Afterlife
Francis had only been to church once in his life. His parents had never taken him or his siblings when they were alive; religion had never been something they taught them or emphasized in one way or another, and he had never been able to extract from them their opinions on the matter.
"That's something for all of you to make up your own minds about," was all his father had said, and his mother had only elaborated slightly more about the matter.
"Religion is personal. No one call tell you what you should or shouldn't believe, that's for you to make up your own mind about. If you are open to possibilities, all possibilities, then the world is a more interesting and accurate place to live. Who would want all the answers anyway? Who do you know who truthfully has them?"
Perhaps this worked for his siblings, or at least for the twins, who had never seemed to care one way or the other to find out any unknowns in life. Their life in the present was what mattered to them, past or future be damned. But Francis was a thinker, even a dreamer, as his mother had often smilingly told him, while running affectionate fingers through his hair. He wanted answers, not simple possibilities, a direction to go and a place to arrive at, a sure path to lead his way. He had thought for a time that his parents would be this for him, that gradually, as he aged, they would reveal more and more to him until he had all the answered he desired.
But with his parents' loss, he had none of this, if they had ever been intended to give him this at all. Though he doubted religion would provide him with what he sought, he had tried it, all the same. Religion might not give him comfort or hope for his future, but he suspected that it would give him the message of damnation, of what he felt to be his doomed, cursed existence…and perhaps if it could validate this feeling or suspicion, it could also teach him how to avoid its seemingly inevitable continuance.
It was a myth, he knew, that people of his nature, of his family's type, would be unable to sit in a church, to be in the presence of a cross, or to speak or be exposed to prayer. Francis sat through it all and half expected himself, despite this knowledge, to burst into flames or to somehow expose himself as the wolf among the sheep that knew deep down that he was, or one day would be. But nothing of the sort occurred. He was greeted with friendly acknowledgement, and then he was left alone, with none the wiser as to his true identity.
He was not provided with answers as he sought, nor with peace of any kind, and after two visits did not return to church again. But even years later, when he had accepted his lot in life, even tentatively began to embrace himself and his family's genetics, Francis sometimes thought back to those services, in particular to their views of the afterlife, and could not be certain of whether or not he hoped that this much of the religious ones' views were accurate.
If there was an afterlife, and his parents were part of it, which section would they belong to- heaven, or hell? If they could see him and his siblings now, what would they think of him? Would they be proud…or would they warn him, if he could, that they had instructed him wrongly, to choose another path, to fight against the very nature that their genetics had cursed him with?
And what about his victims, those of his siblings'? What would their roles in the potential afterlife be…and if they could see him now, watch how they were forced to live his life, would they understand?