Children of the Clergy

Season 2 | Episode 6 | Bargaining token

"Why?"

"Seren, please calm down."

"Why wouldn't you tell me? Why would you even hier me when you knew my father was an angel!?"

Secondo sighed. Seren and Anya had been arguing for a while now and he was sure the other nurses in their rooms could hear. Quintessence was sending Seren a steady wave of claiming energy but, as of yet, it was having no effect on her. She continued to scream at the Russian witch, demanding an explanation.

"Would you two shut up for a second, please!" The witches fell silent, turning to him with their mouths agape.

Secondo wasn't know to be easily irritable or to yell at anyone at all, so his sudden outburst caught they both by surprise.

"Sorry, Sir." Anya replied politely. He sighed again.

"You, angel." He gestured to Seren, "Come with me."

The small girl scrunched up her face and stomped as she spoke, "I am not an angel!"

"Well the signs say otherwise." Secondo opened the door and beckoned her over with one finger. She grumble to herself as she stormed out, waiting just outside the door as Secondo followed her with Quintessence flanking him. "Good day to you, Ma'am." Secondo called to Anya, bowing his head to indulge her formalities.

But the moment the door was closed, his anger was completely back in play and he grabbed Seren's arm, pulled a long rope out of his pocket and tied it around her wrists. Seren recognised the knot he used to hold them together and her eyes widened: a Hookman's noose.

The Hookman Ghouls were the group in charge of captives and prisoners during the Ghoulish Revolution. Their noose was different from the origional because it could only be adjusted to be tighter, never looser. They would tie more dangerous or hated prisoners with it as a threat of death and Seren shuddered at the thought. Secondo would have known that. The symbolism was intentional.

She saw Secondo's smug grin bleeding through his blank expression. "You know what this is, do you not?"

She felt her magics burning again in her chest and Quintessence growled a warning at her from behind his Papa. She shut them down immediately at that, grumbling to herself again.

Secondo tugged at the end of the rope, causing the noose to tighten and dragging her along after him. He tapped on the door of her room and held out his hand, asking for the key to open it. She sighed, dragging her feet on the floor as she walked over. Having to reach into her pocket at an awkward angle, she took a while to finally pull out the key and dump it into Secondo's outstretched hand.

He unlocked the door, pushing it open and strolling in. Once again, she was pulled after him and the ever tightening noose began to constrict her wrists painfully.

The young boy tied the end of the rope around her bed post, helping her up to sit on the soft mattress. She waited paciently, finally having calmed from the endless wave of mojo Quintessence had been sending her. Secondo glanced around her room for a moment, seemingly shocked by how crammed in everything was.

In his room in the Quarters, he could fit his kings-size bed, his large desk, bookshelves to line an entire wall and still have space to move around comfortably. As a matter of fact, he could probably have fitted much more in without it feeling at all crowded.

Seren's room however, as well as all the other workers' rooms, were very different. The bed was large but squeezed in between two tall shelves that were barely wide enough to fit three thicker books inside. A large chunk of the otherwise square room was taken up by a tiny bathroom that barely fit the bath and toilet in comfortably. The door was positioned on the tiny bit of wall beside it. On the opposite side of the room was a desk attached to the wall with a reasonably large closet in the corner. There was almoust no room to move around the bed since it took up most of the already miniscule space.

"Wow...this is all you get?" Secondo asked in subdued disbelief.

Seren smiled slightly, "I actually sort of like it. Having such a small amount of storage space means I only keep things that are really important to me. So everything always feels special." Secondo sighed and she noticed that something seemed to be weighing on him, like there was something important he knew that was physically tiring to keep in. "What is it?"

"...Do you want to know why they hired you? Even though they knew you were an angel?"

Seren's eyes lit up. Secondo's ability to hear people's thoughts would have let him hear Anya's too. "Of course I do! Please, tell me."

She could almoust feel the guilt drifting off him and Quintessence wined from the corner of the room. He would have been able to feel his Papa's emotions even if he hadn't been bonded to him, since he was a Quintessence ghoul, but the bond just added a further connection and made the pain Secondo was feeling even more apparent in his soal.

"The Clergy had an incident with heaven way before the revolution, and it took them forever to get them to leave. They ended up having to offer the angel visitors the soals of an entire Mormon congregation since all heaven wants is to recruit more people to God...They planned to hand you over if heaven ever returned as a way of getting them to leave sooner. You are a bargaining token, Seren."

She felt a tear slip down her cheek at the brutal realization of just how little she mattered to the Clergy. They would have handed her off to her father's kind in seconds if they felt it necessary.

Secondo went to leave, strolling in the direction of the door.

"Wait, I'm still tied up here!" She called after him.

He sighed, resting his hand on the door and bowing his head in sorrow, "I know." His voice was slightly shaky, "I will send someone to sit in your room with you. Until this has all been sorted out and you have been deemed trust worthy, I cannot leave you unsupervised."

She sobbed, "You don't trust me?"

Secondo froze for a moment, clearly wanting to say more. But, instead, he just called Quintessence over and began closing the door. "Get some sleep."

Seren tucked her legs into her chest, resting her head on her knees and just sobbing for what felt like forever. The stains of her tears were barely even visible on her black skirt and she didn't really care if Anya or the nurse in the room next to her could hear her cryes through the thin walls. Her whole life had fallen apart in a single day and now the boy who she'd helped to save from a phycopathic entity of hell didn't even trust her either.

She felt trapped by the same people who offered her comfort after her mother's death. And it was all her father's fault. A father that only appeared to her in the memory of the night he hurt her mother and left. The Clergy was suppose to protect her from all that, but now she was just a danger. A creation of the opposite and possibly a servant of heaven too. She didn't want to believe it, but fuck if she knew what she was anymore.

She heard a knock at her door and her crying stopped abruptly. As she lifted her head to see who it was, a short woman, just younger than Anya, pocked her head around the door. She was stunning, with velvety red hair and shadowy hazel eyes.

Despite the situation, she wore a gentle smile and was addressing Seren with the look of a saddened mother. "Hey, sweety. How are you holding up?"

Seren sniffed and rested her head back on her knees. "Not too bad."

The sister sighed and went to sit in the chair next to the desk. "You sure? You don't look it."

Seren didn't respond. Instead, she kept her eyes closed and prayed to the Dark Lord for it all to be a bad dream, for her to go back to being a normal witch who the Clergy wasn't using as a 'get-out-of-trouble-for-free' pass.

She felt a gentle hand on her head, stocking its soft fingers through her hair. The lamp on her desk, which had been the only thing lighting the room, was switched off and the sister placed a gentle kiss to her head. "Just rest, sweety. You'll feel better in the morning."

"Okay..." Seren sniffed again feeling the tears beginning to brim her eyes.

It had been a while since anyone had talked to her like that or treated her like that. The last person to do so had been...her mother.

She lay down on her side, wrapping the covers around herself and curling into a tight ball. The tears were streaming down her cheeks now but, this time, she was trying to keep quiet.

The sister started to softly hum a tune and, before long, she had drifted off into the bliss of sleep.