Chapter Text
“Doppio, let’s go.”
There was a water stain in the corner of the ceiling, blotchy and mottled. White paint cracked and peeled around the junction like static.
“Doppio?”
It kind of looked like a weird amoeba, or a sickly cloud. Or maybe a fuzzy ripple on an old television screen broken up with faint striated bars. It almost seemed to wiggle and move, pulsating and flickering the longer he stared at it.
“Doppio.”
Doppio jumped as a large hand closed around his own.
“Sorry!” he gasped. “I’m sorry!”
His father fixed him with a concerned stare, eyes dark beneath the ridge of his eyebrows. He was dressed in his vestments, looking out-of-place in the rundown apartment hallway. Doppio’s shoulders twitched as the priest gave his hand a light squeeze.
“You’ve been staring into space again,” he said sternly. “Do you need to go home?”
Doppio shook his head vigorously, eyes fixed on the water stain.
“Are you sure? If you’re not feeling up to it, it’s alright.”
“I’m sure! I can do it.”
The worried crease in his forehead didn’t disappear, but he gave Doppio a faint smile. “I think this will be a valuable experience for you,” he said. "It’s an important task.”
Doppio just nodded again, and the priest let go of his hand. It fell limply at his side as he walked behind his father towards an apartment door.
The man who opened the door was hunched and pale, stress pulling the skin of his face into tight bunches under watery blue eyes. He bowed his head and ushered the priest in with a few muttered words that Doppio didn’t quite hear.
“Yes,” his father said. “Of course, I’m happy to help. Don’t worry.”
The two men continued talking, but the words were faint. They reached Doppio like a song playing from a house down the street, fuzzy and indistinct. Skinny legs carried his body further inside the dim apartment, and another door was opened. Somewhere nearby a faucet was dripping loudly.
“My daughter is inside — please, Father Naso.”
Vaguely, he was aware that he had entered a bedroom, trailing behind his father like an errant cloud. The man’s daughter was lying in bed under a heap of blankets. She looked a little clammy, but otherwise perfectly normal, with the same blue eyes as her father. The priest walked to the bed and knelt down at her side.
“Hello,” he said, voice low. “I’m here to help. Can you answer a few questions for me?”
The girl nodded slightly, eyes darting around the room.
“When did you first start to feel this unholy influence?”
“It’s been… a few months, I think. But maybe less.” Her voice was a tinny recording.
“How did it start?”
“I heard it talking to me. The… the demon. It keeps telling me things, I…”
“What did it say?”
His father asked more questions like that for a while, nodding sympathetically at each answer with that worried look on his face. They could have been talking for five minutes or five hours. Doppio was almost lost in the hazy atmosphere until the prickling sensation of being watched jolted him halfway out of his trance.
The girl was staring directly at him. In the dim light, one of her pale blue eyes seemed to shine sickly green.
“Please,” she said, chapped lips moving slowly. “Get it out of me.”
His father responded, but once again the words were static in his ears - this time drowned out by the weight of that blue-green stare. He only broke eye contact when a calloused hand entered his field of vision.
"The bag," his father said pointedly — probably for the second or third time, if past experience was anything to go by. "Open it, please."
Right, he was holding a bag. The weight of it registered belatedly in his mind as he snapped the clasp open and pulled out a Bible, handing it to his father without a word. The freckled arms in front of him seemed to move on their own as he took out the rest of the items and handed them over.
His father began to speak. He was standing so close, speaking so loudly, that the words must have reached his ears, but Doppio couldn’t make them out at all. He was drifting, untethered, from that crowded room, as if he would just float away like a balloon without the string connecting him to his body.
And right now, his body seemed very, very far away.
————
Doppio woke up with a pounding headache. That wasn't new.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand, wincing at the brightness in the dark room. The screen read Sunday, June 14th, 8:00 AM. Trying to recall the events of the past day, Doppio found himself drawing a blank - the last thing he remembered was following his father into the apartment, and then everything faded into hazy nothingness.
But again, this wasn't exactly new, and at least his past self had apparently been lucid enough to change clothes before going to sleep. Doppio would just go downstairs like usual, try to gauge how pissed his father was, and then clean up for church-
No, said a voice.
Doppio blinked.
You are not going to church.
Well.
That part was new.
“Uh,” he said aloud, then wrinkled his nose at how loud his voice sounded in the small room. “Hello?”
...hello.
“Ooooookay. Hm.” He frowned. “Hmmm. That’s not good.”
He waited for another moment, but the strange voice did not respond. Squinting, he unlocked his phone and opened a new tab. He started to type into the search bar, but only got as far as ‘ hearing voi — ’ before he reconsidered and backspaced. This was definitely an incognito tab kind of thing. Tapping the screen idly for a few seconds, he eventually settled on ‘ auditory hallucinations’ and hit enter.
What are you doing?
Doppio didn’t respond, instead perusing his Google results with increasing alarm. Maybe this was just one of those weird things that happened when you were trying to fall asleep or waking up.
Don't ignore me.
He ignored it. Yeah, it could be a sleep thing, but he was pretty sure those usually didn’t last this long. Between his bad luck and his already impressive cocktail of undiagnosed issues, that hypothesis wasn’t looking great.
Denying this is a futile —
“Will you shut up?” he snapped. “I’m busy!”
Silence. That seemed to do the trick, temporarily at least.
The voice didn’t say anything else as he got out of bed, throwing his shirt into the corner and changing into a clean button-down. It continued to keep quiet when he dug a migraine pill out of the drawer on his nightstand and downed it dry, and stayed silent when he creaked across the floorboards into the bathroom across the hall to brush his teeth. By the time he was attempting to make his dark brown hair look presentable in the mirror, he was well on his way to forgetting it had ever happened.
Tiptoeing down the stairs, Doppio peered around the corner at the bottom to see his father in the kitchen, standing over the Moka pot on the stove with his back turned. The smell of coffee wafted towards him. Doppio took a breath and straightened his back.
“Good morning,” he called out. His father turned around.
“Oh, good morning,” he said with a smile. Doppio’s shoulders slumped in relief. He wasn’t angry. “Are you feeling better?”
“Uhhhh?”
“Better than yesterday,” his father clarified. “After we left, you said you were nauseous.”
“Ohhh, yeah, uh, much better!” he managed, taking a seat at the table. “Well, my head hurts, but, um— it’s fine.”
“That’s good. Can you help me set up for the event after the service today, then?”
Well, that was easy enough. No exorcisms in unfamiliar apartments, no awkward social interactions, just hauling chairs and folding tables around. He opened his mouth to agree—
—and choked violently as a hard lump rose in his throat. He covered his mouth, eyes wide.
“Doppio?”
“S-sorry,” he choked out. His throat felt like it was closing up. “Just… throat's d-dry,” he managed, struggling to push the words out.
His father gave him a strange look, but mercifully didn’t question him any further as he set down a cup of coffee on the table. The rich smell filled his nose and helped quell the queasiness as the lump subsided.
“I’m heading out early,” he said. “You might want to fix your shirt before church.”
Doppio blinked and looked down to see that he had, in fact, buttoned his shirt on inside-out. He winced.
“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.”
His father nodded and turned away.
Doppio sipped at his coffee and stayed glued to his seat until his father left and he sighed, some of the tension draining from his frame. He jumped up from the table to take off and re-button his shirt properly. The caffeine was helping with his headache a little, and his throat felt fine now, but he couldn’t shake the vague sense of unease that clung to him as he washed his cup in the sink.
It continued as he stepped out into the morning light, but he was starting to feel a little better. The early summer air was warm but not sweltering. A soft breeze brushed against his skin, carrying the faint smell of the nearby ocean with it. Sunlight illuminated the street before him as he walked, lighting up the familiar houses in pastel pinks and yellows. Doppio even spotted a dragonfly on the way — a glittering emerald specimen, darting around carelessly in the fresh air. Maybe, he thought, it was shaping up to be a beautiful day after all.
Until the church came into view, and Doppio’s body came to a screeching halt.
It wasn’t like anything had stopped him. There was no invisible wall blocking his path, as far as he could tell, and certainly no visible one. He had just… stopped. With mounting panic, he tried to take another step, but it seemed like every muscle in his legs had simultaneously decided to stop listening to his brain.
“What the fuck?”
To his relief, his mouth was still working. But it didn’t change the fact that he was talking to an empty street, with seemingly no way to move forward. He tried his arms — also unresponsive.
Would you like to be reasonable now?
Well, shit.
If you had cooperated earlier, this wouldn’t have been necessary.
“What the hell does that even—”
He bit his lip mid-sentence. Eyes darting around the curtained windows on the street, he couldn’t see anyone watching him, but he couldn’t be too sure.
Okay, he thought. Okay, Doppio. So maybe you’ve got voices in your head now. That’s fine. You’ve had worse. Just take another step and—
Voices? It sounded almost amused this time. I should hope there are no others here already, or I’ll be in trouble.
“Shut up,” he hissed. “You’re me, you don’t get to critique my… my fucking internal thought process or whatever.”
But your thoughts are so very loud.
“Yeah? Then get out of my head, and you won’t have to hear them!”
He had the urge to ball his fists, to swing his arms around, but they stayed firmly at his sides. The voice hummed, so low and deep he thought he could feel it reverberating in his own chest.
Hmmm. I’m afraid I can’t do that. At least, not yet.
“Not… yet?”
The voice chose that point to stop responding. Oh, that bastard. Wait, no, this was still just some extended hallucination, a figment of his own imagination. He was the bastard.
“...what do you want?” Doppio said eventually, at a loss.
Are we ready to talk, then?
“If that’ll make you let go of my legs, then sure.”
Something flickered out of the corner of his eye. Turning his head as much as he could, Doppio caught a glimpse of a figure in the window of the house two doors down. Maybe they couldn’t hear him, but someone must have noticed him standing frozen in the middle of the sidewalk. It wouldn’t take long in a small neighborhood for word to get back to his father.
...I think we might both want to take this somewhere more private.
Before he could come up with some angry retort, Doppio fell forward as the iron grip on his body was released. He gasped and narrowly avoided crashing face-first into the sidewalk.
“Agh!” He scrambled to his feet, trying to look around surreptitiously as he brushed himself off. “W-where, then?”
Anywhere. Not the church.
He contemplated heading back home, but it would be a long walk. The thought of his legs shutting down on him again in the middle made his knees feel wobbly. Instead, he ducked into the nearest side street and stumbled quickly down the sloping road.
The beach was never far away in Olbia, and Doppio reached it within minutes, kicking sand up into his socks in his haste to get away from the street. The voice in his head hummed approvingly when he found a secluded spot to hunker down among the rocks. It was an ugly beach, more dark rock and scruffy grass than the pristine white sands of nearby Costa Smeralda, and definitely vacant so early in the day. Doppio kicked aside an empty beer can and bent over to catch his breath.
We’re alone here?
“Nobody comes here in the morning.”
Hm. Good.
“So, uh.” Doppio started to speak, but realized he didn’t know what to say. “How did you— I mean, how did I…?”
You? The voice didn’t bother to disguise its contempt. You’re still convinced I’m just a… a fragment of your mortal psyche?
“I mean, yeah. I don’t know how you got control of my legs like that, though.”
You lost consciousness at an exorcism . Are you seriously this dense?
“Are you trying to convince me you’re a demon or something? Because that’s stupid.” It wasn’t like he hadn’t considered that for a minute. Or two, or maybe five. But still.
Well, if you’re so insistent.
He waited for the follow-up, but nothing came. Then he coughed.
“Eugh— wha-?”
The hard, itchy lump from that morning returned. Doppio gagged as a wave of nausea overcame him, and he felt bile start to rise up in his throat. He scrambled to move his arms and legs out of the way as he leaned over and threw up all over the sand.
What came out, however, was not the remnants of dinner or his morning coffee. Instead, a thick black liquid spilled out of his mouth, dark and shiny as an oil slick. It was bitter and viscous on his tongue as he retched.
“Holy shit, ” Doppio gasped. He stared in blank horror at the pool of black liquid oozing over the sand.
Convinced?
He spat out what seemed like the last of it into the puddle and wiped his mouth with the back of his shaking hand. Frowning, he inspected the resulting black smear with suspicion.
“Is this gonna stain?”
Is it… what? A tinge of confusion colored the deep voice. I don’t know.
“‘Cause if my dad sees, like, demon spit on my hand, we’re both in trouble.”
...my apologies, it said flatly. I did not consider the repercussions.
He awkwardly rubbed his hand against a patch of clean sand for a moment, then checked again. Not clean, but it looked lighter. He could probably get it off with soap and water… or holy water? Would holy water hurt him if there was a demon in his body now? Doppio shook his head, trying to focus.
“Um, so,” he said, “You’re like, an actual demon?”
That’s what I said, yes.
“I didn’t think they were real.”
Your father is a priest, isn’t he?
“Well, yeah. I just figured the exorcisms were to make people feel better, or something. But damn.” He shuffled away from the pool of black goo slowly inching toward him. "I guess you’re not a hallucination.”
You’re taking this surprisingly well.
Doppio shrugged at the empty air. “Well, exorcisms are cheaper than therapy.”
I’m here because I’m trying not to get exorcised, thank you.
“Why’d you pick the son of a priest then? That seems kind of stupid. No offense,” he tacked on hurriedly, because he’d rather not start vomiting slime again. The demon made a weird noise.
It isn’t like I had a choice, it said, sounding slightly irritated. The only reason that exorcism didn’t banish me was because you left your body wide open.
Doppio blinked. “What?”
Your soul was… outside. Disconnected. Normally it would be difficult to move from one human to another so quickly, but yours was completely defenseless.
He thought back to the day before. Entering the apartment in a daze, struggling to focus on his father’s words, losing track of time… yeah, not surprising that a demon would be able to waltz right in under his nose.
"Way to pick a bad time to space out," he mumbled, leaning back against the rock. The warmth of it through his shirt was barely comforting. "So, what, are you trying to corrupt my soul?"
I have no such petty ambitions. I just need a place to lie low for now.
“For… for how long?”
Oh, long enough.
The words were almost ominous enough to break through the rock-hard defense of irritation keeping him from melting into a puddle of fear on the ground. Almost.
“Can you cut the cryptic bullshit?” he snapped instead. “Just tell me what you want!”
I… honestly, I’m not sure how long I will need, the demon said slowly, sounding pained, like it had to force the words out. But I assure you that my only goal is to go unnoticed.
Well, that was still cryptic. And definitely a lie. Doppio might not have been a very good Catholic, but he remembered enough from his father to know that demons were liars. And this demon in particular had done nothing to earn his trust.
“Can you at least tell me your name?” he said, because he was getting tired of calling it ‘the demon’ in his head all the time.
Absolutely not.
“Why? I need to call you something.”
The demon didn’t respond, but he got the distinct feeling that something inside of him was laughing. And then, to his horror, his own mouth split open in a grin.
“Names have power,” said his own voice in a strange, unfamiliar timbre. “My dear Doppio.”
And with that, Doppio passed out.