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Breaking the Drought
I got back on the ficcing horse today. Have a thousand words of Priest fic:
It's the little things that catch her unawares. She has long since grown accustomed to the silence left in Johannes' absence, the dull, dead emptiness where he used to be. She no longer listens for his footfalls on the stone floor of a catacombs gone to the vampires and the nightcrawlers and their servile pets or on a rough outcropping of rock above a suspected den. She no longer hears his voice in her ear as they sit to dinner, low and warm and asking her to pass the mash or the loaf of stale hardtack, nor does she feel him as she sleeps, a heavy, comforting warmth at her back, woolen cassock and warm breath and the drowsy press of his half-hard prick against the swell of her ass. Gone is gone, and in her heart, she knows that he is forever beyond her reach.
But it's an uneasy peace she had made with his loss, and sometimes as she threads her way through the throngs with her head bowed and her rosary twined between her fingers, she sees him in the high jut of passing cheekbones or the curve a shoulder. Sometimes she hears him in a snatch of conversation tossed to the winds, clipped and rough and full of secret mischief and humor black and tart as chicory. She knows it's not him, knows, and yet she falters all the same, stops and sways and clutches the beads of the rosary so tightly that they rattle in her grip. She looks for him even though she knows he won't find him, scans the crowd until her eyes burn and her head throbs with the effort, and when she finds nothing but a sea of wary, unfamiliar faces, she drops her head and spits her bitter disappointment onto the gritty asphalt and plods on. The sea of indistinct bodies parts before her, fish shying from the shadow of a shark, and she soldiers on, head bowed and palm bruised by the press of the beads, the smarting stigmata of thwarted hope.
It's cheekbones this time, high and sharp, and her fingers spasm convulsively around the beads as she lurches to a stop and spins on her heel to track the flash of movement. A muffled curse at her back, and then a man trudges past. He's wiry and sallow and stooped, with sunken eyes and teeth gone dark with rot. His lips twitch with the impulse to repeat his dour implication, but then his eyes catch sight of the cross etched into the pale, thin flesh of her face, and the oath dies in his scrawny throat.
"Apologies, priest," he mutters, and scuttles away before she can reply.
It wasn't him. You know it wasn't him, she chastises herself even as her eyes scan the crowd in search of a familiar flash. There, near the mouth of a squalid alleyway. Brown hair and a flash of high, regal cheekbones. But the man who bears them is too short and too paunchy and too bowlegged, and the flicker of hope gutters and dies inside her chest like all the others. The taste of greenbark and pitch fills her mouth, and she turns her head and spits a foaming clot onto the pavement.
It wasn't him, she thinks, and resumes her trek.
It never is, and it never will be, says a gentle voice inside her head, the soft patient murmur of her childhood confessor, an Irishman with powdery hands and a shock of white hair to match his cleric's collar. You know that, child.
Yes, she does know that, has known it since Priest and the battered remnants of his cohort had staggered back to the encampment with blood on their clothes and several holes in their already-dwindling ranks. Priest was hard and remote as the moon, but he was neither cruel nor a liar, and so when he had announced that Johannes and two others had fallen to the vampires in the hive at Sola Mira, she had known it for truth. The last of Johannes had been mixed with the blood and the dirt on Priest's face and hands, and it had sloughed off with every desultory, leaden mile they had walked beneath the pitiless sun.
Gone, gone gone, her footsteps had chanted as they had straggled over the sand and grit and parched desert hardpan, and the listless snap of her cassock had echoed it, intimate as breath against her ear. Gone, gone, gone.
She had not wept then. Such displays of emotion were prohibited by The Church, as forbidden to members of the Priesthood as sex and liquor and a life beyond the strangling strictures of the cloth. She had pressed her lips together until sensation had bled from them and taken shallow breaths against the unseen hand that had coiled its crushing fingers around her chest. Chin, another priest who had come to his majority along with her, had tried to offer what comfort he could with a pat on the back and the periodic jostle of his shoulder against hers as they walked, but it had only served to sharpen the yawning absence of a body on the other side of her, and she had coughed and hitched and spit her bitterness to the earth. Then she had fallen to the back of the line and let her eyes burn with tears she could not shed. She had been tempted to slow until they left her behind, but she had still feared death and damnation then, and she had known that Priest and the others would not abide another loss, would drag her back to the city by force if need be, and so she had walked blindly on, guided by the black of Chin's cassock and the snap of it around his slender ankles in the torpid, early-morning breeze.
Nor had she cried when they had returned to a barracks that had been too empty and too quiet, as lifeless as the crypts through which they often crept, stinking of adrenaline and stale sweat and the sweet sage they chewed to clean their teeth.
I don't know if it will ever go anywhere or see the light of day, but it feels good to break the drought.
It's the little things that catch her unawares. She has long since grown accustomed to the silence left in Johannes' absence, the dull, dead emptiness where he used to be. She no longer listens for his footfalls on the stone floor of a catacombs gone to the vampires and the nightcrawlers and their servile pets or on a rough outcropping of rock above a suspected den. She no longer hears his voice in her ear as they sit to dinner, low and warm and asking her to pass the mash or the loaf of stale hardtack, nor does she feel him as she sleeps, a heavy, comforting warmth at her back, woolen cassock and warm breath and the drowsy press of his half-hard prick against the swell of her ass. Gone is gone, and in her heart, she knows that he is forever beyond her reach.
But it's an uneasy peace she had made with his loss, and sometimes as she threads her way through the throngs with her head bowed and her rosary twined between her fingers, she sees him in the high jut of passing cheekbones or the curve a shoulder. Sometimes she hears him in a snatch of conversation tossed to the winds, clipped and rough and full of secret mischief and humor black and tart as chicory. She knows it's not him, knows, and yet she falters all the same, stops and sways and clutches the beads of the rosary so tightly that they rattle in her grip. She looks for him even though she knows he won't find him, scans the crowd until her eyes burn and her head throbs with the effort, and when she finds nothing but a sea of wary, unfamiliar faces, she drops her head and spits her bitter disappointment onto the gritty asphalt and plods on. The sea of indistinct bodies parts before her, fish shying from the shadow of a shark, and she soldiers on, head bowed and palm bruised by the press of the beads, the smarting stigmata of thwarted hope.
It's cheekbones this time, high and sharp, and her fingers spasm convulsively around the beads as she lurches to a stop and spins on her heel to track the flash of movement. A muffled curse at her back, and then a man trudges past. He's wiry and sallow and stooped, with sunken eyes and teeth gone dark with rot. His lips twitch with the impulse to repeat his dour implication, but then his eyes catch sight of the cross etched into the pale, thin flesh of her face, and the oath dies in his scrawny throat.
"Apologies, priest," he mutters, and scuttles away before she can reply.
It wasn't him. You know it wasn't him, she chastises herself even as her eyes scan the crowd in search of a familiar flash. There, near the mouth of a squalid alleyway. Brown hair and a flash of high, regal cheekbones. But the man who bears them is too short and too paunchy and too bowlegged, and the flicker of hope gutters and dies inside her chest like all the others. The taste of greenbark and pitch fills her mouth, and she turns her head and spits a foaming clot onto the pavement.
It wasn't him, she thinks, and resumes her trek.
It never is, and it never will be, says a gentle voice inside her head, the soft patient murmur of her childhood confessor, an Irishman with powdery hands and a shock of white hair to match his cleric's collar. You know that, child.
Yes, she does know that, has known it since Priest and the battered remnants of his cohort had staggered back to the encampment with blood on their clothes and several holes in their already-dwindling ranks. Priest was hard and remote as the moon, but he was neither cruel nor a liar, and so when he had announced that Johannes and two others had fallen to the vampires in the hive at Sola Mira, she had known it for truth. The last of Johannes had been mixed with the blood and the dirt on Priest's face and hands, and it had sloughed off with every desultory, leaden mile they had walked beneath the pitiless sun.
Gone, gone gone, her footsteps had chanted as they had straggled over the sand and grit and parched desert hardpan, and the listless snap of her cassock had echoed it, intimate as breath against her ear. Gone, gone, gone.
She had not wept then. Such displays of emotion were prohibited by The Church, as forbidden to members of the Priesthood as sex and liquor and a life beyond the strangling strictures of the cloth. She had pressed her lips together until sensation had bled from them and taken shallow breaths against the unseen hand that had coiled its crushing fingers around her chest. Chin, another priest who had come to his majority along with her, had tried to offer what comfort he could with a pat on the back and the periodic jostle of his shoulder against hers as they walked, but it had only served to sharpen the yawning absence of a body on the other side of her, and she had coughed and hitched and spit her bitterness to the earth. Then she had fallen to the back of the line and let her eyes burn with tears she could not shed. She had been tempted to slow until they left her behind, but she had still feared death and damnation then, and she had known that Priest and the others would not abide another loss, would drag her back to the city by force if need be, and so she had walked blindly on, guided by the black of Chin's cassock and the snap of it around his slender ankles in the torpid, early-morning breeze.
Nor had she cried when they had returned to a barracks that had been too empty and too quiet, as lifeless as the crypts through which they often crept, stinking of adrenaline and stale sweat and the sweet sage they chewed to clean their teeth.
I don't know if it will ever go anywhere or see the light of day, but it feels good to break the drought.