AUTHOR: CobraGirl
RATING: G
FANDOM: X-Men Movieverse
SUMMARY: Forgiveness is hard to come by.
ARCHIVE: Ask first, please.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Don't sue.
DATE COMPLETED: May 5, 2003
The cathedral is a lonely, broken monument, its insides darkened with dust and age. Sunlight struggles through the dirty windows; the building's quiet splendor is marred by sheets and scaffolding. Every whisper echoes tenfold in the silence. Halfway through its reconstruction, it was abandoned by its flock and scheduled to be demolished within a year's time.
That was three years ago. Now, deformed footprints mark the dust and a tinge of brimstone colors the air. It has become his home.
He hangs from the rafters and recites the Rosary, beads sifting through his fingers one by one. He speaks his sins to an empty confessional, searching for forgiveness from a voiceless priest. Finding none, he slices himself with a knife kept under a broken floorboard. The scars never fade; he neither expects nor wants them to.
He is running out of space to make the marks, though. For there is wrath, and there is envy - far too much envy - and it is never as simple as four Hail Marys and a candle for the less fortunate.
He lights the candles anyway, scrounging up matches from the priest's office. He lights them for those who cannot do what he does, for those who cannot see what he sees, for those who fear and hate what should not be feared or hated.
Vater, vergib ihnen, denn sie wissen nicht was sie tun.
When he is done, he wraps his tail around a decaying beam and softly speaks the Rosary again.