closed: @keptjust
location: the parade during the summer shine festival.
she used to help out with the church's float. not this year though. she's on the sidelines, staring out as the parade goes on, floats passing by. the sound is loud, and it should be annoying, but rory takes comfort in it. it shows that she's not really alone, even though she wants to be.
she's so focused on the parade, that she doesn't notice something coming at her. or well, a little someone. she feels a force bump into her legs, and she's stumbling a bit. she lets out an 'oomph', and then rights herself, looking down at the figure who had just run into her. "are you okay?" she asks the child, before looking up to see if their parents were around. her eyes land on diego, and she feels a little bit of relief when she sees him. at least she didn't have to go looking for parents. "this one yours?" she asks, a slight joking tone to it while as she hugs herself, eyes taking in the child.
He has nothing against Aurora Banks, and yet he cannot pick a worse person for his seven year old daughter to go running into, Emilia's enthusiasm clearly blinding her to things like adults in their path, even if he wouldn't be surprise if Miss Banks was doing her best ghost impersonation. He doesn't miss the way her arms wrap around her body, and he can only imagine what the sight of kids does to her. Eliza may not have had the best reputation, but every parent of a troubled or rowdy kid seemed to dream about when they were younger, better, more innocent.
"For the moment." He says, cutting his eyes at his older son next to him. Diego asked for one thing, keep an eye on his sister and take her to get funnel cake, and what happened? Lucas let the girl run off. Diego is certain it's going to end up being his fault whenever his ex wife picks them up later at the chili context, but he didn't want to think about that at the moment. "Although with as hyper as she is, I'm reconsidering feeding her junk food."
As expected, the statement instantly gets a gasp and a whine from Emilia, who looked up at Miss Banks. "Tell him that's not fair! It was an accident and I'm sorry and I should still get funnel cake."
It was clear to her from the moment she walked in the doors: Loretta was not going to make it through the night without a task. Under normal circumstances she did her best to steer clear of the church ladies—she never was a fan of heights, or horses. Tonight though, she swallowed her pride and sought out them out. If she was going to be here, she wanted to be useful.
That's how Loretta found herself stationed at the end of a pew, handing out programs to people who barely looked her in the eye. Oh, how the mighty fall.
She's pulled back into the present by a voice, only to be thrust back into the throes of yesteryear. At least this was a kinder sort of nostalgia.
"They came to their senses quick enough." Nothing like the church at midnight to bring out the devil in a group of small town kids. She's smiling before she realizes, half here and half somewhere else for a moment. Somewhere sweeter. "Do you remember the year Bill Thompson brought in that dead fish? Stuck it under the pew?"
"I remember how I couldn't go fishing without thinking about the insect life trying to colonize that dead fish. I've caught them, cleaned them, but seeing it like that was enough to put me off fish for a while." Diego replied almost instantly, turning to look back over his shoulder as if Bill's ghost might just be there, ready to pull another prank on them all no matter how terrible the timing.
But Bill was long gone and so was that fish, the odor gone and the carpet even replaced. But the pews were the same, weren't they? The thought causing a frown to mar his face as he remembered kids scratching their initials in it, or sometimes already finding them there because eventually you had to share a letter combination with someone. L.D. could stand for Larry Douglas as easily as it could Loretta Durst, and there were a lot of names that started with T.
"These walls have seen a lot of years." He finally said, turning back to Loretta and seeing her superimposed for a moment. Her now, her as a child at school, and her when Tommy disappeared. With all the memories tied up in Loretta, all the stories and feelings, the strongest one that always rested right there on the surface was guilt.
She accepted his flame whispering a "thanks" as she watched her wick ignite. Her eyes unfocused as blankly stared at the flame, allowing the warm glow to wash over her face. She watched as her candle joined its brothers and sisters in a dance of mourning. Why was she here? She lifted her eyes up to his face as he spoke.
"Yes," she said with a small nod. Tilting her head toward him she continued. "Hospitals see raw, ugly, hope." Her eyes washed over the crowd - the forced smiles the darting eyes hungry for shreds of gossip. "This?" She gestured with her chin to the crowd around them. "It's just a show, that's all."
She heaved a sigh as another hymn started up. She had learned them all as a girl, and their steady cadence and drone stirred the dust off of some deeply rooted nostalgia. She really couldn't explain why she was here. So far, between having her car damaged, being wildly uncomfortable and socially awkward this night was proving to be a wash. It was a mistake coming. She should've listened to her parents and stayed home.
"Correct. This is for them, not for her." Was that brusque? Maybe, but Diego considered himself to be a no nonsense kind of man. He'd say when someone with a bad reputation did right and he would call out when the so called righteous were being full of themselves, and this here was all theater. "It looks good, but it's not achieving anything except letting them be seen. If they wanted to help Eliza Grant, they'd be looking, and if they wanted to help Ms. Banks, they'd ask her what she needed instead of crooning songs we all memorized at the same time we all figured out by the time we knew our home phone numbers."
Perhaps that was a sweeping statement, but the roots of religion ran deep in Bone Gap - or maybe that was only Diego's own view of thing, all the camps and study sessions and prayer meetings that his father dragged him around coloring his view of things. And yet despite all of those lessons, all those hours spent around those who called themselves devout, Diego often considered stories about a lord and savior to fall into the same boat as stories about Santa Claus and the Easter bunny.
"So why are you here, Miss Barre?" Diego asked lightly, his words so soft that they nearly disappeared in the rhythm of song. "If you say it's a show, are you here as a performer or as an audience member?"
She had made it inside. Her stomach lurched at the sight of the pulsing crowd of Bone Gap residents that had packed themselves inside of the church. Sweating hands gripped her program and unlit candle as she shuffled into a pew row, head down as to avoid the forced "how're your folks?" and awkward smiling. Wind-tossed curls fell in her face as she pushed her way into an empty spot near one of the middle pews.
Another hymn started and she closed her eyes to help quell the spinning anxiety she felt as others, strangers, really seemed to press in on her. Why was she here? She heaved a deep breath and forced her eyes open allowing them to drift around the sanctuary. Some bowed their heads as they sand while others raised their swaying hands in the air in a demonstration of extreme reverence. She scrunched her nose at this.
A voice to her left caught her off-guard. She didn't meet his eyes, but she knew by his clothes, shoes, and smell who he was. "Yeah," she whispered back, blinking as her memory flooded with images and feelings of church lock-ins where she was forced into playing games, reading scriptures at midnight, and be saved. "Not my fondest of memories," she added, almost to herself. She gestured to his lit candle. "Do you mind if I..." She trailed off, holding her unlit wick up hoping the sight of it would complete her sentence for her.
Perfectly capable of reading into the silence, Diego shifted and held his candle out towards her, a hand cupped below it just in case wax dared to drip as he let his flame light her darkened candle. For a moment, he thought of a cigarette's glowing tip cupped between palms on a windy night, the brightest star around as the clock ticked ever later. It seemed incongruous with the surroundings, but a flame was still a flame, wasn't it?
"Have you ever heard the saying that hospitals have seen more sincere prayers than a church?" He asked quietly, not looking at her as he straightened his candle and leaned back in his seat, taking up far more space than he should have. Head tipping back, he looked at the windows being pelted with rain and knew in his bones that it would feel cold against the skin, even if spring was fading away to summer.
What must the church look like from the outside, a beacon in the darkness of Bone Gap, intent making it blaze like an arson's fever dream against rolling black clouds. If he'd ever been religious, Diego had lost it long ago, but he doubted that all these people crying out to the heavens were doing Eliza any good. The best thing they were doing was making their throats sore so they'd quit gossiping, but he knew better than to say that.
The gentle murmur of the room is interrupted by the sheriff’s quiet voice beside her. Clementine looks up from the program, trying to hide the mild panic that flares up in the pit of her stomach. Getting nervous around law enforcement is an old habit, despite Sheriff Sanchez’s friendly demeanor. Blame her mother’s tradition of sending out cops after her whenever she skipped out on school or ran off in the middle of the night. Clementine’s fingers tighten around her candle. She reminds herself that she’s not sixteen anymore.
“You had sleepovers at church?” She questions with a raised brow. The words come out with more incredulity and bite than she intended. She’s never had a good track record at tapering her attitude when she’s speaking with Older Adults, let alone authority figures— let alone adult authority figures who are reminiscing about the good old days. Clementine bites her tongue and purses her lips.
“That sounds…” She looks around, wondering how to backtrack. Clementine can count the number of times she’s been inside a church, and none of them are good memories. She knows she can’t convince him when she finally speaks in a flat, unimpressed tone. “Fun.”
Unbothered by her tone, Diego huffs and turns his face halfway towards her before glancing at Clementine's face. "This was Bone Gap before you were born. Do you think they promoted any activity for kids that didn't involve Jesus?" They did, but he wanted to see what she would say - and if the kids who went swimming together said that they were just trying to baptize each other when they held Jimmy below the water, well, religion always involved suffering, didn't it?
He's about to ask just what she considers fun that's legal when he hears it, a scream rising up from another pew and not the kind of a woman filled with grief. He's heard those screams before, the disbelief of someone lost, but this is something else, this is horrified, and it has Diego jumping up from his seat while his program flutters to the floor, stomped beneath his boot as he moves in the direction of the sound.
One hand reaches out unconsciously as if to keep Clementine in her seat, but he doesn't really pay attention to if she stays. With the chaos descending in the church, Clementine isn't his greatest worry with crowd control. "Out of the way," He says, voice pitched to carry through the crowd. If they part or not, he can't say, as the church plunges into darkness.
Diego had never been an overly religious person - he believed in himself more than a single large deity out there ruling the cosmos, or turtles carrying the world on their back, or that the earth was secretly a womb or whichever thought process you belonged to. He wasn't going to say there weren't powers out there stronger than him, but common sense said that humans weren't the top of the food chain without getting metaphysics involved, so he was hardly going out on a limb.
But if Diego were to ever pinpoint a moment where it felt as though his soul hummed, it was listening to a church choir and voices harmonizing. Something about it was electric and while he didn't think he'd win any talent competition, singing church hymns was a guilty pleasure he hadn't let go of. He didn't have a lot of those in life and maybe it was wrong of him to look forward to any part of this service, but the small pleasures of life were vital, especially when the days were so dark.
Rubbing his thumb against a crinkled corner of a program, he leaned forward and felt something pull in his back from the motion. Too much time spent hunched over, but who was surprised? He wasn't getting any younger, might as well start talking about hard candy and the weather. Speaking of which… "Good thing we have the candles, sounds like the power may go out before we're done. Be just like the sleepovers this place used to have."
open: anyone
location: first assembly baptist church during the vigil
she's good at this, putting on a smile when her insides are all twisted up. she's not used to this, though, her daughter missing and the woods calling to her. she doesn't want to do this, doesn't want to be here, wants to prepare for what she feels is coming. she has to prepare, she has to be ready, but first, she has to conquer today.
rory's brushing her hair from her face, and then grasps hold of the candle with both hands. it's gripped hard, like it'll be her saving grace. she's not crying, even though people around her are, and it makes her a little angry. how could these people cry for her daughter? they need to be looking instead of praying, but as a good church goer, she has to pretend like this is okay, that the praying will work. she knows it won't, because it's not the right way of doing things, but she goes through it anyway.
she startles, having been looking at nothing, as someone comes up beside her. her head turns to look at them, and while she doesn't want to, she gives them a small smile. "thank you for coming," she whispers so she's not disturbing the person at the pew talking. she hasn't talked up there, yet, or not at all, she's not sure, but right now, she's feeling grounded, focusing on the person next to her.
An eyebrow raising, Diego can't help but find himself skeptical at her praise. Pious and devout as she may look, candle held tightly enough that when he glances over her, he expects it to crack or to bear her fingerprints in its wax, Diego knows that she's still a mother. Perhaps grief has crippled her and made her weak, incapable of doing anything but praying to a higher power for saving, but Diego knows if it was one of his own kids, he'd be searching until he wore through the bottom his shoes through. And the things he'd do if he found someone that he thought endangered his kids? That would be worth taking his badge for.
But his kids were good kids, and they were young. Not as likely to get into trouble, but none of that meant that Eliza wasn't still someone's baby that should have someone out looking for her, and it didn't mean that Aurora Banks wasn't well in her right to take offense at him standing there at some church gathering instead of turning over every stone for her errant daughter.
"Are you really thanking me for coming, or thanking me for still paying attention? I won't be offended." Sheriff, yes, but Andy Griffith, no. He tried hard to be a good lawman for the town, someone that could be followed, but he didn't expect blind faith from someone wounded.
Character Name: Diego Elias Sanchez
Role: The Keeper
Nickname (s): Santi, but only for those close to him.
Face Claim: Pedro Pascal
Gender, pronouns: Cismale, he/him
Occupation: Sheriff
Birthplace: Bone Gap, Indiana
Birthday: December 31st
Zodiac: Capricorn
MBTI: ISTJ
Moral Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Sexuality: Bisexual, leaning heterosexual (He's like a 2 on the Kinsey scale)
3 positive traits: Steadfast, confident, hardworking
3 negative traits: Ruthless, Machiavellian, secretive
Languages: English, Spanish, some Farsi
Love language: Physical touch
The youngest child of three, he was never meant to be the one to succeed his father, and yet there are some destinies you can't escape, some fates written in stone. Bone Gap is one of those places where endings are inevitable, where everything happened a long time ago and will happen again. Cyclical. As soon as his great grandparents first arrived in Bone Gap, they sealed not only their own fate, but that of their descendants, and even though Diego's left town before, something always draws him back.
In a small town like Bone Gap, everyone is a familiar face, but Diego wouldn't consider himself a familiar person. Perfectly capable of sharing small talk with you while waiting in line at the check out, he's skilled at talking without giving away a damn thing about himself. The brash honesty of his youth was traded in for guarded secrecy, his silence making ways for assumptions that make him seem just as familiar and known as any other staple of Bone Gap.
They know his story, that he's been both married and divorced, that he has two children he sees every second weekend because the court says his job is too risky and demanding. They know he's at every PT meeting and he's overprotective, but do they know the reasons why? Can anyone really explain the reason why things go wrong in Bone Gap?
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