body got to do something small while the rest of her tried to solve the unsolvable.
With a small whimper, she pressed her forehead briefly against her desk, let herself have just that one moment, and sat back up.
"Coco."
She stilled.
"You've been fidgeting for the past quarter hour," Agott said. Not annoyed, which Coco silently appreciated, just… accurate.
"Sorry, Aggot!" She turned her head to the other, a sheepish smile adorning her face. "Just thinking."
"About the assignment?"
"About the assignment," Coco agreed. The assignment was in front of her, and she was thinking in its general vicinity. Close enough.
Silence. Then, Agott frowned. "Something has been distracting you. Not just today. For a while now."
"Oh, you know how it is." Coco waved a hand, face growing a little warm. "I've got a very busy mind. I was born this way, I can't help it."
"A busy mind," Agott repeated. Though her voice stayed level, her eyebrows were slightly raised.
"Like a marketplace on a festival day. Very loud. Lots of different stalls."
"...right." A short exhale. "We shouldn't be distracted. The next test matters, and Master Qifrey expects real progress from us, not just familiarity with the theory."
"You're completely right." Coco said, and meant it, which was the worst part. "I'll focus. I'm sorry."
"You can make things work," Agott said, with more fondness than her usual. Noticing her change in tone, Agott turned her head back towards her desk in an attempt to hide the embarrassed flush that bloomed across her face. "I've seen you do harder things is all."
The warmth that moved through Coco's chest at that was immediate and, right now, sort of painful. Still, she smiled. "Thanks, Agott."
She turned back to her workbook and found the right paragraph once more, making herself hold each line until it meant something.
She was three lines further when Agott spoke again.
"Coco. Are you eating enough?"
Coco's pen stopped.
"...what?"
"You look pale." A pause with a particular quality to it, the pause Agott used when she had decided to say something she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to say. "You've looked pale for several days. And you're thinner than when you arrived."
"I've been eating fine, Agott." Coco said with a reassuring voice she hoped would calm the other's nerves. "I've always been like this."
"You haven't," Agott disagreed.
Coco turned the page of her workbook and looked at the next diagram as if it were extremely interesting. "I think you're just used to Richeh's meat portions. She takes enough for two people and then offers the rest to everyone else."
"That is not the point," Agott said, and there was something frustrated in her voice now, something Coco did not want to look at directly.
"I will try to eat more at breakfast," Coco agreed cheerfully. "You're right. I'll do that."
Agott exhaled, one that Coco interpreted as 'I am letting this go for now, but I have not forgotten it.'
Coco had a whole small mental library of Agott's exhales.
"Fine," Agott grumbled. Then, after a pause: "But I'm going to mention it to Master Qifrey."
"Agott!" Coco pouted, trying to not sound panicked
"Not now," Agott sighed, rubbing her face. She sounded more like someone who had already decided and was informing rather than negotiating. "At the end of the week, if it hasn't resolved."
Instead of pleading her case and calling more attention to herself, Coco turned to the next page of her workbook and looked at a diagram of a multi-layered binding seal and said nothing.
They went back to working.
Coco stared at the directionality diagram and felt her heart beating too fast. It's over. You're fine. You handled it. Keep going. And figure out what you're going to tell her by the end of the week.
She was actually reading the diagrams now and making notes in the margin next to the spirals, and she had filed the application idea under things to think about later. The nausea was still there but she was working around it steadily and without making a scene.
She was fine.
Then Coco heard Agott tense up with a gasp.
The sound Agott made was small. Just a short, sharp intake of breath, bitten off almost before it started. "Aw, darn it." She mumbled, with a hiss. "I though I had grown past cutting myself with the points of the dip pen."
The smell arrived first, much before Agott's words did to Coco's mind.
She had smelled blood countless times. She had become quite skilled at making nothing of it, and she had been good at it. Not only that, but she thought she had understood what blood smelled like in all its dimensions.
She had been catastrophically wrong.
Because all of it, she realized, from a very sudden and very clear distance, all of it she had ever had at home had been animal blood. Her mother had said so, in a careful, vague way she tended to speak about the supply in general. Coco had accepted this and not thought further about it. She had not known there was a question to ask.
Agott's blood was human blood, and human blood, she discovered then, was a completely different thing. Coco had absolutely no words for what the difference was. The smell was rich in a way that bypassed pleasant and unpleasant entirely, it was simply present, layered, warm and immediate. It reached past every careful, practiced thing she had built, and spoke to some part of her she had not known was there.
It was then that the hunger stopped being manageable.
It all smelt delicious.
She was gripping her pen so hard her knuckles ached. She was facing the wall and the diagrams were still in front of her and she had not moved, and some amount of time had passed. She was not sure how much. Her breathing had gone wrong. The room smelled entirely like one thing and she could not make it smell like anything else.
She pressed the end of the pen very hard against the heel of her palm.
It helped a little. Not enough.
The sigils in the workbook in front of her had stopped being sigils. They were shapes. They were lines on a page and she was a person sitting in a room with a pen in her hand and some amount of time had passed and she could not have said what she was thinking about because she was not thinking. She was just. Very much aware of the room.
"-co? Coco? Are you alright?"
She startled so hard she felt her cushion shift.
She was on her feet before she had made the decision to stand. Her sleeve was at her mouth already, pressed there by a reflex that moved faster than thought, and she felt it the moment the fabric touched her lips. Warmth. She had been salivating, without knowing, without noticing at all, and she pressed her sleeve harder and turned slightly away and made her spine straight.
"I'll get Qifrey," she said. Fast, and slightly too high, but it came out. "For your hand. He'll have something for it."
She felt Agott frown. "It is barely even a cut," Agott said. "I was literally telling you not to worry about it moments ago."
"Better safe than sorry!" She was at the door quickly, hand was on the frame. "Keep pressure on it. I'll be right back, I promise."
"Coco, wait-" Agott started.
"One minute!!" Coco interrupted, and went into the hallway and pulled the door most of the way shut behind her.
The hallway smelled like stone and old wood and the distant warmth of breakfast. Not like the room. She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth, counted to four and waited for her hands to stop shaking.
She stood there, one hand on the outer doorframe, and breathed through her mouth and thought. It is fine. You can go back in. You are in control of yourself.
She thought this very hard for a few seconds.
Then she turned around and went downstairs.
She went downstairs.
Qifrey was in the common room, at the low table, correspondence spread in front of him with a seal on it she registered and immediately filed away for later. He looked up when she came down the stairs, and his expression shifted in a way Coco couldn't quite explain.
"Agott caught herself on her pen," Coco panted out. "Her palm. It's small, but could you look at it? You'll know better than me if it needs anything."
Qifrey was already standing. He moved toward the stairs quickly but stopped, glancing at her sideways. "Are you alright, though? You're sweating."
"I'm fine, it's because I ran."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded. She stepped back to let him pass. She listened to his footsteps go up: one landing, two, the turn at the top, the hallway. She listened to the sound of the door.
She stood there for a moment and looked at the common room. The table with Qifrey's correspondence, the seal she had noticed and filed away. The window on the far wall, the light coming in softly from the overcast sky. The basket of wool on the low chair that had been there for at least two weeks and that she had wondered about more than once. The atelier, quiet and ordinary around her, smelling of ink and wood and the tail end of breakfast.
She had a life here. A real one. And she was going to keep it. That was a decision she had made early and had not revisited. She was going to find the angle, and she was going to sort out the problem, and she was going to keep this.
She walked to the front door, opened it, and went outside.
Her hands were shaking again.
She pressed them flat against her thighs and breathed the outside air through her mouth, and told herself the things she always told herself: you're in control. You've done harder things than this. You're going to figure this out.
The first one wasn't quite true right now. But she was working on it.
She thought about going back inside. She ran through it honestly: the room, Agott, Qifrey now upstairs with Agott, the smell probably still faintly present in the air, her desk, the whole careful architecture of normality she had built and was currently failing to inhabit.
But before she could make herself think, she felt something shift.
She started walking before she could think about it.
She blinked, and suddenly she wasn't sure if she'd opened her eyes once more.
Where was she?
She was somewhere dark, and dense. That's all she could feel around her.
Her body felt weird. Was she trully inside her body?
She could hear desperate whimpers coming from somewhere around her, but she couldn't really see.
Were her eyes open? Yes, but- she couldn't see.
She heard a yelp, loud, near her.
She went back into her head.
She looked down at her hands.
There was blood on them.
On her palms, on the lines of her fingers, worked into the creases of her knuckles. On the cuff of her right sleeve, a dark irregular blot that had dried enough at the edges to be stiff when she moved her wrist. She turned her hands over and back and over again, slowly, and could not find anything in them that felt like hers.
They were her hands. She could see the small crooked scar on her right index finger from a hem pin years ago. The callus on her middle finger from the pen. They were her hands and the blood on them was not hers.
She was kneeling, but she did not remember kneeling. The ground was cold under her and the undergrowth pressed into her shins.
She looked forward.
A fox lay at the edge of the briar, red-brown and small against the root system.
Still. Dead.
She looked at it for a long time without moving. Then turned her hands over one more time, slowly, in the cold and the quiet.
The fox didn't move.
Had she done this?
Somewhere above her in the branches, a bird started and stopped. Wind moved through the high leaves. The light shifted a little.
She did not get up. She did not gag, which she had half expected she might, but the thing in her chest right now was too big and too strange. It was something she did not have a name for yet.
She looked at her hands.
She looked at the fox.
She didn't feel as hungry anymore.
She had always been the kind of person who found a way through. She had never once in her life sat in front of an impossible thing and decided it was going to stay impossible. She had pushed and pried and gone at things from the side when the front wouldn't open. And it had worked, it had always eventually worked.
She looked at her hands.
At some point she realized she was crying, which surprised her, because she had been fairly sure she wasn't going to due to how little she was feeling. The crying was quiet and mostly involuntary, not enough to make her stop looking at the fox or her hands, or the place where the briar roots disappeared into the dark earth.
She had been so sure. That was the part that hurt most. She had been so completely, specifically sure about who she was and what she would and wouldn't do.
She had been wrong, after all.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at the blood still on her palm and thought, for the first time with any real seriousness, that she could not keep going like this.
She had been telling herself she needed more time. More information. A real plan, not a collection of half-formed possibilities.
But she was also, right now, kneeling in the undergrowth with a dead fox at the edge of the briar and blood on her hands, and she had not decided to do any of it. That was not a plan. That was not even half of a plan. That was her body making a decision without her, and it was the second time today - the first time had been salivating in front of Agott, which was bad enough, and this was considerably worse.
She did not have enough information. She did not know enough about her own biology, about what was happening to her, about why human blood had brought a part of her that was deeply buried out. She did not know if this was going to keep happening. She did not know what to do with that not-knowing except sit with it in the cold and feel the shape of it.
It was a very large, jagged, painful shape.
She looked at her hands one more time.
Then she looked at the fox. She was not going to leave it like this. She didn't know exactly what she was going to do about it, but she was not going to leave it in the briar and walk away and pretend it hadn't happened. She was not cruel.
She got to her feet, slowly, because her knees had stiffened in the cold and her left foot had gone partially numb, and she stood for a moment just getting her balance back.
The air smelled like earth, bark, and blood.
She needed to go back. She needed to have an explanation for where she had been, which she was going to need to compose carefully, and she needed to have a reason for why her sleeve had a blood stain on it, which was going to require either a very convincing story or getting back to her room and changing before anyone saw her, and she needed to figure out, at some point in the near future, which of the two options was actually achievable given the current layout of the atelier and the current location of everyone in it.