The doctors shake their heads over you and the nurses slip in and out, and when the old priest comes in, his frown eats up every feature of his face.
"Don't you know," he asks you gravely, "That suicides are damned?"
You are silent. You have spoken very little since you clamped your own hand over your mouth, over your sobs. Words don't have much to do with what your life has been, after that.
But if you still spoke, if you still had the words or the hope or the anger, you might say to him, in all the raw flesh of being thirteen and back from the near-dead again, don't you know?
Doesn't he know that the snow-white collar was supposed to save your brother? Doesn't he know that the holy water and the tortured cross ought to have warded away the dark and grinning things? Doesn't he know that your brother used to be good, and was good, until he wasn't your brother anymore?
But you are silent, and so what you get is this:
Don't you know that suicides are damned?
And oh, you do.
Do thou, oh prince of the heavenly host, by the Power of God, cast into hell—
This is the prayer, and often it does exactly what it sets out to do, and you are left alone in the hollow emptiness of earth, which is exactly what a priest should hope for, if given the alternative between emptiness and devouring.
You are a priest.
You chose this path like it could save you. Or at least, if it cannot save you, it can take you outside of the self you don't want to be anymore, for the good of others.
You are a priest.
(So was he.)
They call you quiet now, or stoic, or any number of words that show more respect than your schoolmates did. But nobody knows who you were anymore, and so you are sometimes distrusted or disliked, but you are not feared. Not mocked.
Not pitied.
The past still has a way of sneaking up behind you, tapping you on the shoulder, cowering and laughing and knowing in the dark corners of rooms.
When you come face-to-face with it, when you pin it down and wrest it out of a shrinking human vessel, the past is present.
There is no peace in this life. There is no life in survival, though, and so you chose to do more than survive. Hwa Pyung, the impudent man who claims to hear voices, likely cannot understand it.
At least, you believe that until he holds up a photograph of your brother's face.
By then, you are in too deep anyway. You are in too deep—sprawled and bleeding on the floor, which is the deepest place you know. The man beside you has killed, and the man who used to be his brother will kill again.
So you do it. You speak.
(This is life.)
And you tell him about the man who used to be your brother, because you are a priest, and this is mercy, this is saving other people,don't you know?
There is no peace in this life, in this bleeding, foul room.
But mercy is the closest you can ever come to peace on earth.