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."
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.
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.
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--
“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--"
“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.
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."
(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.
"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?"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
cw implied child abuse, inpatient psychiatric stuff and medical & religious abuse, injury/gore ment
Date: 2024-11-29 08:36 am (UTC)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."
cw: religious discussion
Date: 2024-12-02 03:15 am (UTC)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.
cw mentions of self harm, mutilation, gore, disordered eating
Date: 2024-12-02 05:03 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-04 05:34 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-08 04:46 am (UTC)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--
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 11:44 pm (UTC)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.
cw maladapted spirituality from religious abuse, light reference to child abuse, suicidal ideation
Date: 2025-01-03 03:50 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-23 04:00 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-01 03:53 am (UTC)“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.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-01 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-01 01:18 pm (UTC)Still fraught, he lets his tears fall. He means it. Every word. He believes, so, so very much, in his neighbors.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-01 04:17 pm (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2025-02-01 11:08 pm (UTC)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.
And so I emerge from the depths of Sheogorath to return to the depths of Sheogorath
Date: 2025-05-28 04:26 pm (UTC)