Work Text:
"And don't think I haven't, uh, haven't noticed you... hopping around," Frater Imperator says, waving his hand in Perpetua's direction, as if that should be self-explanatory.
What? he wants to say, but that seems too rude. For a brother he's still on thin ice with, anyway.
"Hopping?" he repeats instead.
Copia puts his gloved hands on his suited hips, takes a deep breath, and looks anywhere but at Perpetua.
"You know. Your... thing you do."
He's suddenly quite focused on the world outside the window. Frost lines the base of uneven panes, which blur the white expanse of the Ministry's grounds. The trees are weighted down, the lakes frozen thick. Gravestones have become treacherous little mounds in the waist-deep snow. It looks quite distant from the office they sit in, but Perpetua feels as if he's out there, despite the lamps and the fireplace, the plush cushions and carpeted floors. He's felt that way ever since winter fell. The fires in the Ministry burn day and night, but the cold still settles deep in his bones, and in places he doesn't want to remember.
"I don't know," he tells Copia, after a moment to think on it. "The thing I do?"
Spit it out. Talk some sense. Shout at me—scream at me. Cry if you want to. I'd understand.
Copia clears his throat. He's still gazing out the window. The soft drone of wind is punctuated by a little leather squeak; his fingers, fidgeting against each other, then curling into a fist.
"You walk a little... odd," he says.
Something throbs, stinging and twisted, in Perpetua's belly. He swallows it down.
"I do?"
"Sorry," Copia adds, turning back to face him, but he doesn't meet his eye. "I'm sorry. That was rude, huh? Not odd, but... ah, I don't know." He waves his hand again, shuffling his feet. "You know what I mean?"
Perpetua's stock still on the edge of the sofa. He breathes, slow, like that page on the internet told him to. In, wait, out. Think it through.
"Please say what you mean," he replies.
Copia blinks. The fists unravel; he tugs at the hem of his jacket instead. He clears his throat a second time. He might be getting a cold, Perpetua muses. It would come as no surprise. Why, he might one day ask, can they not install central heating?
"You limp," Copia says.
That's blunt enough for Perpetua's heart to pound.
"I do?" he asks, too soft for Papa. Too stupid of a question for anyone.
"You don't... you don't notice?"
Perpetua bites his lip, tasting paint. He lets it go with a flush of shame. In its place, his hands grip the skirts of his cassock, and he gets the absurd urge to rip it off, to expose the limb that's caused all this trouble. To tell Copia everything.
One day, perhaps. Or another life.
He asked for honesty, so he must give it too. He forces his grip to loosen and tells the scorching truth.
"I try not to."
Copia doesn't hesitate this time. "But why d'you—why, what makes you..." and he trails off, gesturing into nothing.
"My, uh..." Perpetua looks down at it, feeling it now more than ever. "My knee. This one."
He pats his right thigh. Touching the knee would be too sore. He hopes Copia doesn't see through the pat and realise this.
"What's wrong with it?"
There's that bluntness he wanted. But it's too sudden, too sharp. Perpetua wants time to think of what to say; how to admit to this without making it sound too bad. Words balanced on a knife's edge. Perpetua allows himself until the end of a gust of wind.
"Nothing new," he says, when the roar beyond the walls dies down. "I hurt it, when... a few years back. It doesn't cause me trouble, until it gets cold as balls like this, and then—"
It's his turn to wave away the unspoken, to grimace and fidget into the silence that falls after it. Copia's frowning at him, comically sincere. His hands are back on his hips.
Perpetua feels naked before him.
"How did you hurt it?"
A winter night, still but biting. He left under the cover of clouds. Those grounds he'd known for a lifetime became something foreign, as if the land itself was disowning him just as he turned his back on it. Behind him, the nunnery faded into swirling black, faster than he'd thought it would, the meagre light lost to snowfall and trees. He'd cried when he first lost sight of it; he brushed his tears before they could freeze on his skin. Gasping breaths cut into his chest. He'd stumbled onward, his sobs silent even to his own ears. He hugged the small bag to his chest, clinging to all that he had left in the world, all he had taken from the building he would never see again. His feet sank into fresh, loose snow. He wondered if he'd packed spare socks. He thought of the line above the fireplace, hung in the dormitories a few beds away, where he'd peg a woollen sock out to dry, wiping up drips from the floor, thanking God for His providence and His generosity, for a fire and woollen socks and a cloth with which to clean up the meltwater—
He would never have seen the rock that caught his boot. He fell, clutching that bag with one desperate hand, fumbling in snow with the other. Snow in his mouth, his nose, his eyes, choking him and blinding him, silencing the cry as his knee burst to flames, twisted beyond what God had designed for it.
Nobody had heard him scream. Even in the frigid night of his most damning sin, his back turned to his Lord with the certainty of fools, he knew he did not deserve for someone to hear him.
In his brother's office, a lifetime away, Perpetua smiles. It feels as weak as the winter sun.
"Tripped and twisted it," he says. "You know."
You know.
"Well." Copia claps his hands together. "Okay. That's... that's not good."
Perpetua almost laughs.
"What we should do," Copia continues, his confidence paper-thin. "We will get you something to help. To try it out, if you—if you want."
As if in agreement, his bad knee throbs. Perpetua grips his thigh and tilts his head a little.
"What would help? I take... tablets. Already."
"Ah. Good, but, that's not all." Copia crosses to the sofa opposite and sits down, though by the way his leg bounces, it doesn't seem like he wants to.
"I have tried some cream—"
"No, no. A, uh... I had one, back in the day. A—a cane. To walk around with. I don't know if you have seen it in a photo, or—ah, nevermind." He waves it away, as if embarrassed. "Point is. I recommend, and I can get you one. Stylish... ly. To match your mask, or all those bones, or—I don't know, if you wanted to say fuck the costume and get bright orange or something, then that's not the end of the world. I mean. I would not do that myself. But it's your cane, your dodgy knee, so..."
Perpetua’s eyes burn with something desperate. He blinks it away.
"And what did you do?"
"Oh. Uh." Copia shifts, and taps his left hip. "I did... ballet. Too much of it, I think. I manage it now. My cane is all dusty somewhere. But, you never know—could go downhill again. One of these days, we might be matching."
Perpetua wants to smile, but his mouth is tight and shaky. "We are twins," he says, and his heart jumps to his throat. "It's only right."
Copia's smile is slight, but it's there. It's there and it's real. It's not in Perpetua's mind when he closes his eyes and dreams of things he reaches for and grasps at and slips away from whilst he cries for it.
His head spins. He feels like he's falling. He's breathless, like he was when he was running through the snow, in that night so far away—but this time, he has something to run towards.