Ordo Salutis
a short story
written by Fye K.
Please read in 3/4!

Repentance is the fifth step in the Ordo Salutis(order of salvation).
It is to choose to turn to God, to turn away from sin.

Absolution.

It's a word I've heard so many times in so little years. I don't think I've ever heard it on people's lips so much as I have in these past few months alone. It seems as though everyone's begging for forgiveness, like they know the end is near. I can't blame them, what with what's happening in the world. It really is coming to an end, and though we're all trying to draw it out for as long as we can, I don't know if we'll be able to stop it. Maybe this really is something completely beyond our reach. We hunters aren't taught to kill things of biblical proportions. We hunt puny little demons and vampires and ghouls. Not angels or-and the thought makes me want to cringe and hide in a hole for the rest of my days-archangels and seraphim. We don't do that kind of thing, because we don't believe in it. Which in retrospect is completely ridiculous, because we can believe in one end of the spectrum but find ourselves refusing to believe in the other.
But lately I haven't had a choice. I don't think I ever did, especially being raised as a catholic school girl the way I was. I always believed in something, some higher, better power, that had the right to forgive me all my trespasses like I always found it in me to forget people who trespassed against me. It's not so much that I was convinced that something like that existed, I don't think. When I think back on it, I think it's just the need to know that there's someone, somewhere out there, who's willing to hold me and tell me that it's okay. That I've regretted my actions long and hard enough, that I'm forgiven. It's not that I believed that existed. It's the need for… for absolution.

Even I don't escape the desire to be cleansed of my sins. And it's not like I don't have more than a few; I have a grocery list for a family of six's worth of sins. I just add them all to my tab. I'm not sure how many I've got now, but only one, the first one, the original sin, was enough to send me to hell.

My first sin was to succumb to temptation.

When I was younger-mid teens, somewhere around there-there were nights when I'd stay up until two in the morning on school nights, in the middle of the week. I had a girlfriend at that time. She was beautiful, loving, caring. A bit of a slut, but I was so in love, I could look past that. And that's what tore me. My love was so genuine, so profound! How could something like that possibly be wrong? How could that be a sin? The way she tasted like apples when I kissed her in the summer and how she tasted like hot cocoa on the coldest winter nights… I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I couldn't understand how that could be wrong. I was in love; wasn't that okay? Wasn't it okay to be in love and be loved? Didn't God want me to be happy?
Some days were worse than others. Some days, my girlfriend would tell me what people did to her in class, what people said to her in the hallways. No one did anything about it. I tore myself apart, dissected myself, performed a vivisection on myself. And it took me a while to find a way to cope with it. I was too weak, too shy and too scared to try and find a drug dealer. Not that it would've been hard, there were at least three right outside of the school doors. But I was scared, this was a world that I didn't know. So instead I turned towards something that felt right.

Some nights, I just grabbed a knife and carved myself up.
Some nights, I reenacted my emotional vivisections.

And that's probably when the sins started piling up. Lust, Envy, Greed, Wrath and Sloth. I was never a glutton and I never really took pride in anything, whether it be in other people or myself. I was never a prideful person, or a hungry person, be it for food or people or fame. Even envy only has one sin under its name, and that's something I never talked about. It was a horrible thing, a horrible slip-up of composure and I regret it more every year.

So, of course, with the world coming to an end, I'd look for a way to cleanse myself of everything. Of course I'd look for a way to be forgiven everything I've done and everything I should've done. But it was obvious that I couldn't even purge myself. That was impossible, because of the simple fact that I was a hunter. I killed things. The blood would never wash off my hands. Vampire or otherwise, most of what we kill was human, once. And though we may not have been the ones to kill that human, how are we any better? I can't find it in myself to hate what I hunt.

Maybe that's why I keep going.
Maybe trying to find a meaning to this is my way to find…

Absolution.

Just a blurb I felt like I needed to write. it doesn't help that I was listening to
Iris the entire time. I remember crying so many times to that song it's not
even funny anymore.

Please R I wouldn't mind a little feedback on this one.
Oh, and if you don't mind, if you catch any silly typos I might've missed, please
don't hesitate to point them out.

Thank you!