Title: Confessional
Author: Moirae
E-mail: moirae_13@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13 for language and descriptions of violence
Disclaimer: In Joss we trust. I don't own them. Please don't sue.
Archive: Feel free; just let me know where you're taking me.
Spoilers: Season five, post "Crush." Spike's reaction to being uninvited from Buffy's home.
Description: A priest receives a strange visitor. Warning: character death.
Feedback: The feedback monster needs his vittles, please feed him.
"Bless me, father, for I have sinned..."
The expressionless profile of the priest was painted in silhouette against a mocking wall of iron crosses.
"How long has it been since your last confession?" His voice was barren, the tired instrument of rote sermons and an endless train of confessionals.
"About a hundred and twenty years. Give or take." The British lilt betrayed no humor and its calculated assertion allowed for no dispute. Through the iron wall, steal blue eyes inspected the priest with the cool detachment of a beast tracking its prey, daring the vessel of Christ to challenge him.
The priest faltered. Though the man couldn't be more than twenty-five, something about him suggested many lifetimes of experience.
"Wha--what are your sins, my son?" The last words were hushed, born of his lips by habit, released into the ether of their own accord, and tinged with the disconcerted certainty that this was no child of God.
"Well, lechery comes to mind. Adultery and coveting are big ones, too, aren't they? Done enough of all those in my day to earn me a lifetime of penance." The icy voiced melted in recollection. A cheerful irony crept into his words and he went on, playful and self-indulgent. "And it's been a mighty *long* life, mind you."
The priest listened uncomfortably. The stranger's unremorseful account of his sins was almost as disconcerting as the unholy air that hovered about him.
"I suppose you'd consider murder my greatest sin over the years. Done that one nightly for as long as I can remember." A shadow fell on the comic timbre of his voice, and he finished the thought with a dangerous malice. "At least until this past year, that is."
The stranger sat in stony silence, his jaw clenched and fists readied for an unseen aggressor. Then, just as quickly as the edge had appeared, it was gone. "But that's all cleared up now, isn't it?"
He continued, relishing the chronicle of his sins with the arrogance of an adolescent thug. "I don't respect my parents--or didn't--when they were alive. (I'm sure they'd attest). And the poof I've got now isn't worth his weight in blood as a father figure, so no, not much respect for foster-daddy, either. I've taken the Lord's name in vain, worshiped false idols..." He paused a moment to consider the rest. "I've stolen, I've lied, and I've bloody-well disrespected my neighbor's wife."
A smile slashed across his face as he finished, etching his carved cheekbones into smooth definition. Braving a glance at the man, the priest noted his alabaster skin stood in shocking contrast to an even whiter lightening tangle of hair. He looks like a fallen angel--all beauty and scorn he thought solemnly, before turning away.
The pasty-complexioned father remained silent. He seemed to wrestle with his response as he absently threaded a rosary through uneasy fingers. Thankfully, the stranger spoke first.
"But that's not really what I'm here to confess."
Spidery fear crept up the holy man's spine as he imagined what heinous crimes the confessor *had* come to divulge. He felt like a mouse being pawed at by a feasting cat and anticipated swift-extended claws to appear any moment to finish him off.
"I'm really here because of a girl."
Now that was the last thing he expect to hear. A girl? He had steadied himself against tales of mutilated corpses, against whimpering rape victims, against collections of slaughtered children. Any of these atrocities might have driven this creature to a house of worship for absolution. As soon as the thought was unleashed, however, he realized that the pale figure next to him was not here for absolution. He knew it in his bones, just as he knew that he would not walk away from this conversation unscathed--physically, mentally, spiritually--it didn't matter. He would be forever changed.
"Everything was fine before she came along. I had my life, my dark princess. I was a happy man. I had some fucking self-respect." He spit the last sentence out, disgusted by some deep-seeded memory. "But she ruined everything."
He paused, deliberating his next words.
"You know I actually sought her out? She was supposed to be another conquest, another notch for the Big Bad. She wasn't supposed to take away everything I was--everything I knew about this bloody existence!" His fury waxed.
In the pews, the sparse collection of early-morning parishioners shifted uneasily, attempting to tune out the threatening murmur coming from within the confessional.
"I tried to destroy her. I tried everything I could think of--but do you think that any of my plans worked? No! They were all for shit." The man's face set in a dangerous grimace.
"Hell, those first few years, my every thought was for her blood. I wanted to bathe in it--watch her squirm under my grasp, pleading for her pathetic life. Time was, I thought I could rule the world--pave a path of death and carnage across the globe with my darling Dru." His voice hitched. The faintest hint of tenderness colored his last words and the priest was startled by the sudden shift. "But things change, don't they?"
The priest wanted to answer, give some words of comfort to his confessor's suddenly hopeless inflection. But before he could even fathom how to comfort a murderer for his inability to wreak havoc, the man spoke, falling back into his familiar ironic mode.
"What's that they say? If you can't beat them, join them? Hm...Well, I guess that's what I did. Lot more complicated than that, mind you. Suffice it to say I couldn't kill her, I lost my woman, then I lost my bite. Saddest bloody day of my life--the day I had to turn to *her* for help. And what do you think she did? Couldn't put a bloke out of his misery, could she? No, she had to prove her virtue and integrity by protecting weak little ol' me."
This latest development stunned the priest. He wondered if this man was indeed on a path to light. He gave every indication that something had changed within himself--perhaps this girl was a positive influence on him.
"Well, fine. You want to help me, get me on your side, turn me into a simpering idiot--go ahead." The priest vanished from his vision, replaced in a red haze by the girl who tormented his existence. "You can do all that and I will adapt. I'll go along. I'll even like it for a bit." His words came out in a steady stream of hatred and the priest's hope for the man's redemption dissipated. "But you better bloody well be prepared for the consequences. You can't twist a bloke into a pathetic, sniveling wreck, then treat him like nothing's changed. You can't make him fall so deep into your spell that he sees nothing but you and your fire, then take it all away from him."
He began to shout in the face of his imagined tormentor. "I changed for you! Everything I was, I turned inside out. I made my life a quest for your approval and you just laughed in my face! You couldn't give me just a *crumb*! What did you think I would do? Endure it? Put up with rejection? Not bloody likely, you bitch!"
The church was empty now, save for the priest and his enraged companion. The parishioners felt a corrupting cloud of evil envelope their sanctuary and knew that God had abandoned His temple today. One by one they filed out, desperate to escape the anger threatening to suffocate them. The priest entertained the thought that he, too, should leave before it was too late, but curiosity--and fear--kept him rooted in place.
The stranger calmed somewhat and returned to the silhouette before him. "That was the last straw, her rejection that night I told her how I felt, how much I needed her...loved her. She laughed at me. Told me I would never be what she wanted." His words expressed a dangerous finality. "The moment she slammed that door in my face, I knew what I had to do. If she wouldn't have *me*, then she wouldn't have *anyone*."
The stranger lounged against the confining walls of the confessional and lit a cigarette. Beyond the point of protest, the priest sat in silence. "Took some doing, but I finally got something right. Had to have the chip taken care of first--" He stopped himself. "But I guess I should explain that, huh?" He took a drag and continued, "You ever see 'A Clockwork Orange'? Bloody brilliant movie--ultraviolence and all that. Alex and Beethovan's Fifth. Well, they did something like that to me. Implanted this chip in my brain to, uh...squelch my violent tendencies. So I had get that out first thing. Wasn't easy--had to threaten some people, maim a few demons--but finally I found someone to take care of my little problem and BAM! the Big Bad was back."
He smiled with murderous delight. "From there it was pretty simple. Now I know what you're thinking...I went straight for the girl, right?" The priest sat immobile, the rosary twisted in his grip. "Nope. I was smarter this time. Knew I couldn't rightly take her out--she'd proven that enough times. So I went a step better. I went for her friends."
His crystalline eyes flickered yellow as smoke spiraled lazily from his mouth to the heavens. "It was easy enough--caught them unawares one by one. I took the whelp and his girlfriend first. That was bloody beautiful--a poem, a work of art. Blood splattered all over his Hawaiian shirt and beloved comic books. I hit 'em before they knew what was what, and I tell you, if I could have painted that moment, I'd have it hung over my bloody mantle."
He eyed the priest conspiratorially and ground the expired cigarette under his boot before lighting another. "Did the Watcher in next--you know, her, uh, mentor/father figure. He was a bit of effort. Got an eyeful of holy water for my trouble, but eventually I took him down too. I left her a nice present with him--scattered his parts through the house like a scavenger hunt." His voice was callous and unaffected--the cool inflection of an exterminator detailing his lastest job. "Messy business, that, but I think it more than made up for chaining me to his bathtub and making me drink lukewarm blood from a mug."
The priest fought down the bile in the back of his throat and shuddered in horror on the far side of the confessional. With disturbing clarity, he realized that the creature in front of him was a monster in the literal sense of the word--the devil's minion, perhaps Lucifer himself.
The confessor continued, a little more softly. "Saved Red and her girlfriend for last. That was my toughest kill--almost couldn't go through with it. The witch had been nice to me on occasion, and I really had no qualm with her. Nice little chit, she was. But I had gone so far by then, I sort of had to finish." He sat for a moment in contemplation, his brows furrowed uncertainly. "I did her quick. Little pain as possible. I know that doesn't count for much where you come from, but in my world it's a rare blessing. The girlfriend didn't fight much. Once she'd seen what I'd done, she sort of lost it and went down easy."
Deathly silence filled the church. The priest sat immobile, frozen with dread and sickening curiosity as he waited for the devil to finish his story.
"I left her mum and kid sis alone. I know--you think I'd gone soft--and you're partially right, I suppose. I figured her friends were enough to break her, and I just couldn't bring myself to kill her mum. That woman made the best damn hot chocolate I've ever tasted. It was more than that, though--she was decent to me. She knew what I was and accepted me unconditionally. That's rare these days."
He took a drag and distractedly picked at his chipped black fingernails. "The kid sis was nice enough, but that's not why I spared her. That was actually an act of self-preservation. See, she's some sort of mystical whatzit, and anything might have happened if I tried to kill her--earth-shattering explosion, magical portal opening, the world sucked into Hell--who knows? So I stayed away from that one."
He sighed with finality as he concluded. "I know she'll come after me. Probably won't stop 'til one or both of us are dead. And that's fine. I'll lay low for a while, probably skip town--for the hell of it. But there's really nothing left for me in this life, and I'm about ready to say sod it all, anyway."
He sat up, as if ready to leave, but stopped himself, reconsidering.
"I was once told that to kill this girl you have to love her. And that's true. I love her, and short of draining her dry myself, I have killed everything she ever was." He let the words hang as he examined the priest through the thin wall of crosses, looking for recognition in the terrified man's eyes. "But I didn't realize that the reverse would be true too: to love this girl you have to kill yourself."
For a moment the priest felt something human and remorseful pass over the pale figure's expression. It was gone almost before he saw it.
"The moment I set eyes on that girl, I was ruined. I've destroyed everything I ever was because of her--" He amended, "Because of my love for her. And that's why I'm here, talking to you. The only sin I've ever *really* commited has been loving this girl. And for it, I know I will pay with my life."
With that, he stood. "No need to offer me penance at this point; I know it won't do any good." Casting a glance upward, he said, "He can't save me now, anyway." Inhuman eyes returned to the frightened priest with paralyzing intensity. "Only she could have done that."
He straightened his charcoal duster, and before the priest saw it happen, the man was gone, the wave of a black curtain in the empty confessional the only evidence of his existence. The priest stared at the empty space through a wall of iron crosses and let out a long-held breath. Shakily, he gathered himself and stood, the rosary abandoned at his feet. No, perhaps He can't save any of us now was the priest's final thought as he made his way down the isle and past the towering wooden doors of the church, never turning back.
Author: Moirae
E-mail: moirae_13@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13 for language and descriptions of violence
Disclaimer: In Joss we trust. I don't own them. Please don't sue.
Archive: Feel free; just let me know where you're taking me.
Spoilers: Season five, post "Crush." Spike's reaction to being uninvited from Buffy's home.
Description: A priest receives a strange visitor. Warning: character death.
Feedback: The feedback monster needs his vittles, please feed him.
"Bless me, father, for I have sinned..."
The expressionless profile of the priest was painted in silhouette against a mocking wall of iron crosses.
"How long has it been since your last confession?" His voice was barren, the tired instrument of rote sermons and an endless train of confessionals.
"About a hundred and twenty years. Give or take." The British lilt betrayed no humor and its calculated assertion allowed for no dispute. Through the iron wall, steal blue eyes inspected the priest with the cool detachment of a beast tracking its prey, daring the vessel of Christ to challenge him.
The priest faltered. Though the man couldn't be more than twenty-five, something about him suggested many lifetimes of experience.
"Wha--what are your sins, my son?" The last words were hushed, born of his lips by habit, released into the ether of their own accord, and tinged with the disconcerted certainty that this was no child of God.
"Well, lechery comes to mind. Adultery and coveting are big ones, too, aren't they? Done enough of all those in my day to earn me a lifetime of penance." The icy voiced melted in recollection. A cheerful irony crept into his words and he went on, playful and self-indulgent. "And it's been a mighty *long* life, mind you."
The priest listened uncomfortably. The stranger's unremorseful account of his sins was almost as disconcerting as the unholy air that hovered about him.
"I suppose you'd consider murder my greatest sin over the years. Done that one nightly for as long as I can remember." A shadow fell on the comic timbre of his voice, and he finished the thought with a dangerous malice. "At least until this past year, that is."
The stranger sat in stony silence, his jaw clenched and fists readied for an unseen aggressor. Then, just as quickly as the edge had appeared, it was gone. "But that's all cleared up now, isn't it?"
He continued, relishing the chronicle of his sins with the arrogance of an adolescent thug. "I don't respect my parents--or didn't--when they were alive. (I'm sure they'd attest). And the poof I've got now isn't worth his weight in blood as a father figure, so no, not much respect for foster-daddy, either. I've taken the Lord's name in vain, worshiped false idols..." He paused a moment to consider the rest. "I've stolen, I've lied, and I've bloody-well disrespected my neighbor's wife."
A smile slashed across his face as he finished, etching his carved cheekbones into smooth definition. Braving a glance at the man, the priest noted his alabaster skin stood in shocking contrast to an even whiter lightening tangle of hair. He looks like a fallen angel--all beauty and scorn he thought solemnly, before turning away.
The pasty-complexioned father remained silent. He seemed to wrestle with his response as he absently threaded a rosary through uneasy fingers. Thankfully, the stranger spoke first.
"But that's not really what I'm here to confess."
Spidery fear crept up the holy man's spine as he imagined what heinous crimes the confessor *had* come to divulge. He felt like a mouse being pawed at by a feasting cat and anticipated swift-extended claws to appear any moment to finish him off.
"I'm really here because of a girl."
Now that was the last thing he expect to hear. A girl? He had steadied himself against tales of mutilated corpses, against whimpering rape victims, against collections of slaughtered children. Any of these atrocities might have driven this creature to a house of worship for absolution. As soon as the thought was unleashed, however, he realized that the pale figure next to him was not here for absolution. He knew it in his bones, just as he knew that he would not walk away from this conversation unscathed--physically, mentally, spiritually--it didn't matter. He would be forever changed.
"Everything was fine before she came along. I had my life, my dark princess. I was a happy man. I had some fucking self-respect." He spit the last sentence out, disgusted by some deep-seeded memory. "But she ruined everything."
He paused, deliberating his next words.
"You know I actually sought her out? She was supposed to be another conquest, another notch for the Big Bad. She wasn't supposed to take away everything I was--everything I knew about this bloody existence!" His fury waxed.
In the pews, the sparse collection of early-morning parishioners shifted uneasily, attempting to tune out the threatening murmur coming from within the confessional.
"I tried to destroy her. I tried everything I could think of--but do you think that any of my plans worked? No! They were all for shit." The man's face set in a dangerous grimace.
"Hell, those first few years, my every thought was for her blood. I wanted to bathe in it--watch her squirm under my grasp, pleading for her pathetic life. Time was, I thought I could rule the world--pave a path of death and carnage across the globe with my darling Dru." His voice hitched. The faintest hint of tenderness colored his last words and the priest was startled by the sudden shift. "But things change, don't they?"
The priest wanted to answer, give some words of comfort to his confessor's suddenly hopeless inflection. But before he could even fathom how to comfort a murderer for his inability to wreak havoc, the man spoke, falling back into his familiar ironic mode.
"What's that they say? If you can't beat them, join them? Hm...Well, I guess that's what I did. Lot more complicated than that, mind you. Suffice it to say I couldn't kill her, I lost my woman, then I lost my bite. Saddest bloody day of my life--the day I had to turn to *her* for help. And what do you think she did? Couldn't put a bloke out of his misery, could she? No, she had to prove her virtue and integrity by protecting weak little ol' me."
This latest development stunned the priest. He wondered if this man was indeed on a path to light. He gave every indication that something had changed within himself--perhaps this girl was a positive influence on him.
"Well, fine. You want to help me, get me on your side, turn me into a simpering idiot--go ahead." The priest vanished from his vision, replaced in a red haze by the girl who tormented his existence. "You can do all that and I will adapt. I'll go along. I'll even like it for a bit." His words came out in a steady stream of hatred and the priest's hope for the man's redemption dissipated. "But you better bloody well be prepared for the consequences. You can't twist a bloke into a pathetic, sniveling wreck, then treat him like nothing's changed. You can't make him fall so deep into your spell that he sees nothing but you and your fire, then take it all away from him."
He began to shout in the face of his imagined tormentor. "I changed for you! Everything I was, I turned inside out. I made my life a quest for your approval and you just laughed in my face! You couldn't give me just a *crumb*! What did you think I would do? Endure it? Put up with rejection? Not bloody likely, you bitch!"
The church was empty now, save for the priest and his enraged companion. The parishioners felt a corrupting cloud of evil envelope their sanctuary and knew that God had abandoned His temple today. One by one they filed out, desperate to escape the anger threatening to suffocate them. The priest entertained the thought that he, too, should leave before it was too late, but curiosity--and fear--kept him rooted in place.
The stranger calmed somewhat and returned to the silhouette before him. "That was the last straw, her rejection that night I told her how I felt, how much I needed her...loved her. She laughed at me. Told me I would never be what she wanted." His words expressed a dangerous finality. "The moment she slammed that door in my face, I knew what I had to do. If she wouldn't have *me*, then she wouldn't have *anyone*."
The stranger lounged against the confining walls of the confessional and lit a cigarette. Beyond the point of protest, the priest sat in silence. "Took some doing, but I finally got something right. Had to have the chip taken care of first--" He stopped himself. "But I guess I should explain that, huh?" He took a drag and continued, "You ever see 'A Clockwork Orange'? Bloody brilliant movie--ultraviolence and all that. Alex and Beethovan's Fifth. Well, they did something like that to me. Implanted this chip in my brain to, uh...squelch my violent tendencies. So I had get that out first thing. Wasn't easy--had to threaten some people, maim a few demons--but finally I found someone to take care of my little problem and BAM! the Big Bad was back."
He smiled with murderous delight. "From there it was pretty simple. Now I know what you're thinking...I went straight for the girl, right?" The priest sat immobile, the rosary twisted in his grip. "Nope. I was smarter this time. Knew I couldn't rightly take her out--she'd proven that enough times. So I went a step better. I went for her friends."
His crystalline eyes flickered yellow as smoke spiraled lazily from his mouth to the heavens. "It was easy enough--caught them unawares one by one. I took the whelp and his girlfriend first. That was bloody beautiful--a poem, a work of art. Blood splattered all over his Hawaiian shirt and beloved comic books. I hit 'em before they knew what was what, and I tell you, if I could have painted that moment, I'd have it hung over my bloody mantle."
He eyed the priest conspiratorially and ground the expired cigarette under his boot before lighting another. "Did the Watcher in next--you know, her, uh, mentor/father figure. He was a bit of effort. Got an eyeful of holy water for my trouble, but eventually I took him down too. I left her a nice present with him--scattered his parts through the house like a scavenger hunt." His voice was callous and unaffected--the cool inflection of an exterminator detailing his lastest job. "Messy business, that, but I think it more than made up for chaining me to his bathtub and making me drink lukewarm blood from a mug."
The priest fought down the bile in the back of his throat and shuddered in horror on the far side of the confessional. With disturbing clarity, he realized that the creature in front of him was a monster in the literal sense of the word--the devil's minion, perhaps Lucifer himself.
The confessor continued, a little more softly. "Saved Red and her girlfriend for last. That was my toughest kill--almost couldn't go through with it. The witch had been nice to me on occasion, and I really had no qualm with her. Nice little chit, she was. But I had gone so far by then, I sort of had to finish." He sat for a moment in contemplation, his brows furrowed uncertainly. "I did her quick. Little pain as possible. I know that doesn't count for much where you come from, but in my world it's a rare blessing. The girlfriend didn't fight much. Once she'd seen what I'd done, she sort of lost it and went down easy."
Deathly silence filled the church. The priest sat immobile, frozen with dread and sickening curiosity as he waited for the devil to finish his story.
"I left her mum and kid sis alone. I know--you think I'd gone soft--and you're partially right, I suppose. I figured her friends were enough to break her, and I just couldn't bring myself to kill her mum. That woman made the best damn hot chocolate I've ever tasted. It was more than that, though--she was decent to me. She knew what I was and accepted me unconditionally. That's rare these days."
He took a drag and distractedly picked at his chipped black fingernails. "The kid sis was nice enough, but that's not why I spared her. That was actually an act of self-preservation. See, she's some sort of mystical whatzit, and anything might have happened if I tried to kill her--earth-shattering explosion, magical portal opening, the world sucked into Hell--who knows? So I stayed away from that one."
He sighed with finality as he concluded. "I know she'll come after me. Probably won't stop 'til one or both of us are dead. And that's fine. I'll lay low for a while, probably skip town--for the hell of it. But there's really nothing left for me in this life, and I'm about ready to say sod it all, anyway."
He sat up, as if ready to leave, but stopped himself, reconsidering.
"I was once told that to kill this girl you have to love her. And that's true. I love her, and short of draining her dry myself, I have killed everything she ever was." He let the words hang as he examined the priest through the thin wall of crosses, looking for recognition in the terrified man's eyes. "But I didn't realize that the reverse would be true too: to love this girl you have to kill yourself."
For a moment the priest felt something human and remorseful pass over the pale figure's expression. It was gone almost before he saw it.
"The moment I set eyes on that girl, I was ruined. I've destroyed everything I ever was because of her--" He amended, "Because of my love for her. And that's why I'm here, talking to you. The only sin I've ever *really* commited has been loving this girl. And for it, I know I will pay with my life."
With that, he stood. "No need to offer me penance at this point; I know it won't do any good." Casting a glance upward, he said, "He can't save me now, anyway." Inhuman eyes returned to the frightened priest with paralyzing intensity. "Only she could have done that."
He straightened his charcoal duster, and before the priest saw it happen, the man was gone, the wave of a black curtain in the empty confessional the only evidence of his existence. The priest stared at the empty space through a wall of iron crosses and let out a long-held breath. Shakily, he gathered himself and stood, the rosary abandoned at his feet. No, perhaps He can't save any of us now was the priest's final thought as he made his way down the isle and past the towering wooden doors of the church, never turning back.