lovethyneighb_or | IC inbox (pumpkin hollow)

“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)

"You are not dead, father, buried though you are. If your growth does not push you towards the sun, that can only mean your roots are digging deeper. What untapped riches will you find, after your long journey through the depleted shallows?"

IC inbox (pumpkin hollow)

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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