This series, which has been two years in the making, was actually brought about by a fit of inspiration I got from reading another fic. Tenshi no Korin's 'Someday out of the Blue', to be precise. You can check out the original at
(www (dot) anime-palace (dot) org (slash) fanfics (slash) somedayoutoftheblue.html)
So if the premise seems familiar to some of you, there's good reason. I beg Tenshi's forgiveness, since she got the story down in 4 pages and I could barely do it in 200+ pages.
THE FINDING LIFE SERIES:
Coming Back
I can still remember that dusty day, all those years ago, when the Father asked me to make a decision. His word had great weight at the time, because I had just been asking myself what this was going to do to my life. I mean, was I sure? Really sure? I hadn't been sure, when I was standing at the bus stop with the father. But then again, I had never been sure of anything.
I wasn't even sure of my name. I knew that Nick wasn't the name I had had when I had arrived at the orphanage. It just sort of stuck. A nickname of a nickname that no one I could remember had given me once. It had finally ended up in the orphanage's paperwork, so I decided to get used to it.
"You are much too reckless Nick." He said as we waited for the bus together.
Father Wolfe had been good to me in his own way. He had even to let me take his last name until I could find one that suited me. Yet for all the kindness he had shown me, he was still a priest at heart, and sermons ran in his veins. I had heard this speech before, and was fighting not to tune it out. I wanted to show some respect for the man of God who stood beside me. We might never see each other again. The least I could do was pay attention.
"I know I am father." The canvas bag with what things I had lain on the ground between us. It separated us like a canyon.
"You must stop taking things so seriously. If you keep running off to do whatever you want all the time, you could find yourself in serious trouble quicker than you think."
That wasn't my fault. That flawless skill for getting into trouble and making it ten times worse than it should have been was not my fault. But I hesitated to explain the true source of my impulse. I wasn't looking to be checked into an asylum anytime soon.
"Won't the church help me?" I asked instead. I had agreed to go to December, to study for the priesthood, because I thought it could help me. My abnormal conscience had been growing more and more insistent with age. Father Wolfe had talked about how faith in God could refocus your wasted energy into good works for others. I wanted to be like Father Wolfe so badly. I wanted to help people with a calm smile; I wanted to somehow know exactly what to do. Most of all, I wanted to start my own orphanage someday, so I could help people as Father Wolfe had helped me.
"It will, a little. But you must draw on your own strength, as well as the Lord's to calm your impulsive natures. Remember that God helps those who help themselves." He said. "But as you work to calm your soul, remember your gift of charity. For all your wanderings, I know you to always help others in need. That is a very good thing Nick, and that it comes so naturally to you, makes me believe there will always be good in your heart."
The bus pulled into the station. We both looked at it and worried.
"Well Nick… Stay out of trouble. And may you always be under the Lord's protection." He extended his hand to shake, a sign of respect and maturity that he gave to few in the orphanage.
I smiled as I took it. "Thanks, father. I'll try."
But I didn't try hard enough.
It took me 2 years to finally get to December. I had met a girl on that bus with dark hair and soulful coffee-brown eyes who called herself Middy for reasons I couldn't figure out. She liked my smile almost as well as I liked hers so she took me home for a while and taught me how to smoke. She did things to me in her Father's barn, things that were the farthest and closest I could get to divinity. Her brother shot me months later and thankfully missed, leaving a large scar blooming out from just above my right hip.
I finally scraped together bus fare to the city by doing things I Was Not Proud Of. I might have been the greenest criminal that ever entered the underworld. Even by the time I finally reached December, I had never fired a gun. Father Wolfe's memory kept me from killing or raping. But I still had dreams that woke me up at night, the lingering feeling of drowning in red, red water.
The head priest had been hard on me, but his own demons gave me a measure of sympathy. After cleaning the halls for a few months, I finally got into the school on a trial basis. I did all right, I guess. The scriptures were easy enough to memorize, the nuns easy enough to pacify if you weren't a smartass and I had started succeeding in turning the doubts that bloomed in my mind into fiery, driven essays that worried my teachers. I couldn't tone down my attitude from abrasive, I was sure that was why I hadn't made any lasting friends in the school. I decided the loner role was a good one for me.
But then I started having the dreams again.
My abnormal conscience had always manifested itself in the same way. I would start having dreams of a man in a black suit. His jacket and white shirt open at the collar, exposing well toned pecs. He stood, looking at me off in the distance. Each time I had had the dream I had been in the middle of debating some choice. Straight and narrow or right and penalized. And I'd keep having the dreams until I took the right choice. It had troubled Father Wolfe for years.
It had confused the hell out of me. I wasn't having any crisis of faith at that time, far from it. Classes were finally starting to wind down for the semester when the dreams began in earnest. I had finally made it to the church, the one place I believed I could be safe on this entire thrice-damned planet. I couldn't figure out what my mind was trying to telling me.
So I ignored the man in the black suit. I watched him, stared back at him for three nights, hoping he'd just go away.
Then one night, just before I had to take a massive test, he walked up to me.
One hand was in a pants pocket, the other hanging loose, casual by his side. He got close enough to me that he could have reached out and touched me and stopped. He looked me over, and then dug into his shirt pocket for one crumpled cigarette.
"Care for one?" he asked. Something told me it was my brand.
"Sure." I said, taking it.
He fished another one out for himself and lit it, then tossed me the lighter. The flame burned red instead of the usual orange and blue. The smoldering end of the butt glowed blue-green.
He pulled the cig away from his lips and blew a pensive smoky breath. "Well?"
Must have been my turn to talk. "Why are you doing this?"
"You aren't supposed to be here. Dammit! You aren't supposed to be here! After all this time, you finally come back and you're wasting your time here? He's out there. He's still out there, he's still alive and he's practically waiting for you to track him down!"
"Who?"
"You know who."
"I don't if I have to ask, do I?"
He considered. "You may be right. Well, you would, if you saw him."
I tried to relight my cigarette, but my hands were shaking so badly, the flame sputtered and died. "Could you go away? I feel like I'm going insane."
"You are insane, if you stay here any longer. A human being only has so many years in their life. Believe me; you've learned that the hard way."
"I'm not going to listen to you." I had finally gotten my cigarette lit, "And I'm not going to talk to you after this. So if you want to say something, anything, say it now."
He shrugged, angrily. "Guess the only thing I can say is that when your past tracks you down, I hope for your sake that you'll know to run after it with everything you've got. I'm sure you can figure that out when the time comes. You can go back to your wonderful life now."
The last few words were spoken with heavy sarcasm, and he walked past me. His shoulders hunched in agony his hands fisted into the pockets of his coat. He cast a shadow like a cross as he made his way out on a plain of white sand, barren and too clean for words. I watched him, the heavy feeling of unfocused longing in my stomach that felt like it had been there for years. I leaned into my cupped hands and flicked the lighter once. The world around me exploded into flame.
I woke up screaming and scared the hell out of my neighbors.
After that I didn't dream for three years.
But what finally started the whole incident, the one that would by some standards ruin my life, was a request from one of the head fathers.
"Help you with services on Sundays?" I had asked, knowing I sounded like a child and I hating myself for it.
"Well not for a while, but yes." The Father, Father Leon, had been a man who frustrated easily and had the broken capillaries on his nose to prove it. "Your teachers say you're doing well, and they have high hopes for you after your training is complete. I'm taking in a couple of students to help me with services when our new cathedral opens in the middle of May, and your name came up."
"That's very kind of them." I hadn't realized my teachers thought of me at all until that point. The fact that I was on someone's radar, let alone that they considered me fixable had made me slightly nauseous. I had always thought of myself as the one who was going to show them all someday; the reality was irritating.
"Well then, can I assume that your answer is yes?" his smile was contagious, but my heart didn't mirror what my face was doing. I was comfortable in my little nest of bibles, finally starting to feel at peace with myself. And, aside from the continued queasiness, I hadn't dreamed in a long time by then. My little voice finally seemed to be gone.
I supposed if I had refused it then, the inevitable might have never happened. But the fathers rarely asked for help, and at the time, I decided it was a chance to get out of the school for a little while in the spring.
"Sure, father. You can count me in."
The month of May had come and gone peacefully.
The chores I took on at the new cathedral meshed well with my continued responsibilities at the school, and I barely felt the transition at all.
In time they had me teaching the youth meetings with another student. We enjoyed the overwhelming female attention we had started to get, but we knew better than to do anything foolish. My partner, a boy so easy to forget I was still asking his name after weeks of working with him, feared any slip ups would affect his future. I knew any stupidity on my part would bring back my past.
I thought of my past often, and had been thinking of it when I had gone outside for a smoke the first day of June.
That day one of our newer members, a girl who had said her name was Sandy, had been asking me why priests didn't marry. I had mentioned some of Christ's teachings and the need for control over ones emotions while tending to the flock, but she had still looked doubtful, and a little disappointed. Finally, I had told her that it was an odd rule, but the church had made it for one reason or another, and I certainly wasn't going to be the first to question it. She had muttered some excuse, and wandered off to join her friends.
She made me think about Middy. Not so much the way she looked, but that girlish longing that begged you to bend the rules Just This Once, For Me. Back then I still remembered the way Middy looked smiling in the moonlight with a certain childish longing. I had done wonderful things in that loft.
Things I thought had barred me from the priesthood forever, in fact. But when I got to December and confessed, I was surprised that their policy nowadays was one of a 'keep your damn mouth shut' nature. The numbers of people who got through the training and actually became priests were low, so the church let things happen that weren't supposed to happen. Both before and after the fact. I made me think more than I should.
Even I knew students weren't supposed to wear cossack cloaks until they were ordained, but Father Leon had pulled a few strings. We each had our own set to wear during services, so long as we were careful with them. I could understand people wanted to see a priest who looked like a priest, but wearing a long black coat on what was still a desert planet seemed like a dumb idea.
That day I had, like always, taken mine off and hung it up carefully before I went outside for a smoke.
We still didn't have rain as the colonists would have defined it, not yet. The best we ever got was a rare, thin mist. It fell down on everything and got you soaking wet before you even realized it. It was misting when stepped outside, cool and gentle. The clouds creating the stuff were light, and you could still see the suns clearly shinning through the grey layer.
"The Devil's beating his wife." I murmured. It was something Father Wolfe used to say, an old saying carried over with the colonists. I had been so busy looking up at the sky that I nearly didn't hear the door swing close. I tugged on the handle. Locked. Dammit. I would have to go around to the other side of the building to get back in.
Stressed, I had reasoned that there was no sense going back in without a smoke. I patted my pockets but found them empty. Fuck it all. This was getting more and more complicated by the minute.
I leaned against the church and watched the people hurrying along as I talked myself into going all the way back inside for something I couldn't possibly enjoy in a few minutes left. People were moving quickly, heads covered, trying to get out of the rain like it was acidic. I still can't understand why anyone would want to. Rain is a gift. It showed that we had finally conquered our environment, a more potent reminder than the rusting hulls of the colonist's ships that the Historical Committee had bitched and moaned about preserving.
There was one guy who seemed to be enjoying the rain as much as I was. He was sitting on a nearby stone bench, just on the edge of where the church ended and the park next door started. You could tell he was tall, even sitting down. He was wearing a dark, dark wine colored trench coat that looked black in certain patches of light. It didn't fit him well, like it was bought off the rack, years ago, and had had several bad days since. The honey blond hair at his forehead, temples and behind his ears was spiked up and sagging slightly in the rain. But the rest lay across his shoulders in clumps. It made him look like a demented human hedgehog, and contrasted oddly with the sad, faraway look on his face.
The bench had no back, so I sat down next to him, facing the opposite way. "Hey," I said, "Bum a smoke?"
The blonde head winced, so slight I could have imagined it. He reached into his coat and pulled out an open pack. It was nearly a full one, but old and a bit beat up, smelling more like lint than tobacco. I was delighted to see that the brand was mine.
"Thanks." I said, flicking my lighter. The paper sputtered for a second, then caught.
"No problem." He tucked the pack back into his jacket, staring out into the garden. Looking over my shoulder, I couldn't see anything interesting. It was just pots of brown, hearty plants that the city was trying to get to flourish.
I had noticed the clock above me said I had a few minutes before I was late and had to start running. I tended to be a ball of stress during my breaks, but that day I hadn't felt like going anywhere. "Care to join me?" I asked, exhaling.
He didn't turn, just kept staring out across the square. "No thanks. I don't smoke."
The way he said it was almost as odd as the statement itself. "Really? You carry around a pack for charity?"
He didn't answer.
I leaned in and looked at him in profile. He was unbelievably pale against the dark red of his coat, but his eyes were well covered behind a pair of funky orange sunglasses. His face was sad. No, sad was too mild. It looked like someone had stabbed him in the heart years ago, and was still twisting the knife around.
I wanted to make this guy react. Do something besides think about whatever he was chewing on. A joke, a question, an odd comment, anything… For a second I thought about punching him, but ruled that out. You don't maintain the dignity of the church by coming to service with a black eye.
He finally felt me watching him. "Charity, yeah. Something like that." He said, shortly, hoping to satisfy me. He tried to grin, but the grin was just as empty as he seemed to feel, and he abandoned it.
In a smooth turn of his head, he turned and looked at me. Straight on. Eyeball to eyeball.
His eyes widened. He stared. I stared.
I've heard it called by a Colonist word, an old phrase taken from a long dead language. "Déjà vu": You get it in little bursts. Like a toy in a pawn shop window, the kind that you played with as a kid. Little everyday connections that are so general they're personal. Usually you don't pay it much mind. Give it a, 'Huh. Odd.' and move on.
But… I didn't just know this guy, I knew this guy.
I knew the dumb hair, the pale skin, the nose that was the right angle to be cute. I saw the mole on his right cheek and wasn't irritated like I would normally be. It was supposed to be there, it was all supposed to be where it was, because I had seen it somewhere in the time before, and I KNEW this guy.
Hell if I knew how.
I wanted to hug him so bad my teeth hurt. But why the hell would I want to hug a complete stranger?
He leaned in. I leaned in.
"Where were you?" he asked.
It had all turned into a sparkly, slow motion sequence. Anything could have happened outside of the space between our faces and we would have never noticed. He felt the same way. I wasn't the only one completely confused. And he had said something hadn't he?
"Sorry…" I heard myself answer, "I've been busy."
The church bell rang and we both startled.
"4 o clock…" I heard myself say. The afternoon service… That's right. I had duties. And the farther away I got from this guy, the better. "Dammit."
The cigarette had barely burnt at all but I had dropped it, ground it out. I looked back at the guy. He had looked… god, scared. Lonely. He had looked like he was panicking worse than I had been.
Dammit. Where did I know this guy from?
I heard the bell rang again.
"Thanks for the cigarette." I said. My body turned, and my legs started running. As soon as I rounded the corner, I felt like I was going to throw up.
My feelings had been mercurial, shifting from one to the other in quick succession. Go back. I had to go back. Maybe he was still sitting there on the bench. Maybe I could still catch him. He knew who I was, didn't he? Even I wasn't sure who I was. It wouldn't hurt to ask. Sweet Jesus, where did I know him from? No. No, I'm too impulsive. I've always been too impulsive. I was late enough as it is. Screw being late. I knew I had just missed something important. No. It was better to go with what I knew. What I knew to be true, to be solid, to be consistent. Go. Run. Now.
When I had gotten to the other door and tried to turn the handle.
Locked.
Panicked, feeling like some unknown emotion was right on my heels, I started pounding on it.
When Father Leon opened up the door for me, he looked shocked. My hands were shaking so badly, I could barely keep a grip on the door handle.
Next Monday: Revelations of the Secular kind.
