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gravehags · 14 hours

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copia/f!oc, 4k. sophie's having a Bad Day. copia does something about it.

banner by the divine @enjoy-my-swearing, special thanks to @anamelessfool for the beta read

everything's orchestrated, follow the arrows - ao3

“Motherfucker.”

Copia freezes mid-step, poised over the one floorboard that cracks like a pistol underfoot when it’s this warm and humid. It would be even louder than the almost musical sound that just rang out through their cozy little apartment. Sophie’s rarely that vehement over something as simple as breaking a glass while washing dishes– though for a lady once bound in service to Christ, his wife has an admirable ability to curse like a dockworker. He doesn’t generally have to tread lightly around her, but perhaps it’s best not to startle her just now.

Truly, he hadn’t meant to sneak up on her. He’d been going cross-eyed over a spreadsheet for a while, and lurched from their little home office towards the kitchen for some water, maybe to make a sandwich for himself and another for his lady.

It’s the grinding sound, too much like the broken crockery before, like something caught in the garbage disposal, that catches somewhere in his chest. He hasn’t heard that sound often, but he’s heard it enough to know what he’s hearing. Even over the sound of the water running.

Ah, he thinks, sidling up to the kitchen doorway. It’s a terrible thing, being right.

His darling wife, his precious Sophie, is hanging her head over the kitchen sink, her shoulders bowed and shaking. The kitchen window catches the afternoon light, its frame of Devil's Ivy turning to milkglass, the air to gold, her sleek hair into some fabulous alloy. Even from here she’s beautiful, sloppy in her father’s flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled perfectly past her elbows. She raises one hand to swipe the inside of her wrist at her snotty nose– it’s an endearingly disgusting gesture– and the slice of red in this haze of green and gold is as loud as a scream. It nearly stabs the breath out of him, and it’s only the habit of a lifetime of communal living that keeps him from making a noise at the shock of seeing it on the pale underside of her forearm.

Copia leans against the doorway, and watches his wife cry.

This isn’t entirely unexpected.

Every morning she burrows herself into his skin like a tick, indulges so beautifully in the sin of sloth, just the way her husband has taught her. Even when the air conditioning broke last August, she’d wriggle herself a little closer into him. She would sigh like a cat when he slid his arm around her, when he pressed a kiss to the back of her neck just to taste the salt on her skin.

This morning, she’d taken a call, extracting herself from the warmth of her husband’s arms in the diffuse pre-dawn half-light, everything the same shadow of itself. The sudden lack of warm wife in his arms had done more to wake him up than anything else, listening to her tense Spanish down the hall. Today was supposed to be her day off, but she’d been gone before the streetlights, leaving him coffee, leaving him a bagel with cream cheese and cherry jam.

Leaving him to pace around the apartment like a caged tiger.

Sophie’s charmingly old-fashioned, in her way. She hasn’t quite figured out why some of her text messages are blue, and some are green. Or why some have Read: 6:23 AM at the bottom and some just have Delivered. She certainly hasn’t figured out Share My Location. It isn’t that she’s stupid, or even incurious– he could never love a woman like that– it’s just that these things are orthogonal to the way she thinks.

It’s a good thing he keeps an eye on her. Someone has to. And that’s just what he did, all day, watching her little blue dot on the C train all the way up to Washington Heights, and then the A train all the way back to Rockaway Beach. It made him wonder if she’d left her phone on the train, if something had happened to her– but then she’d stayed on the edge of the water for so long that his gut churned. She wouldn’t have left him, wouldn’t have just walked into Jamaica Bay without a word of explanation, without at least a note, a text message, something. Delivered, not Read. Suicide is a mortal sin, and besides, his Sophie would never abandon him.

He had an idea of what happened, if he’s honest. He’d kept her little village in Colombia in his weather app, even after all this time. Monsoon season, and the infrastructure she’d nearly dedicated her life to still incomplete. It wasn’t hard to make an inference. So there’s absolutely no reason his gut should be this tight, no reason why his hands should shake.

Sophie wouldn’t abandon him, so he’d let himself pace their apartment once, twice. And then he did what he’s always done, and worked, tried to bury himself in the ledger of this little non-profit, making the numbers dance from red to black. He’s a skilled accountant, but he’d had to triple-check himself, reread every row and column. He’d only let himself check the map every twenty minutes, only let himself text her after the sun hit the curtains.

Delivered, not Read, and he happened to be looking as it flipped to Read: 2:38 PM, as three little dots popped up, and then he could breathe again. It almost didn’t matter what she said in response. She’s alright, she’ll be home soon. Does he want anything?

He’d tilted his head back, looked up at the popcorn ceiling, and listened to his wooden chair crack in counterpoint to his spine. He’d felt his breath moving in his lungs.

Just you, baby.

It had taken all of his considerable willpower not to pounce on her as soon as he heard her keys in the lock. He tried not to suffocate her, he did, he knew he’d devour her entirely if left to his own devices. So he’d made himself wait three whole minutes after she got in to stretch and pad down the hallway to see her, already curled up on the couch and frowning at her laptop. She hadn't paused longer than to take off her shoes, hadn’t said a word to him, didn’t even look up when he came into the living room.

But, on top of a napkin on the corner of the coffee table, she’d left a sweating can of his favorite milk tea, still cold from the bodega. It hurt his heart in the best way. His wife, his precious Sophie, almost never left the house without bringing him back something, whether a drink or a snack or even just a couple of flowers she picked. He prayed to his Lord Below that he never took it for granted.

He’d moved to her, run a hand over her babyfine hair and kissed her temple. She grunted, patted his wrist absently. She was Working. She’d probably been working even on the train, running logistics and writing emails and connecting Person A to Person B over the phone. He’d left her to it. It would have been supremely counterproductive to do anything else, at that point.

Now, he’s leaning against the doorway to their kitchen, watching his wife cry. Watching her bleed.

It’s something of a shock, honestly. She hates crying, hates it nearly as much as he does. He’s seen it before, but rarely. He can count the number of times on both hands, and have fingers left over. They’d both wept, the first time they went to bed. He’d caught her weeping the morning after, as she’d come to the conclusion that her vocation was over. That had been hard.

Harder still had been the thought running through his head, at the time. He hadn’t done anything irrecoverable, yet. He could leave her, just like that, faith broken and alone, and go back to his Ministry. It would be an impressive feather in his cap, truly corrupting a Bride of Christ. A Papa hadn’t pulled it off in a few hundred years. It would go a long way towards securing his legitimacy, still more than a few wagging tongues. Collect her rosary like a trophy and go trotting home a hero.

He couldn’t, of course, any more than he could have torn out his own heart. That might have been easier. What he’d done was get down on the cold tile with her and pull her into his arms, tell her that he was sorry, but that he couldn’t be sorry for loving her. She’d put her hand over the terrible brand over his heart, and closed off that line of thought for him forever.

This, though. His jaw aches, biting back the nearly physical need to go to her.

Briefly, Copia considers just ducking back into the hallway. Sophie’s a mess, and she hates being a mess. Watching her like this feels voyeuristic, feels like listening to her masturbate. It’s the kind of falling apart she’d only do if she thought she was unobserved. He’s never seen her so unguarded. The thought makes him suck in a breath, sharp, at a blinding flash of jealousy. He wants this, wants to see her this vulnerable, to see every tiny private thing. It's an almost physical lust, to see what it looks like when she's broken. He wants her to give it to him willingly, to break like this in his arms. Not alone.

She hears it, and her head whips around, hackles up, eyes wide and feral. Like a small predator, something less than apex, cornered. Something with sharp teeth. There's blood on her face.

“Sophia,” he says, aching.

Now he can see the color of her eyes, so bloodshot that they’ve gone a shade of seaglass. He reaches for her, keeps his hands where she can see them, moving slow and cautious. “Babylove. You’re bleeding.”

“What? Oh.” She looks at her hands as if they are attached to someone else. Or maybe not: she’d have more compassion for someone else. She turns back towards the sink. “I’ll take care of it.” Shrugging it off. Shrugging him off, and the instant of rage and despair at her rejection is nearly blinding.

He moves past it, already shucking off his gloves and stuffing them in a pocket. He lays a careful hand on the sweet curve of her waist, and looks over her shoulder. “That looks fairly deep,” he says, soft but not too soft. She’s tense, but she isn’t actively cringing away from him.

“S’fine. I’ll handle it.”

“There’s self-sufficiency and then there’s absurdity. Let me help you. You don’t have to do it alone.”

The red is still pulsing out of her skin into the running water, a splatter on the shards of glass in the sink. Damn, not the Depression glass. No wonder she’s upset. He knows that isn’t all of it, can’t be all of it. She’s been crying for some time now, he can see that.

“It’s not– Copia, it’s a scratch.” It really isn’t. She’s sliced deep; he sees the flap of skin. She’ll be lucky if she doesn’t need stitches.

“Let me feel useful, hm?” He touches her wrist, where she’s holding it under the stream, water running over his fingertips. “You taught me how to put a bandage on, have a little faith in me. Or at least your teaching abilities.” He’s trying to keep it light, but she hangs her head, silent. He presses his cheek into her hair. “Sophie,” he murmurs. “Not so much to be consoled as to console, yes? It would be a consolation to me, if you would just– let me help you.”

He wants more, of course. He wants all of it. She’d been preoccupied for days, not so much on edge as distant, absent. He’d rather she slap his face than hear sorry, honey, what was that? one more time, like she wasn’t there at all.

Her hand is so small, in his. Strong and callused and small. He waits. He has spent so much time, waiting for her.

Finally, she leans her head back against his cheek. “First aid kit’s on top of the fridge.”

He squeezes her waist, kisses the top of her head, and his shoulders go a little loose. It’s something. It’s a start, anyway.

There’s so much blood that he leaves fingerprints on the white metal box, and he swallows to keep his throat clear. It won’t help Sophie if he panics. He’s never been faint at the sight of blood– innoculated, you might say, at a young age. But he hasn’t had to deal with this much of his wife’s blood, before.

Copia sets the box down next to the sink, and feels the solid click of the latches in the balls of his thumbs. Sophie keeps it well-stocked, and he finds betadine and gauze and medical tape. She’s kept her hand under the spray, obedient. That’ll make it easier, that she isn’t kicking harder. It’s not quite a relief.

He bends over her hand, flashing back on Asheville, so long ago now. Even under the soap and the blood, the smell of her is still the same. Leather and amber, sunlight, clean and animal. It makes it hard to see, for a moment, but he blinks it back to look, to check for shards of glass. It looks clean, and it didn’t go so far as to cut a tendon, but her poor hand. He looks up at her face, and that’s worse. Watching her cry was one thing, delicious in its way, but seeing her face looking defeated, looking at him with love and longing and something like despair, is a blow to the heart. Seeing her like that feels like a violation.

“Honest assessment, now, Sophie. You’d know more than I would. Does it need stitches?” He smiles at her, and it feels a little grotesque. He’s trying. “Consider that I need you to have that hand. I couldn’t live without your handjobs now, it’d be a cruel thing to do, depriving me like that.”

She smiles, more in recognition of his effort than genuine amusement. “No. Little to the left, and probably. Lucky.” A bitter twist to that last word, and it feels like a knife to his gut. “I’ll follow up with Dr. Olin though, if it’ll make you feel better.”

“It would.”

He bends to his task, then, pushing the nausea to the back of his mind. She only hisses at the sting of the antiseptic, and he thinks he does alright, hiding the flinch. Watching the blood bloom on the gauze feels otherworldly, too vivid to be real, screaming red spreading through blinding white. He wraps the soft cotton over her delicate bones, counting every freckle, tracing a tiny scar between her knuckles. He knows where that came from, knows how she got every callus, and counts himself blessed. (By what, by who, doesn’t really matter.)

He can’t restrain himself from kissing the back of her hand after he’s taped her up, and doesn’t try. She looks a little steadier now, and he’s glad. He reaches to run a hand over her sleek hair, to lean in and kiss her forehead, and breathes deep of the smell of her. “Go sit down, babydoll,” he says, and for a wonder, she does, slipping away from him.

He turns to grip the sink, and lets himself react.

Copia gives himself a full thirty seconds to shake, and to see if he’s going to vomit into the sink, looking at her blood turning pink on the porcelain. The light’s too bright, his hands feel far away. There’s a faint smudge of her blood on the back of one of his hands, and for a moment he thinks he might lose the battle with his stomach. He jerks to rinse it away, and breathes in for a count of three, holds for a count of four, exhales for a count of five. He has to do it three times before he’s steady.

He fetches water for both of them, drinks half of his glass and refills it, grabs a packet of those almond cookies she likes. Then he steels himself to go to the living room.

She’s so pale, under the skylight, her skin in contrast to their burnt orange couch, the dark blue of her grandmother’s afghan thrown over the back. She looks washed out, ghostly under the pale light, hollowed out. He wonders when she ate last. What hurts him more is how grateful she looks when he settles in next to her, presses the water glass into her left hand. Every time, every little kindness, she’s faintly bewildered. Sophie reacts to kindness with the bafflement of a dog being shown a card trick. While he loves her for never taking it for granted, it scrapes him raw that she doesn’t seem to trust it.

Her phone buzzes, and he watches her take a breath, square her shoulders, and reach for the damned thing. He lets her get it all the way out before he takes it from her, gently but firmly.

“Copia, I have to–”

“No.” He isn’t harsh, but he is implacable. Somewhere he registers that his voice is pure Papa. “I know from experience that you type perfectly well with one hand, but no.” He sets it to the side, out of her reach, and reaches down to sweep her legs into his lap. Gratifyingly, she moves with him, tucks her head under his chin. She isn’t fighting him, and it almost makes him more worried. Maybe she’s just responding to his tone, but he’ll take it. He has to.

There’s a fine tremble to her, a faint vibration deep in her bones. She’s on the ragged edge of something, he knows what it looks like just before she works herself into dropping in the traces. He lets her chew mechanically on the cookie, even though there’ll be crumbs everywhere. It’s fine. This is more important than how badly he’ll squirm if any of that goes down the front of his shirt. “Tell me what’s wrong.” He isn’t asking.

Copia knows that he’s a hypocrite. Sophie will give him space to brood and sulk, will get the fuck out of his way for a few hours when he needs it. She isn’t a patient person, but she’s patient with him. It’s taken work; neither of them knew how to live with just one other person before they were together. She hadn’t even been gone half a day, and he wants to coil around her and squeeze, wants to swallow her whole. He couldn’t give a good goddamn. She’s hurting, and he needs to know why.

“Sister Doctor Jane,” she says, so small, and his stomach drops. “She’s been hurt.” Sophie’s brave captain, in Colombia, a woman of iron discipline and boundless compassion, hidden under a faintly acidic brand of acerbity. It was Sister Doctor Jane that had founded the mission, and Sister Doctor Jane that Sophie was the most bitter about disappointing, when she’d left the order for her heathen man.

The woman had actually flown up for the wedding. Copia shook her hand, even, and had felt about two inches tall under her assessing gaze. He remembers the exchange, her grip frim, how she’d leaned in and breathed, “Do not fuck this up.” Sophie told him later that she’d never heard the doctor swear before. “Most assuredly not, signora,” he’d promised. He hopes he isn’t fucking this up now.

His wife is speaking. “It– it ain’t been good, the last couple days, down there. The foundations for the last wing of the hospital weren’t– there was a design flaw. The rain’s been s’bad they got washed out. Been tryna coordinate evac with Sister Isabella. Izzy’s good, but y’know what the signal’s like, down there.” Too well. Especially when the weather isn’t cooperative. “Sister Doctor was getting the last of the patients out when the roof caved in.” She straightens, in his arms, rears back to look at him, and he recoils a little from the ferocity of her eyes. “So forgive me, Copia, if I ain’t taking too much time off for a cut on my hand.” The venom in her voice startles him, burns him, even if he knows most of it is directed at herself.

Sophie reaches for her phone again, and it takes him a moment before he can gather himself, before he grabs her around the shoulders. “No. No, Sophia– stop struggling, listen. Listen to me.” She does still, but it’s a coiled stillness, ready to strike. He tightens his grip for an instant. “You are going to let me help you.” He can feel her muscles slack in surprise, confusion, he’s not sure. “Woman, with the number of tours I’ve coordinated, do you think I don’t know about logistics? You think so little of your people that they’d turn down assistance from a man sworn to the Devil?” He’s murmuring into her ear soft and sweet, the kind of seductive that he’s used on her before. He knows it’s effective. He knows it’s unfair.

What he doesn’t expect is that he gets almost exactly what he wants. Nearly in slow motion, his beautiful wife, his precious Sophie, burrows into his shoulder and makes a strange wet wounded noise. It doesn’t register at first what’s happening, how she shakes like she’s coming apart at the seams.

He doesn’t know what to do but hold her, looking up at the light, how it’s filtering through the matching Devil’s Ivy around the skylight, threaded through the rough blonde wood bookshelves that Sophie put up with her own hands. His books and hers, some of them annotated in both of their hands, copies of Meister Eckhart and Anton LeVay that they’d sent back and forth from her mission, from his tour, commentary to each other in the margins. They’re better than any love letter, white passionflowers and Burano lace pressed between the pages.

“Sophie,” he’s saying. “Sophie, I want this. You’re not alone, you’re not ever alone. I’m with you, babylove. That’s what this is, that’s what this means, I wasn’t just sharing your bed and your name. I want to share your life. Let me, let me in, let me help, let me be with you. Don’t make me be alone.”

He has her life, he knows. Of course, it isn’t just her life he wants, it’s her soul. He wants to feel the warp and weft of it in his hands, even if it burns him. He knows he’ll never get her to deny Christ, likely can’t lead her further down the path of self-indulgence than he already has. Isn’t she in his arms, even now? He thinks, perhaps, she may have even made him truer to his own principles, refined him in his own selfishness. Isn’t he holding her, instead of living his life for his flock? So it’s a small concession, really, helping her people tonight. In her own way, she’s brought him closer to Satan, his brave wife. And she may never deny Christ, but he knows that she’d never deny her husband, either. He’s read First Corinthians, the same as she has. He knows what she hopes for, in her secret heart. Maybe she thinks this is a concession, but really it’s just that he can’t stand to see her in pain, not if there’s something he can do to ease it.

Copia strokes her hair, and waits for her to settle, rocks the sweet weight of her in his arms and croons little nonsense noises to her until she’s steady again. Brave and true and strong.

“Here is what will happen, Sophia,” he says, when he can feel her still and breathing clear. He doesn’t have to see her raised eyebrow to feel it, either. “I will make food– alright, I will order food. We will work on this, together. We’ll figure it out, yes? And when you and I can do no more for your people, I will take you to bed and comfort you the best way I know how. Hopefully, you will let me comfort you with my dick.” And that does get a laugh out of her, and even if it’s watery, it still feels like he’s won something.

In the end they don’t quite save the day, though they salvage much of it. More than she could have, alone. They’re up the rest of the night, with making phonecalls and checking weather reports and supply chains and directing resources from a thousand miles away. When he finally has her in his arms, in their bed, exhausted and sated, the streetlights are flickering out in the face of the dawn, and he thinks he’d follow his wife anywhere, anywhere. Even into the light.

#elise knocks it out of the park with these two yet AGAIN #every time i read their fics it gives me a visceral physical reaction #i can’t think of any other fic author that wrecks my ass like that #10000/10 #the band ghost #fanfic

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