i’d love to see natalie x preacher’s daughter!reader !! 💗
[cw.] — a bleak, intimate character piece set in a small-town religious milieu; homophobia and spiritual abuse, coercive control, and community cruelty. references to parental violence and an implied bruise, emotional manipulation, and ostracization. illness and hospital setting, medical despair, anticipatory grief, and death. body handling after death and an illegal burial. themes of guilt, obsession, self-destruction, and devotion-as-violence. cigarettes/smoking. tender romance threaded through tragedy, affectionate touch and kissing, and love depicted as enduring hurt. 2.9k words
there’s a violence in devotion that nobody warns you about.
natalie scatorccio learned this the first time she saw you at sunday service, standing in the third pew with your father’s hand on your shoulder like a brand. you were all white cotton and soft edges, a lamb among wolves, and she was already bleeding before she knew your name. the church smelled like old wood and older sins, and you turned your head just once—just enough for her to see the way light caught in your eyes like water in a well. something holy. something drowning.
she didn’t believe in god. she believed in cigarettes and the particular mercy of things that killed you slowly, in the way rust ate through metal and the way wanting ate through bone. but when you looked at her—when you looked at her—she understood why men built cathedrals. why they carved saints from marble and called it worship. you were something worth kneeling for, and she had never knelt for anything in her life.
your father’s sermons were about sin. about the wages of it, the weight of it, how it settled into the marrow and made a home there. natalie sat in the back row and watched you mouth the hymns without singing them, watched your hands fold in your lap like birds with broken wings, and she thought: i am going to ruin you. and then, quieter, underneath: you are going to let me.
the first time she spoke to you was behind the fellowship hall, where the azaleas grew wild and the ground was soft with years of fallen petals. you had slipped away from the congregation, from the casseroles and the careful smiles, and she had followed you the way water follows gravity—without thought, without choice. you startled when you saw her, one hand flying to your chest like you could keep your heart from escaping.
“i’m not going to hurt you,” she said, and even then she knew it was a lie. the first of many. the kindest of many.
“i know who you are,” you said. your voice was smaller than she expected. softer. a church mouse voice, a kept-thing voice. “my father says—”
“i know what your father says.”
you looked at her then. really looked. and whatever you saw there—the hunger, the ruin, the desperate wanting that she wore like a second skin—it didn’t make you run. you tilted your head, and your hair fell across your shoulder, and you smiled like you were apologizing for something that hadn’t happened yet.
“he says a lot of things,” you whispered. “most of them aren’t true.”
that was the beginning. or maybe the beginning was earlier—maybe the beginning was the moment she was born, screaming and unwanted, into a world that had already decided what she would become. maybe the beginning was you, years before she ever saw you, learning to fold yourself into the shape your father needed. maybe there was no beginning at all. maybe they had always been falling toward each other, two bodies in orbit, and the collision was just a matter of time.
she took you to her trailer on a tuesday afternoon when the sky was the color of a bruise and the air tasted like rain. you stood in the doorway for a long moment, looking at the water stains on the ceiling, the dishes in the sink, the mattress on the floor with its tangle of sheets, and she waited for you to recoil. waited for you to see her the way everyone else did—as something dirty, something shameful, something to be scraped off like mud from a shoe.
but you just stepped inside and closed the door behind you, and you said, “it’s quiet here.”
you learned each other like a language, like something that required study and practice and the occasional failure. she learned that you cried when you were angry, that you bit your lip when you were thinking, that you had a scar on your knee from a fall you didn’t remember. you learned that she couldn’t sleep without noise, that she flinched when people raised their voices, that she had taught herself to read from stolen books and gas station magazines. you learned each other in the dark, in the half-light, in the spaces between what you were supposed to be and what you actually were.
“tell me something true,” you said one night, your head on her chest, your breath warm against her skin. outside, the cicadas were screaming, and the heat pressed against the windows like something trying to get in.
she thought about it. thought about all the things she could say—i’ve never loved anything i didn’t destroy or i’m so tired i can feel it in my teeth or sometimes i think i was born wrong, like god made a mistake and i’ve been trying to fix it ever since.
what she said was: “i don’t know how to want things without wanting to swallow them whole.”
you lifted your head. your eyes were dark in the darkness, two wells she could fall into and never climb out of. “is that what you want to do to me? swallow me whole?”
“okay,” you said. and you kissed her like a benediction, like a burial, like something that was already ending even as it began.
your father found out the way fathers always find out—through whispers, through rumors, through the particular cruelty of small towns that have nothing better to do than watch each other bleed. someone saw you climbing out of her truck. someone saw you holding hands behind the dollar store. someone saw, and someone told, and the next time natalie drove past the church, your father was standing on the steps with a face like a closed fist.
she didn’t see you for three days. three days of calling and calling and calling, of driving past your house and seeing the curtains drawn, of lying on her mattress and staring at the ceiling and wondering if this was what dying felt like. on the fourth day, you appeared at her door with a suitcase in your hand and a bruise on your cheek the color of rotting fruit, and she didn’t ask questions. she just pulled you inside and held you while you shook, and she thought: i will burn this whole town to the ground. i will salt the earth where it stood. i will—
“it’s okay,” you said, even though it wasn’t. “it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
you said it like a prayer. like if you said it enough times, it might become true.
the weeks that followed were the happiest of her life, which meant they were also the most terrifying. happiness, for natalie, had always been a borrowed thing—something she held in her hands while waiting for it to be taken away. and you were so easy to love. so easy to want. you sang while you made coffee, off-key and unconscious, and you laughed at her jokes even when they weren’t funny, and you looked at her like she was something worth looking at.
she started to hope. that was her first mistake.
“what do you want?” she asked you once, while you were lying in the grass behind the trailer, watching the clouds move like slow animals across the sky. “if you could have anything. if nothing was stopping you.”
you were quiet for a long time. so long that she thought you might not answer at all.
“i want to wake up without being afraid,” you said finally. “i want to go somewhere no one knows my name. i want—” you stopped. swallowed. “i want to be the kind of person who deserves to want things.”
“you deserve everything.”
“no.” your voice was soft, but there was something hard underneath it. something she had never heard before. “i don’t. and neither do you. that’s why we fit.”
she should have known then. should have seen the way you were already leaving, even when you were lying right next to her. but love makes you stupid, makes you blind, makes you believe in things you know aren’t true. and she wanted so badly to believe that this time would be different. that you would be the thing she didn’t destroy.
the sickness started slow. a cough that wouldn’t quit. a tiredness that sank into your bones and wouldn’t let go. you said it was nothing. you said you were fine. you said don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry, like a habit, like a spell, like something you could make true just by saying it enough.
but natalie had spent her whole life watching things die. she knew what it looked like when something was ending.
the doctor said words she didn’t understand, words that sounded like they belonged in textbooks, not in mouths. you sat in the plastic chair with your hands folded in your lap—those same hands, those prayer hands, those good-girl hands—and you nodded like you had always known. like you had been waiting for this the way some people wait for trains, for letters, for someone to finally tell them what they already suspected.
“how long?” natalie asked, and her voice came out wrong. scraped. like she had swallowed glass.
the doctor looked at her with tired eyes, the eyes of a man who had given this speech too many times, and he said, “it’s difficult to say. could be months. could be weeks.”
could be weeks. could be weeks. could be.
she didn’t cry. she couldn’t cry. the grief was too big for crying, too heavy, like trying to hold the ocean in her hands. you reached for her, and she flinched, and she saw the hurt flash across your face like lightning, and she hated herself for it. hated herself for everything.
“nat,” you said. soft. steady. like you were the one who was supposed to be comforting her. “nat, look at me.”
she looked. you were smiling, and it was the saddest thing she had ever seen. sadder than the empty bottles on her mother’s nightstand, sadder than the sound of her own crying when she thought no one could hear, sadder than every sad thing she had ever known.
“i need you to promise me something,” you said.
“don’t make this your fault.” your hands found hers, and they were so warm, so warm, and she thought: how can something this warm be dying? “this isn’t because of you. this isn’t because of anything. sometimes things just end. sometimes the story doesn’t have a reason.”
“that’s not—” her throat closed. she tried again. “that’s not fair.”
“no,” you agreed. “it isn’t.”
you came home with her. of course you did. where else were you going to go? your father wouldn’t even look at you now, and the church had closed its doors, and the only place left was the trailer with its water stains and its mattress on the floor and the girl who loved you like a wound, like a war, like something she couldn’t survive.
she held you every night. memorized the weight of you, the smell of you, the sound of your breathing while you slept. she told herself she was preparing. building up a reserve of memories to live on when you were gone. but that was a lie too, wasn’t it? there was no preparing for this. there was no way to store enough of you to last a lifetime.
“i’m scared,” you admitted one night, your voice barely a whisper, your fingers tracing shapes on her shoulder. the light from the tv flickered across the ceiling, blue and cold. “i know i’m not supposed to be. i know i’m supposed to have faith.”
“something. anything.” you laughed, but it was a broken sound. a shattered-glass sound. “my father would say god. he would say i should be grateful for the time i’ve had. he would say—”
“your father doesn’t know anything.”
“no,” you said. “but neither do i.”
she kissed your forehead, your eyelids, the tip of your nose, the corner of your mouth. she kissed you like she was trying to leave a mark, to brand herself onto you, to become something you would carry with you wherever you were going.
“i’ll be here,” she said. “until the end. i’ll be here.”
“i know.” your hand found her face in the darkness, cupped her cheek with a tenderness that made her want to scream. “that’s what scares me most.”
the end came on a wednesday. not with fanfare, not with warning, just a quiet slipping away like water through fingers. natalie woke up to the sound of nothing—no breathing, no heartbeat, no soft sighing in her ear—and she knew before she opened her eyes. knew the way animals know when a storm is coming. knew it in her blood, in her bones, in the hollow space where her heart used to be.
you looked peaceful. that was what people always said, wasn’t it? they looked peaceful. like death was just a kind of sleeping. but you didn’t look peaceful to natalie. you looked gone. entirely, irrevocably gone. a house with all the lights turned off. a song that had stopped mid-note.
she didn’t scream. she didn’t cry. she just lay there, holding your body—not you, not anymore, just the thing you used to live in—and she thought about all the time she would have with you now. all the time in the world. all the time to remember and regret and wish she had said things differently, loved you better, been someone who deserved what you had given her.
you used to tell her not to worry, like you could talk fear out of her with your mouth. you used to make the future sound simple—like time was something you could save up and spend, like you could promise her more of it.
this was the time. this was all there was. this silence, this stillness, this endless afterward.
she buried you where the wildflowers grew, where the trees bent low and the greenery stung, where no one would think to look. it wasn’t legal. it wasn’t right. but nothing about this had ever been legal, had ever been right, and she couldn’t bear the thought of your father standing over your grave, pretending he had ever loved you the way you deserved to be loved.
she dug until her hands bled. until the sun went down and came back up again. until there was a hole in the earth big enough to hold you, and then she lay you down, gentle, so gentle, the way you had always asked her to be.
“i’m sorry,” she said. the words were meaningless. just sounds. “i’m sorry i couldn’t save you. i’m sorry i couldn’t be better. i’m sorry—”
but there was no one to hear her. just the wind in the trees, and the birds that didn’t care, and the weight of all that dirt waiting to cover you up.
she filled in the grave. planted nettles on top, those bitter weeds that stung when you touched them, that left marks on your skin like warnings. don’t come near. don’t touch. don’t try to love what isn’t yours.
the trailer felt different after that. quieter. emptier. she could still see you everywhere—in the coffee cup you used to drink from, in the indent on the pillow where your head used to rest, in the way the light came through the window in the afternoon, golden and soft, the way you used to love.
she didn’t eat. she didn’t sleep. she just existed, the way ghosts exist, the way memories exist. half a person. half of what she used to be.
she understood now. understood that you had been warning her all along. not in words stolen from a song, not in poetry, but in the plain fact of your softness: that to love you was to be marked by you. that devotion left welts. that the price of having you, even for a little while, was losing you.
now the world was exactly that. a place without you in it. and she had to live there anyway.
she went back to the grave sometimes. sat among the nettles and let them sting her, welcomed the pain because at least it was something, at least it was proof that she was still alive even when she didn’t want to be.
“i don’t know how to do this,” she told you, told the dirt, told the sky that didn’t answer. “i don’t know how to be a person without you.”
the wind moved through the trees. the nettles swayed. and somewhere, maybe, you were listening. or maybe you weren’t. maybe there was nothing after this, no heaven, no hell, just the long slow forgetting, just the way things ended and didn’t start again.
it didn’t matter. natalie would talk to you anyway. would keep you alive in the only way she knew how—through words, through memory, through the stubborn refusal to let you disappear completely.
she had loved you the only way she knew how: like a vow and like a wound, with her teeth in it, with her hands shaking, with her whole body saying mine even when the world said no.
she lit a cigarette. watched the smoke curl up toward the sky, toward wherever you were, toward nowhere at all.
“i’ll see you soon,” she said.
and the nettles grew, and the world kept turning, and somewhere a girl who used to believe in nothing learned what it meant to believe in something she couldn’t keep.
