The Nature of Sin: Prologue
AN: Still unfinished, this was written in 2003 for the now-defunct Faith and Anger archive.
They think I am a fanatic.
It's amazing; in this place, I am not unique because of my mutation -- I am unique because of my faith. I can see it in their eyes. So polite, yet so unwilling to look directly at me because all they see are the scars.
It frightens them that someone could be so obsessed with sin that they would etch it into their flesh. Though they smile at me and try to talk about the weather, their thoughts always stray to the swirls of raised tissue and their words falter. It would do no good to tell them I carved them long ago, before I knew what true sin was.
They think I can't sleep so often at night because I'm tortured by my sins. I pity them that. These people, these X-Men, are good people, and kind, but as bigoted in their own way as those at home who looked at me and crossed themselves and muttered incantations against demons.
What if I told them my dreams are filled with is a priest's voice? Father Whitney, a good Irish Catholic come to minister to the Bavarian masses, had seemed so sincere when he took me under his wing.
My adopted circus family didn't share my fascination with the Catholic church, and so my Catholicism was a bastard child of Scripture and folklore. Father Whitney changed that. He told me I shouldn't profane my body with these scars, for the Bible forbid self-mutilation. He taught me the Hail Mary and the Our Father. He gave me my first rosary.
I trusted that man, though I knew he liked the bottle a bit too much. I trusted him implicitly, and that was my first true test of faith.
Ten years later I still feel the ropes cutting into my wrists, holding me to the pew... the cold metal of the cross pressed against my forehead... still hear his lilting voice slurring out the Rite of Exorcism...