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"You know how the Ordo said that none of his Bastard Childre survived," Atticus leaned back and looked to the ceiling, his mind drifting back to fire. The first time he had seen what happens to kindred when they die. "They lied. They let me live." There, it was out there now. No take-backs. How would Lina respond. It was not unanimous that he be allowed to live, some of the Mysteries still wanted him put down. Atticus would like to think that he has proven himself.

Moretti raised an eyebrow. Well, that was news. An Order cover-up was one of those things that happened. Experiments went awry. Decisions got made. Sometimes, you had to do what you had to do, and that which was criminal in some Domains was also what was the right thing to do.

"God damn, James. No fucking around with you, is there?"

Calm. She certainly didn't read like she was about to cut a bitch. He was an asset. A good one, who had as much drive toward Change as she did and kept nipping at her heels, ever driving her forward to greater heights. She wasn't going to cut him for his Sire's bad decisions. If someone had done that to her, where would she be?

"Well, if the Covenant saw fit to let you live, that's the Dragon's choice. You're fine by me, and I'm not telling anyone. Can I ask, how did all that play out? From the beginning...?"

"I only know from where I come into the picture. Anything before that was rumor and hearsay."

Atticus takes out another smoke, "Want one?" Atticus will provide one if Lina says yes.

He takes a deep, long breath, and dove in. His eyes closed as he told the story, remembering it with a uneasy clarity, "I was on a Crab boat in Alaska. Working the night shift. Making sure the boat wasn't getting destroyed the sea while the rest of the crew slept. We rotated the night shift. I had never fallen asleep on shift before. Not once. Then..." A brief shutter, "Everything went black. Next thing I remember, I woke, covered in blood, still ain't sure who's it was. I was in the engine room. Bodies all around me. My Crew, my friends." A single tear of blood trickles out of Atticus' left eye. It travels down his cheek, rests on his jaw bone, builds a little bit, before falling with a pat to the thigh of his jeans.

"Then the fire. I panicked. Insanity. I now know it what Rötschreck. I broke out of the engine room made my way through the flames and dove over the side into the freezing ocean water. I know now ship had drifted out of the sea and into the ocean. Which should have taken several days." Lina did some quick logic, Atticus lost several days of his life... His memory just... gone.

"Hours later, just before daybreak, I was pulled from the ocean by a boat. I should have froze to death. When I hit the ship deck and panicked again. Frenzy took me. The boat was manned by a group of mortal servants and several members of the Ordo, including two Ax Sworn." He took a drag off his cigarette. "They were hunting my Sire, or whatever you wanna call him. He was a former dragon. Former because they basically excommunicated him when he lost his mind, ordered him to the final death. He was a serial embracer. He would embrace kine and run experiments on them. All... not very subtle. I am the only survivor of these experiments, or so they tell me. My guess, if they found one of my brothers or sisters, they were in no state to continue, so they were put to death."

A few moments pass by. "For some reason they didn't execute me. So over the next few years, I helped to track him down, capture him, and bring him in for the Dragon's justice. I watched them burn him alive. That's when I completed my first chrysalis, standing there listening ... to ... him ... laugh." His words seemed to carry an echo through his mind. "It was like, some Buddhists call it sudden enlightenment. I think it's one of the reasons they granted me my freedom. Some freedom, the Bastard Son of a psychotic monster."

Atticus wiped his face, opened his eyes and looked to Lina, "And now you know why I threw myself into my work..."

Lina accepts the second smoke, lighting it up. It had been a while since she had partaken properly in a smoke; somewhere along the line, it had been a habit unformed and forgotten. A moment's memory a motel, a year or so ago, the cigarette sliding toward her eye as she tested herself. It was nice, knowing how far she had come. From then, to Aaron, to Florin and the Chapterhouse and the bustling Covenant...

Atticus's story was a hard one. A fisherman on night shift, getting got? Brutal. Of all the places to get jacked by a serial embracer, that had to have been one of the most unlikely spots one could have imagined. His friends dead. A wave of panic, and off he went into the icy depths. By mere happenstance, he had been saved by the very Dragons that were hunting his Sire, a monster in his own right. It was a story that she could empathize with. He got justice, justice and enlightenment in fire...

Slowly, she gave an understanding smile.

"Best bastard I've ever met."

Moretti let out a deep sigh, taking a long drag of the cigarette, wondering if there were people with happier death stories.

"You feel like you owe it all to the Covenant, yeah?"

"Thanks boss," The compliment was nice, given the state of things, "Yeah, you could say that. I owe everything I have, and everything that was taken from me to the Dragon. It's weird you know. It's like, I'm thankful for being born, even thought I am super likely to get cancer. Only that cancer is insanity." Atticus leaned forward and rubbed his eyes, "My last chrysalis. I discovered something. I found a truth Lina. It may be just a truth to me, but I found a real truth."

Atticus took a breath off his smoke, "The beast. It's not some metaphysical monster. It's our sin. All of them the seven deadly ones, and the smallest white ones, all wrapped up. What it does, what it wants to do, is truly embrace sin in the most maddening and insane ways. That's what he did. Embraced Chaos. Embraced sin. Reveled in it. Relished everything about it. Like Scrooge McDuck in his bin."

That was actually a very apt metaphor for what it was they were dealing with. You always played the odds, every time you went into the womb of the Chrysalis to change another piece of yourself. She nodded at the whole cancer bit, understanding full well what he was about. And then he spoke on his third Chrysalis, and what he found.

Sin.

He was speaking to the right person about that. Every Daeva knew sin, right down to the dirty, rotten core.

"Yes, that... makes sense. You're talking to the right person about that, a Daeva who try-try-tries to turn the fact that my Beast drives me toward tearing away what others have to elevate myself into something tempered by a dream that we can all overcome this. Nothing will ever be enough, until one day, we overcome this Curse entirely, the sin of jealousy endlessly portrayed in a cycle that I have to fight so very hard to arrest. My hopes... they channel it. Keep me from falling. But I don't mean to make it about me. Sin. What did you have to do to find that Chrysalis?"

Steven

"I went down to the Cosumnes River Preserve and went full Draugr. I let the beast loose. It hunted and killed, it languished in the blood and the violence. Thankfully, it didn't come across any kine. I was too far in. Slept in the dirt. It was on the third night that I realized it wasn't the beast. It was me. At some point the beast and I had become one. Like... I guess... It was like driving. You do it so often that you forget your doing it. I was standing on a hill, holding a mountain lion above my head and letting the blood rain down on me... and I realized. Yeah, it was me."

Atticus' whole world view had changed at that moment. The whole deal. So much light came through that darkness.

Steven - now seems a good time to wrap this one up on such a meaningful note. <3

works for me.