This one fed off of "Faithless" - Kurt is going through the motions, trying to find that which was lost.
Kurt slipped into the dimly lit church, silent as a shadow and just as invisible. The aisle and the pews were a dark sea around the island of light that was the choir loft, brightly lit as practice continued into the early darkness of a winter night. Half sung phrases and the constant giggling of the younger members of the ensemble echoed through the empty building, a blatant contrast to the emptiness and the haunted state of both the old church and the Nightcrawler.
He slid into a back pew far away from the light as the choir director brought his singers to attention and began explaining passages from the hymnal to them. Kurt sat for a time, watching and waiting. The old comfort was easily remembered; the comfort of entering a house of worship and feeling surrounded by a sense of awe and calm at the same time. No matter what battles he was fighting on the outside, he could always trust that he had a place to go inside that would not fail him, no matter its mystery or conflicted nature. The strength embodied in that place, the continuity of it was what had made it the loadstone that drew him.
But that was gone.
He could reach for it, remember the motions and the words and even the sense of the thing, but the actuality of it – the faith that held the whole complex structure together – was gone and he was left with nothing but jagged rubble that cut him anew at every turn.
Yet he went through the motions, aching and hoping that something would break through and give him a sense of assurance again. He knelt and crossed himself, hardly feeling the obvious absence of his rosary beads. He bowed his head and began reciting a simple prayer from his childhood. The words were hollow, empty and without meaning to him. He saw right through them to contrivance and instantly they were ashes in his mouth – they meant nothing. A Bible nestled in its place on the back of the pew before him seemed a mockery with its gilt lettering and leather binding. He had the sudden, anxious desire to fling it away as he had his own, that thick little volume that had been with him over half the earth.
He looked away and the anxious desire passed. The choir muttered a few phrases together, sight-reading some unfamiliar music, completely trusting their maestro to lead them through the complexities of the melody. Kurt felt again the deep ache of what he had lost.
As something of a guard against the pain, he went back to the motions. He unfolded the kneeling bench at his feet and dropped to his knees. Resting his elbows on the back of the pew, he folded his strange hands together and lifted his eyes to look to the crucifix above the altar. It seemed lusterless and wooden – a gilded representation of a lie and a forfeit. Kurt dropped his hands and his eyes before the condemnation that filled his throat could be voiced in the too quiet sanctuary. He swallowed it down hard and folded his arms beneath his head on the back of the pew, one hand clutching his hair, fingers unconsciously tracing the few symbols that even patterned his scalp. He was so tired that he felt sure he would die of this terrible internal conflict.
After a time he became aware that there was another sitting in the darkness close by that he, in his distraction, had not noticed.
Kurt did not lift his head to see the stranger, nor listen as the choir began to warm up with the well-known strains of "Amazing Grace." He deepened the shadows of his figure as was his talent and hoped that this other wayfarer would deem seeing him as a mere trick of the light.
"...how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me..."
A wretch. That was all that was left of him. Wretched; unable to be saved by that which had been so monstrously revealed as a debacle, a fiction invented to assuage the madding crowd.
A certain hopelessness dredged an aching sob muffled into his sleeve.
There was the light touch of a hand on his arm.
"Leave me be," he mumbled, lightening his aura just enough to let see the deep blue fur and the demonic tail that draped over the back of the seat.
There was silence except for the strains of the chorus for a long time after that and Kurt was not sure if he slept or fell into a stupor of exhaustion. He thought he felt a touch, just a slight tracing over the etchings that he had carved into his own face and down the back of his neck. Later, he would remember snatches of a conversation that he wasn't sure had even consisted of spoken words.
"My son comes here often, when his hands start to hurt him."
"How vas he injured?"
"Oh, you know, battling oppression, bringing hope. That sort of thing."
Something was pressed into his hand.
"He'd want you to have this."
"Won't he miss it?"
"He has untold numbers of others wherever he goes. He carried something like it once and it brought great healing."
Kurt sat alone again, unsure if another person had even been there, and stared down at the small cross in his hand.