lovethyneighb_or | IC inbox (pumpkin hollow)

Mulcahy would back away, but two issues: first, he’d bump back up against Powell’s corpse. Second, he’d show fear.

It’s just Theodore. He knows and likes the man, and yet—and yet something feels so deeply wrong. Obviously there’s the inexplicable presence of Powell and these imps and the church and the fire, but there’s—there’s horrible and impossible such that either he’s been beset by devils or he’s dreaming… and then there’s another underlayer, a mysterious off-ness that he doesn’t understand. And he can’t stand it.

“Because what he wants is denying himself his peace,” Mulcahy tries sternly. “And no man should have to suffer forever like that. How are you here?”

“You needed a confessor,” he says, quite plainly.

Tap.

“I’m afraid you’d have to tear through a whole army to get through to him. An unenviable task. Tell me, Father, is he not consumed by hatred?”

You needed a confessor, Theodore says. Mulcahy hears 2’s voice saying, tell me the truth.

His gaze turns bitter and suspicious. “Of course he is. Should that mean that I abandon him?”

(It’s an ugly and thankless duty, to care for people in spite of their tireless hatred for others. It’s just the thing for a priest to do.

He’s so tired.)

"Of course not. But it may be best that you know what you're up against."

He gestures to the implike things, which are keeping their distance now, seeming uncertain in their actions.

"Banekin hail from a realm that, at its core, is Domination-as-Consuming, Hope-Crushing, Forever-Chained. Daedra are... how might you say? Embodiments. His own hatred, his constant companions, are quite literally eating him alive when he no longer has what he needs to lord over his surroundings. That's quite typical, of those that seek out ol' Molag for power. The promise of being powerless under someone else, so long as you can dominate everything else in turn, is quite appealing when you don't think too much about it. After all, most mortals realize they're inevitably under someone else's heel- isn't it just a matter of survival and practicality, to make sure you end up as close to the top of the heap as possible?"

This is reaching into a kind of alien mysticism that 2 would never once have bothered with. In all those years he was never so imaginative, and if there was any kind of mystic or occultism he bothered Mulcahy with, it was his own.

That stinging iciness in his nerves doesn't go away, but this... is different. It's the shallowest compensation.

...

"How are you here?" He wants to know what kind of game he's expected to play before he plays it. This, before he answers any questions, before the man tries to pull a confessional from someone whose most terrible mistake he can clearly already see. "For that matter, what is here?

“We’re somewhere, I believe, between a dream, a desire, an an appeal for help. And I… well, I suspect I’m here because I have a tendency to promote change, for better or worse. And I’d rather it be for the better in your case, Father. I do like you.”

He walks over to a nearby candle, snuffing out the icy flame and seeming to conjure up a new one that glows with a proper warmth. The orange hues of comfort and safety begin to radiate from it, but there’s a distortedness to it. The edges of the world are too sharp, too deep, like heavy strokes of an oil painting, and the colors are a little too bright.

“You don’t trust any of this,” he remarks, tone neutral, as he scoops up a piece of broken stained glass. It turns into a butterfly and takes to the air.

“Probably best that you don’t. I had a dream recently that kept folding in and in and in on itself, and by the morning I had folded myself into such a tight knot.”

Theodore is a spirit of change, then? He is, at least, forthright.

"Is that so...?" He still doesn't deign to get closer, but that butterfly is ever such a familiar sight.

"W-well... you dream as well, then? Are... are they often good dreams?"

"Sometimes they're wonderful. More vibrant than anything I can describe. Sometimes, they're torturous, designed to break me. I break quite often. It's part of my nature."

He walks around the church, life blooming in his footsteps. It isn't restoring the place to what it was, and in some cases it's actually hastening on the ruin, roots pushing through cracked stone, but it's a sort of destruction that lives and breathes and grows.

"You're a fool to keep fighting, Father. But that isn't a bad thing."

Mulcahy’s hands clench and unclench at his sides. Theodore is saying a lot of things, and there is a lot to ask. But.

In a small voice: “Then how do you come back from being broken?”

And as he does, he turns around to look back at the body.

“You grow. You grow and you grow and you grow. Twisted and strange and refusing to die. You form new shoots where the world cuts you back. You learn to grow around your hollows and let life shelter in it. You push up through cobble and masonry and make it crumble as you reach for the sky. And you ready yourself to do it again when they cut you back.”

He pauses.

“Someday, you might find that you can’t grow back. When that happens, you let yourself rot. You feed the next thing that will grow in spite of them. If you know you have that power, they cannot destroy you in a way that matters.”

As Theodore speaks, he lowers to his knees in front of the body and clutches Powell’s cold, stiff, cruel hands in his. He had the words love and hate tattooed onto his fingers for some unfathomable reason; the one he clutches now reads love.

This is as he was conditioned to do: turn away from the living world to mire himself in guilt, in what was never really a failure at all.

“You make it sound so wonderful,” he sighs. “But I’m no plant, Spirit. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t—I don’t know if I can.”

He knows he’s speaking metaphorically, but the point us that he feels far more like a dead bush whose woody skeleton has been there for years more than he does a thing that can change. Not in a way that matters.

“No one knows what they can do, until they do it. But if you’re looking for proof, Father, look back at what you’ve done. Really, look back. Start digging back the soil, and you’ll more likely than not find you’ve got some sturdy roots.”

“Tell me, Father, truthfully, would you rather be capable of love and feel this agony, or never feel love at all and spare yourself from the pain?”

"..."

He clasps his hands in front of his forehead, elbows leaning on Powell's rotten chest, and takes a terribly deep sigh.

"Spirit," he murmurs, "you came for a confessional. The least I can do is be truthful."

...

"Pain has been the color of my whole life. When I was a child, the source of it was my parents and my brothers. I would hide from them in my sister's room, as the rest of us boys were packed into the other bedroom. I was always closer to her than the others. More like her. When we left for the ministry, it was as much because of our calling as it was to escape. Seminary was only a little better. The best decades of my life were spent as a hospital chaplain, ministering to the disabled and offering relief to the sick and dying. And after that was the war, and then that awful ship--if you know what it is like to break, you must know what it feels like to--to feel..."

He clutches at his ribcage.

"... My heart, my body, my mind--all of it shattered in that place. The Village, what Number 2 did, it was all taking advantage of that. The Korean War and the ship was all impersonal and senseless violence and all the aftershocks of that. Number 2 took the time to break you along where your cracks already were. And much of that was... was merely turning your eyes to truths about yourself that you were always too frightened to face. Oh, h-he carved up my brain and fried my mind. He made my senses into liars and my dreams into reality. He poisoned our food. He locked me all alone in all-white rooms. He invaded my home. He attempted to force me into idolatry and blasphemy every day. And yet, more than all of that... he showed me how desperately I have failed to be everything I tried to be. What I must be, as a servant of Him."

He lowers his hands. Turns to Powell and his bloody face and torn throat. The least he can do is confront, with both of his eyes, the mess he has created.

"The old Hawkeye and Powell... both of them were my fault, and I will live with that forever. I know now why I have never swayed a crowd. Why I have never held any gravitas or charisma, always being mistaken for absent even by those who loved me as a friend. I am not good. I am not a good priest, and I am not a good man. I have never been, and I cannot be. No good deed will change what I am in my nature: a viper. And I know where I am going when everything is done."

He scrubs at his eye and turns, just a little, eyes still cast resolutely downwards. Towards the vines and roots bursting from between the stone.

"And yet I cannot abandon love. Perhaps I've thought about it here and there, and sometimes it's held a lot of weight, but it's never been a lasting thought. It's never seemed appropriate. As a child, I loved my family. At the hospitals, I loved the patients and the staff. I loved the 4077th, and many of my fellow voyagers through the ship and the Village. How could I stop caring when we were all in such pain? What would that have helped? How could I answer His call if I stopped? Spirit, I've been in agony my whole life because I could not help but love at least one of my neighbors. And I will always happily be that fool.

"The problem is--I don't know what good it's doing anymore."

Edited 2024-11-29 08:53 (UTC)

The spirit doesn't say anything at first. He kneels down, looking intently at the floor as he gathers pebbles of rubble, humming to himself as he does so. Then he starts writing in the dust, seemingly nonsense and certainly nothing that Mulcahy can glean any meaning from. Then he looks back at the fistfuls of stone, then back to his scribblings on the floor.

Finally, he stands up, facing Mulcahy. He tilts his head to one side, staring at the priest, and through him, and then straightens back up. Then he pushes the stones into Mulcahy's hand.

"You're the crowd. You're the adulteress. Only you've gotten it all confused. Somehow, you've made it just and righteous to cast the stones, so long as they're at yourself. Go on, then. Do it properly. Hurl these stones at yourself, with all your might. Not backwards, but forwards. Throw them overhand, and strike yourself in the temple. Surely you can do that, with righteous hated, if love has failed you."

He's asking the impossible, asking Mulcahy to make a rock circle the world. It would take more strength than everything the poor man could muster in his life.

Should Mulcahy try to do anything else, he'll suddenly find a feeling like overwhelming, petrifying dread locking up his body. This is the test. Throw the stone, with all your might, with all your hatred towards yourself.

He looks up at him in bewilderment. "Spirit, I don't..."

And then a horrible and blackened dread comes down on him; blackened, like that crashing and churned ocean, like the smoke that rose from the wasted city. Gritting his teeth and clenching the stone, he raises it over his head, and throws it.

Mulcahy is an athlete, but he's thinner than he once was, too. He throws another, and it makes it farther this time; he throws and it leaves the church doorway. He feels a determined anger welling up in him, and throws, but no stone makes it farther than a few yards beyond the church doors. He could do it, he thinks. He should be able to. He should be able to. He tries to will the dream to allow him and it won't. If the spirit had asked him to do anything but this, he could do it; he'd slice off his fingers, he'd dig open his ribcage, he'd pull out his teeth and cut out his own tongue; he'd vivisect himself for this anger, the kind of fury that feels like it should justify the world on its own terms, like the existence of it by itself can and should light up and devour entire forests. If the spirit had asked, he'd starve for this anger, the way he so often has. But he didn't; he asked him to throw stones, and no hatred can defy the world that's in front of him, which he is bound to.

He's sobbing as he throws another, fingernails scraping the cobblestones for the next pebble. I want to. And he can't. Never, not once, has this or will this ever work. It does nothing and means nothing, and--and all this wasted energy, for nothing, and he can't--he can't stop.

Edited 2024-12-02 05:44 (UTC)

Sheogorath watches, even as Mulcahy's fingers grow cracked and bleeding, even as the priest grows dizzy and sick and a dark vignette creeps into the edges of his vision. Sheogorath watches until Mulcahy has no more stones to throw.

Then, he goes and gathers them up, and sets them just out of arms' reach, gathered in a pebbly little congregation.

Sheogorath watches Mulcahy, silently, like a cat.

The blood on his hands doesn't feel good at all, but it does feel right. If he can't throw these stones, he can split his skin trying--he drinks from it, the dizziness, the darkness, the self-consumption of it. You know that he does this for you. For you. Guilt is a feeling that comes from without, from others, from there being people to hurt at all--if he were alone, maybe, maybe, maybe. Spend all his days penitent and self-flagellant and it will never work but at least he'd be alone. He moves to strike the bricks, either his flesh will give or it will give him stones, God, he can't move, God, you know how he hates. It's worth it. Keeps himself in check. Better himself than others. Better this. Always did have a temper--no thing worth breaking, no man worth hating--hit it again, hit it again, hit it again, hit it again, move your hands, for God's sake, move your hands--

He screams.

And he takes a breath, and he groans and shrieks, and he screams again. And--

Edited 2024-12-20 07:39 (UTC)

“Shepherd, shepherd, shepherd… you’re baying like a wolf. Don’t you know, you shouldn’t frighten your flock. Here they are, gathered to listen.”

With a broad gesture of his cane, he indicates the stones. They’re still sitting there, outside of Mulcahy’s reach, like a group of tiny people gathered far, far down at the base of the mountain on which the good father stands.

“Go on, now. Preach.”

He’s speaking so quietly, so calmly, as if Mulcahy wasn’t just having a meltdown.

"Shut up!" he hollers, still having a meltdown in fact, "How dare you! How dare you! You know what I am! They, they know what I am," he gestures to where the Banekin may or may not still be, he isn't looking, and then gesturing down to Powell's still-present beaten and bitten and bloody rotten corpse, "he knows what I am!"

He brings up his hands, his bloody fingers, laughing into them--a shrill, demented howl. "Preach," he gasps, "preach what? What invests me with the right? After what I've done! I didn't even know! I don't remember it!" His gestures are wild, clawing at the air because he cannot claw his chest, cannot pull at his hair. "I had to guess! I had to be told what I did! Because like an animal I couldn't help myself, and no matter how much I try to be good and practice patience and fidelity and mercy, that is who I am! An animal!"

He presses his hands to his eyes. "Of course any man has a right to defend himself. I learned how to box for it. But--I joined the priesthood for a reason. I'm meant to set the example. And think about the men I was surrounded with on Earth. Doctors. The sick and wounded. Hawkeye--he might give someone a black eye, but at no moment would it ever occur to him, from the bottom of his heart to the top, to murder someone else. I know this--I saw it, spirit, he died beside me countless times for it--" his voice strangles as he searches fruitlessly for another stone, "--and yet, after decades of preaching His word and surrounding myself with healers, nothing has worked!"

(To stop being his father's son. He got his awful temper from him.)

He seethes, "I hate him! I would kill him again, I know I would! I would kill 2! I am an angry, hateful creature, I dream of vengeance more than mercy, and I don't know what is so wrong with me that I failed to change this! Spirit, what is there to grow from such poisoned roots? The thing to do would be to rip them out and--"

... he stops, suddenly, eyes wide, shaking.

“You’re ashamed of being an animal, are you? What’s you rather be, a houseplant?”

It’s hardly the first time he’s heard this particular mortal complaint, and it isn’t even an especially hard bit of guilt to work out, but it gets him every time.

He takes a moment to gather himself, to stop shaking quite so hard.

“I should be better,” he laments. “I mean—not just me—man is made in the Lord’s image—man may be an animal, but he ought to be more than a beast. It is good to reach towards divinity, not to become it but to be closer to it, to walk His path… even if you aren’t talking about God, shouldn’t man strive to do better than be ruled by his most base instincts? I dedicated my life to do better. To help. Do you understand?”

Although at this rate, Mulcahy wouldn’t exactly say no to becoming a houseplant. It sounds far easier than all of this, and he’d probably get some sleep for once.

“Well, the guilt alone sets you apart from a beast- not that that’s helpful, exactly, but I think you’ve already achieved what you set out to do in that regard. You believe people can be more than beasts, though, don’t you? It’s genuinely something you think can happen, something you genuinely wish to see?”

“Of course I do.” He grips his own arms, as though he were cold. “I’ve seen it, time and time again. Even in the depths of man’s own self-made purgatory, I’ve seen it. Doctors and nurses, squeezing out every last drop of their ingenuity, their energy, their sanity, to make the same effort to save every patient on their table. Clerks and corporals coming to their aid above and beyond the call. Soldiers going home wiser and kinder.” His eyes begin to well. “The way the human… rises, over and over again.”

Still fraught, he lets his tears fall. He means it. Every word. He believes, so, so very much, in his neighbors.

"And so you witness, and so you preach."

He's within arm's reach, eyes utterly fixed on Mulcahy.

"You are broken, Father Mulcahy, and that does not disqualify you from anything. I can see it in your eyes. You've beheld miracles, wrought by the power of mortal spirit. Would they have been anything worth noting, if you did not come from a place of brokenness? Would it be as inspiring, if such resolve came naturally? You journey with them, broken and wretched, through a broken, wretched place, to something better, and you have not gotten there yet. That does not make you less of a priest. What you are feeling, in your agony and in your grief, is the pain of growing and wanting to grow. A tree does not begin in the heavens. It starts its journey in the mud, lower than low, sometimes covered in the filth of a bird's droppings. A priest that only ever lives on high has no roots to hold fast when his faith is shaken. And I have seen a lot of shaken faith."

… and that does not disqualify you from anything.

From anything.

And you have not gotten there yet.

(There was no convincing him that he wasn’t a shattered man. But to be told that it makes no difference, that the world is still open to him because he is not done…)

There’s a creeping, hurt, hateful animal in him that bucks and thrashes against those words, against any kindness offered his way; but no animal can stop the rain from meeting the ground, and those words burrow into the soil of him, seeping. Feeding what grows.

“Almost fifty years and one war of growing in the dark,” he sighs, craning up to meet this strange spirit’s eyes. “I don’t know if I’ll ever reach the sun at this rate.”

Come back from breaking by growing, grow by changing… can he even do that, when he feels so spent? It’s been a long time since he could imagine the future. He can’t even imagine next month.

Edited 2025-02-02 02:19 (UTC)

And so I emerge from the depths of Sheogorath to return to the depths of Sheogorath

blindwatchersees - 2025-05-28 16:26 (UTC) - Expand

IC inbox (pumpkin hollow)

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cw implied child abuse, inpatient psychiatric stuff and medical & religious abuse, injury/gore ment

cw: religious discussion

cw mentions of self harm, mutilation, gore, disordered eating

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cw maladapted spirituality from religious abuse, light reference to child abuse, suicidal ideation

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And so I emerge from the depths of Sheogorath to return to the depths of Sheogorath