Chapter Text
“Oh, Your Eminence,” I said, unable to mask the dismay in my tone. “Why didn’t you come to me with this straight away?”
“It can’t be that bad. It doesn’t feel so bad.” His grimace as he stretched the lacerated skin shrugging the unbuttoned layers of his vestments off his shoulders betrayed his words somewhat. “Surely it just needs, you know, a clean and some stitches, no?”
“When and from who did you get this?” I traced the jagged score marks that ran from Copia’s right collarbone to the centre of his bared chest with my fingertips, carefully angling my own claws away from the flesh. I had no fear for myself at touching the raw red wound, nor would my touch add any extra lasting harm to its bearer, but it deeply concerned me to see the extent of the dark bruising that was blossoming under the skin with a much more thready, spiderweb pattern than a simple soft tissue impact mark.
“I believe I got too much in the way of one of your compatriots in heat and their similarly inflamed quarry.” He clearly winced briefly at my touch, but feigned normalcy right away as soon as he could compose himself. “This was, ah, three days ago now.”
“And this progression?” I asked, unable to keep the sharpness down. “Three days of bruising and without the wound drying, and that seemed normal to you?”
“It seemed fine,” he protested. “It looked shallow; I dressed it myself with antiseptic and on the second day it seemed dry. It was only this morning that I wake up and find it open and bleeding again, and this-” he indicated the tendrils that spread out from the dark bruise around the cuts, looking like the bare branch-tips of trees- “spreading like this”. He scowled down at himself. “There was nothing in the wound. It’s been washed and covered. There should be no infection.”
“Bacterial damage is not your problem,” I frowned, still tracing the thickest black marks with one fingertip. There was a good reason the majority of the hospital staff was made up of ghouls of all elements- our diagnostic tests were much, much faster and more conclusive than a human fiddling with a tube full of blood and a microscope. I could feel the presence of the infection reflecting back from him into my hand. In my mind’s eye, in the unknown thing I’d seen and thought with before the Ministry pulled me through the planes to serve on this one, my element showed me all it could in its own way- water poisoned by the squeezed and leaking fangs of a snake, or the rotting of a dead thing at the bottom of a well. “This is envenomed.”
“Poisoned?” The Cardinal’s hackles rose like an animal. “But you can control this, no? Even in the haze of heat?” His eyes suddenly looked very stony and sunken in their sockets thickly smudged with the black paint of office, staring past me. “So. He must have chosen to impart venom to me.”
He wasn’t wrong. Heat makes you vicious and stupid, enough to leave a nasty slash on someone, but not enough to fully envenom your claws and teeth against them without making the active choice and thoroughly realising the consequences. But that was absolutely not something I wanted to get involved with, and not something I needed him prioritising now. “You know damn well how potent this stuff can be,” I warned him, changing tack. “I can’t let this leave my sight. You’ll have to stay overnight.”
He raised an eyebrow. “For this? You are kidding me.”
“I’m serious. And so is this. This would have been a simple solve if you’d come straight to me or one of the other physicians on the day, but this is going to be much harder to shake now.”
“It looks like nothing. I’ve received deeper wounds handling kits.” I very much doubted that, but he flapped his hand over the cuts irritably. “You are positive this is infected and not just bruised? It feels fine.”
“Of course I’m positive.” I appreciated his surprise that one scratch could impart enough venom to be a danger, but not the implication that I made such glaring mistakes. “Believe me, Your Eminence, I appreciate how many tasks and pressures you undoubtedly have on your plate. I would have absolutely no reason to want to keep you in here, taking up a bed, unless I felt the situation was serious enough to warrant prioritising over your duties. How have you felt since waking? Any unusual aches or temperature changes?”
He snorted harshly, still barely contained from his earlier realisation that someone had made a purposeful attempt on his life, although his anger was also very understandable even if unhelpful. “Once a human reaches a certain age, Doctor, there are no unusual aches, I’m afraid.”
I took a chance and gave him a severe, schoolteacher look. “And once a ghoul reaches a certain age, Cardinal, which I guarantee is significantly in excess of yours, we learn to smell concern radiating off a man even before he admits to it. Keeping information from me definitely won’t slow this down or lessen it, but it may well make it far, far worse.”
He had the decency to look chastened. “Since this morning I felt a little hot, yes. I thought it was just unseasonable weather.”
“You’re going to have a beast of a fever to go through.” I shook my head. “What else?”
“I had no appetite since waking, either. Only sipping drinks.” He mimicked my shaking gesture, perhaps for comfort. “But genuinely, no pain I can’t account for as normal.”
“Well, that’s better than it could be.” I lightly pinched a peak of skin on the back of his bare hand, which fell back into place satisfactorily, to test hydration. “When you say you drank, you mean taking decent fluids, I take it? Not just a large Communion wine with lunch?”
“Please, give me some credit. If things are bad enough to be day-drinking, I’ll be dipping into a tasteful supply of my own, not mooching off the cheap stuff.”
I grinned to myself at his faux offense as I went rifling through the chilled cabinet below my desk. The Ministry’s facilities may have come on leaps and bounds since I arrived, but there were some things that called for the old remedies. I nudged aside some vials of blood moon-charged water and selected two or three packets that contained acrid-looking pre-prepared powders, shaking a generous helping of each directly into my palm, letting him watch but not too closely. I only turned aside briefly to focus and call up three even droplets of lukewarm water, which slipped into being from under my index claw and into the powder mix like the first patters of a desert rain. When I turned back to his curious face, I was swirling that claw in my palm, the pale powder grounds folding into a paste and taking on a sealike blue-green hue. He questioned nothing, but kept watching my hands, part curious and part impressed.
As I mixed, something occurred to me. “What were you doing around ghouls in season, anyway? Were they contravening the confinement rules?”
My own heat wasn’t due for another week, and the obligatory period of quarantine with any brethren who happened to be afflicted at the same time would be a hassle and require much awkward untangling of events later if anything serious resulted from the unions that would come about- but the thought of being allowed to roam the corridors feral and embarrassing myself and snapping at the humans was much worse.
“No.”
“Then why were you in the quarantine quarters?”
“Do you need to know that for my treatment?”
I raised an eyebrow. “No, but I do think it’s an interesting piece of contextualisation.”
“Then you are asking too many questions.”
I raised both eyebrows but said no more. I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow that enquiry to its conclusion. “Alright. Take a seat.” The medicinal salve for his wound completed, I gestured to the examination table, which would put his chest at my eye level. I kept my face carefully immobile as he tried to maintain his dignity hopping his lithe but short frame up backwards onto the edge, the sleeves of his partially open cassock bunching around his thin wrists.
I came to stand before him and showed him the scentless mix in my palm. He inclined his head once in consent, apparently unconcerned as to the contents. That struck me as a little foolhardy, given how he came to be here, but at the same time, I felt a seed of trust and pride blossom pleasantly in my throat like a jasmine flowering tea. I dipped the pads of two fingers in the salve and held it up to his chest. It was a gesture not entirely unlike our customary salute, and I wondered for a moment how much we looked from the side like two musty figures one could’ve picked out in any of the old stained glass windows around the main Ministry complex.
“I warn you now, this is going to hurt you a lot more than it’s going to hurt me.”
He gave a wry, brittle smile at that. “Well, I do appreciate honesty. Let’s get it over with, huh?”
The vicious wheezing hiss that escaped him the moment I touched the salve to his lacerations confirmed my suspicions that he vastly underestimated my warning. “I’m sorry,” I said softly as I continued to smooth it on in small circles through his shuddering. Above me he set his jaw hard, but his hands gripped the side of the examination table with white knuckles and his right foot tapped agitatedly. Even tending to the other side of his chest I could feel his heartbeat pick up under my hand.
I’d felt fragility in humans before many times. I was no true surgeon, just a stauncher of blood and dispenser of medicines, but I knew more about their soft innards and flimsy bones than most would ever want to unless they were being served up on a canteen tray. If I focused, I could sense the delicate veins and dark rich heart and liver inside him, see their shapes and colourations picked out in water droplets in that mind’s eye. It felt like secret and dangerous knowledge to sense the famous Protege’s quite literal soft underbelly, his adrenaline ebbing and flowing under my hand. I felt heat on the back of my neck and a pang in my own chest, where my own heart would have been if I was his kin. That some humans could be so powerful in their aura and station but so very weak in body still moved me, even after many years of my practise.
“Almost done,” I promised, taking another daub of salve from my other palm. He only grunted in the affirmative, and ground his teeth so hard when I applied it I could hear his jaw joint click. He exhaled hard in relief and hung his head when I pulled my hand away from the wound, now glistening a sickly grey colour between the mix of blood, bruising and bluegreen salve, and moved to the sink to disinfect my hands.
“So, what now? I can go?”
“Absolutely not, I told you.” I scrubbed my hands vigorously with paper towels which met their end in a meticulously covered and sealed hazard bin. “This isn’t a mild flu that will fizzle out in isolation. This is a unique reaction and you’ll need to be monitored and medicated periodically by someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“Nothing is amiss just yet,” he argued, gesturing up and down himself. “Surely I can get a few chores done before I must-”
“And if you sequester yourself in your office or the back of the library and the fever comes on suddenly?” I fixed him with the most dangerous look I dared bring out against a man of his standing. “And nobody knows where you are, if you fall and take a head injury, or go into a seizure from the high temperature? Absolutely not. It is my job now to prioritise you above whatever petty stuff might interfere with your treatment, whether this is a personal errand, or a whim from the Grand Papa himself.”
At that, he visibly relented. It seemed my vehemence even in the hypothetical face of the Papa made him see the seriousness of what I described, at the acceptable price of some of his comfort as a patient. “Do I at least get a private room for my indignity?”
“Of course.”
I walked ahead of him, ensuring the reception area was empty save for the desk attendant as I ushered him through the space and past the private-marked doors at the back. He clasped his undone vestments shut over his chest tightly, concealing his injury even in the empty corridor beyond. The room I took him to was small and blue, furnished only with a bed and small writing desk under the narrow window, but it was a good bed with plump pillows and he seemed to accept it as his temporary home.
“So,“ he said archly, “I suppose I get into bed now like a sick child and Mother will take my doctor’s note to the teacher?”
“His Unholiness will be advised that you are unavoidably indisposed for the next day or two and be obliged under our rules to be discrete with the details, if that’s what you mean.” I saw the displeasure in his eyes. “He will understand and respect my decision, Cardinal. I assure you, you aren’t the first senior clergyman I’ve ever confined to quarters and I doubt you’ll be the last.”
“Only if I don’t make it,” he said dryly.
“Your Eminence, with the utmost respect, please take off those robes and get into bed and don’t succumb to a poisoning just to make a fool out of one po-faced doctor.”
The corners of his mouth twitched with amusement at the command but he obeyed. Kicking off his shoes he fully divested himself of the upper half of his black cassock and his buttoned undershirt, grunting as the shoulder movement strained his injury again, and let the rest fall to the floor and stepped out of it without bothering with the other buttons. I expected him to hand it to me with a quip about taking care of it, but he retrieved and folded it quietly himself and placed it on top of the shoes on the desk’s chair, then reached for the bedcover, his heavy suit trousers still on.
“You’ll be uncomfortable with those on,” I warned him. “I’d get rid of them too if I were you. No need to stand on ceremony here.”
“Ah.” He tucked his thumbs through his belt loops and looked down reflectively. “It would be no problem to me to do this, but, uh, you may not feel the same way.”
I sighed heavily. It took a lot of willpower to keep my tail from going rigid with irritation. “You’re not wearing anything under there, are you?”
He gave a concessionary grunt.
“I am a doctor, in case you’d forgotten. I’m sure even you aren’t concealing anything that would shock me out of professional composure. I could just make you take them off anyway,” I said sharply.
“‘Even me’?” He leaned back a little with a spreading grin that showed a lot of slightly crooked teeth, apparently adequately distracted by that from the open wound and still-burning salve smeared across his chest. “What does this mean?”
Sneaking around the rut confinement quarters, and now playing some sort of boyish game with me, his soft-haired chest and belly exposed with his hips canted like that, even with a dose of venom seeping through his system? I could see at least some of the many rumours which swirled around Copia were true; both about his obnoxiousness and his appetites. “It means give me your door key, I’m going to send someone to your quarters to pick up your sleepwear.”
His wolfish grin stayed fixed. “You assume I have some.”
I thrust my hand out for the key, which he deposited in my palm. “Fine. I’m going to send the nearest Sister to rifle through your underwear drawer with no time limit. Don’t blame me if you find yourself in urgent need of a trip to the tailor after they’re done with the place.”
His laugh followed me out of the little room. “You can tell her the most interesting stuff is in the bottom bedside cabinet drawer on the right, if you like.”
I opted to withhold that nugget of information from the poor girl I sent from the general care desk to retrieve his essentials, to keep it from my own mind as much as anything else.
Rut was a week away, for crying out loud. It was a long time since I had been a youth that boiled over even before the season was fully here. While the Sister was gone I took it upon myself to tidy her desk and think about the most un-sensual medical procedures I could recall, instead of returning to the side of the incorrigible man waiting for me.
When I came back to the private room, Copia was already looking a fraction more wan than he had done when I left him. He had clambered onto the bed and was leaning back against the headboard, the hair at his temples mussed as though he’d been rubbing them. I had a mishmash of things in my arms that the Sister had gathered from his room- his day-to-day diary with a biro clipped haphazardly onto the cover, a plastic wastepaper bin bag with various grooming items at the bottom, the charging cable for a mobile phone, a surprisingly worn but cosy-looking red bathrobe with an endearingly tacky gold monogramme on the breast pocket (I made a mental note to enquire one day what the first initial stood for), and a neatly folded bundle of black cotton which I was confident were a t-shirt and boxers, but was trying not to appear too curious about. I placed them on the bed beside him.
“Here. Now you can change, and settle in.” I turned my back as he swung his legs back off the bed and his hand went for his zipper, and I scrutinized the light fitting above us studiously while I heard the shuffle of fabric behind me.
I was expecting him to have bundled up in his soft robe when I turned back around, but instead he was hanging the robe and t-shirt over the back of the chair beside the bed along with his day clothes, clad only in his shorts. The curve of his back and the sharp straight lines of his legs looked long and elegant despite his small stature, something you couldn’t normally see in his day to day wear.
“This is enough cover, yes?” He asked, although it definitely did not feel like a sincere question. His smirk was present again, as though being the object of attention was giving him a genuine medicinal boost. What a groundbreaking medical discovery that would be if it could be replicated. “It’s more comfortable for me. As you said, you are a doctor. Hopefully I’m not the worst thing you’ve ever seen in an infirmary, yes?”
“Suit yourself,” I sighed, feeling thoroughly checked in a chess game I had at no point really agreed to play. “You’d only have felt far too hot in the robe later anyway. Now- if you need assistance, you have a call button beside the bed here,” I gestured, “but I’ll be in and out anyway now and then to make sure you’re getting enough water. I would strongly advise you make yourself comfortable now while you have the energy, because once your body starts combating the infection properly, it will come on quick. You have a long night ahead.”
Actually, I suspected we both did. I was the most well-informed person about the Cardinal’s condition, as of now, and I already knew I would not be happy ceding the night shift to someone else.