It is like a weight within him that settles deep, crushing the breath from his lungs and leaving him gasping. His eyes fall to details, the way his hands look in the artificial light that streams in soft from the windows, settling patterns across the floor.
He has carved a facsimile of a home but it is silent, oppressively so, and he breathes out and he breathes in. The dust settles and the voices of strangers echo like the soft rustle of glass and the pallid shifting of leaves under a dead autumnal sky. The pain in him is sharp enough to feel pure, sharp enough to elevate him. He wonders if anyone will hear him if he prays. He knows, somewhere in the depths of himself that he is watched, even then, when he wakes with tears on his cheeks that he blames from the leaks in a roof - his- roof, although it is not truly his. He has not built it, burned his hands, splintered them on wood. He merely occupies what was already there, like a hermit crab moving into a larger shell. Maybe it is temporary. He doesn’t know.
God is a whisper and God is faith and God is full of glory and strength but also pettiness and rage and retribution. Humanity truly was made in His image, and he loves them as he loves God, with a strange half-fervent bewilderedness. Never completely understanding, but always wanting to. Always patient, waiting for some kind of answer. He wants to cling to this meaning, this chance, but he fears the nights alone. Every night, he swears and smiles and tells some stranger that they are not alone, that he is with them. Sows pieces of light into the darkness, not with war words or with fury but with kindness, placing seeds in the hope they take root. He doesn’t ask for anything in return. Doesn’t know what he would ask, because everything seems so much. He tries to fill his waking moments with the purity and the strength of the path set before him so he will not be so afraid of the dark.
But in the end, the dark is always there, and it is waiting for him, and when he wakes in the dark, he wakes alone.
He wonders if he prayed for it, that God would hear him. He would tell Him that he is sorry. That he is trying to be a good and a worthy son, but that he is only one man, and he is frightened. That his fear does not take away from his conviction, but it does not mean that he is not afraid. He wants to pray for the pain that has taken root in him to lessen, he wants to pray for contentment and for peace, but he is tired. He is tired of hearing his own voice echo back to him in the night, and he is tired of feeling as a weapon does, tired of elegant purpose without the pedestrian nature of a heart.
He wishes God would do what Fathers do.
He wishes He would hold him. Take him into His arms and tell him that he was going to be okay. That He was proud of him, and that he was loved. The only touch he has is the fleeting touches he gets by the hands of a stranger, an hand to arm clasp of fealty, of shared strength. They see him if they know him, as an Arc, one of the great ones of Heaven, but they do not see him as anything more than that. He wished God was something that he would touch. Throw his arms around, and cover His face with kisses. What it would sound like if He laughed. If the voice of I love you wasn’t only in his own head. He knows what he is meant to do, but he wants to be a son as well as a means to an end. He wants to know that He was sorry that He hurt him. That He allowed him to be hurt.
But faith does not answer, and he sits alone. He does not know what it would feel like to be held any more. He is light and he is purity, and he doesn’t want to remember. He doesn’t want to remember what doesn’t exist for him at this place and time. There is no one that he can speak to when he desires it, no one that does not come with built-in instructions, timings, when and where. There is nothing that is simple. Nowhere he can go. Nowhere to call home. His home is broken into a million souls spread out across the city, in as many hearts, and he knows that as many as would help him if he called, an equal number would turn their faces away. He is stronger now, and he can bear it, but he wishes he didn’t have to. He wishes for the first time in his long existence that he could stop feeling, stop being a raw nerve of the universe, sensitive to every agony, because he has enough of his own.
He touches the window, misty with early-morning frost, and it echoes through his heart. He wants to numb it. He knows that’s wrong. That what he’s needed for requires him alive and feeling. It requires him to love even when love is the thing that is destroying him. God loves, and he does not doubt His love, but he wishes He could hold him. He wishes that He would speak with him, and touch his cheek, and with perfect understanding, hold him close, for this human part of him needs touch and he is starving for it, without knowing how to ask. He wishes that his smiles were real, and the whispers of ‘you’re okay, you’re fine, I’m with you’ came from a throat that wasn’t his own. He recovers in his silence, and listens to the world around him that he knows that he has come to help, and it used to be enough to love them, used to be enough to expect nothing in the return, but it’s cold, and he’s alone, and he wants someone to answer, anyone. He wants someone to run to when the world comes crashing down, because the world is such a heavy thing to try to shoulder, and it is bowing his back a little more every day.
He turns himself from porcelain to steel. He becomes as flawless as a flawed thing can be. He tells himself that he is light, and light does not fear the dangerous. Light does not bleed, does not cry in the night, does not feel lonely. He stops telling himself the things that are driving him forward, because he is tired of hearing his own voice echo back to him. He loves, and for the first time, that doesn’t feel like enough. He wants to know that he has somewhere to come back to, somewhere safe, somewhere where he belongs. He wants to know why this happened, what the purpose of this pain was, in the greater scheme. He wants to know that it is worth it, or perhaps it never will matter for him. Just another thing cast by the wayside after the conclusion is reached, for although he loves God, he knows that he is an easy sacrifice for Him to make in the pursuit of something greater.
The world turns without knowing that he listens and that he guards it in his own, silent, ineffectual way. He listens for an answer to his own words, that tells the world that it is loved, completely, and without reservation, loved. Unconditionally.
He wants to hear it back.
He wants to know that he is forgiven for whatever he has done, for he has tried.
He dons the mask of the soldier gazing across a wasteland, and the sinewed power of the holy man. For the first time in his existence, he will carry groundshaking conviction like a shield and like a weapon. But who will smile at him when the war was done? Who would chase away the nightmares that nipped at his heels and twisted in his heart? Who would tell him that it was all right that he was afraid, that he wasn’t alone?
The word is dusty, covered, shaken off, like a book from childhood not read since, but read so much before that he knew every page. He falls into the rhythm where he had left off what felt like centuries ago.
The two words are small. His head is bowed. His eyes are open, his tears a slow trail down his cheeks. “I know that I shouldn’t be, but I am. I never was the best of Your sons, and I know that, Father, I always have known that, but I always tried. Tried to be the best I could, tried to be obedient. Tried to face the fighting with honor and loyalty and grace, but I was scared then, and I’m scared now. “
“I know what You want from me, why You’ve sent me, but I don’t understand. I get the others. Great and mighty warriors, but You know what I am. You know that I don’t want to do this. I never wanted to do this, but I’m scared and I’m alone, and I need You. I know You can hear me. I know that You love me, but that doesn’t feel like enough, and I feel like shit that it doesn’t.”
His voice breaks slightly.
“I’m supposed to be a good son. I’m supposed to love. I’m not supposed to need anything back. But I’m small, and I’m broken and I’m lonely, Father. I can’t do this on my own. I need to know You’re with me.”
There is silence and he shakes his head. “I know You’re not going to answer me. I know this isn’t how this works. And I know I’m just a speck in the void and that You are so much greater. But—-I need to have something. Some way of making this through this. I want to be touched,” he whispered. “I want to be held. I want to belong somewhere and to know I belong. And for once, I want to feel whole, and for it to be okay that I’m a fuck up because I’m a fuck up that’s trying. And it’s not okay for me to give up everything without a question, because I’m not perfect. And I’m not a hero. I’m here.”
He touches the window again, chases the light that hesitated on the dirty floor. “I wish You would tell me that you love me,” he whispers, his voice trembling. “Because if I’m going to fight, if I’m going to maybe not make it out of this, I want to do more than feel. I want to hear it.”
“I need something for the pain, now, because it hurts so much, Father. And maybe it’s wrong. Maybe it’s human, but I’ve given up so much.”
No answer comes, but he understands, ignoring the hot tears that spill down his cheeks. He curls up on the floor and watches the patterns the motes of dust make in the subtle beams of light, and he is gentle with himself, angling himself in, keeping himself warm, the silence settling like a promise into his chest.
“I should have been better—-”
But he isn’t, for he is so much less than perfect. He is awake, and he is alive, and he is alone. He wants to say that he understands, to let the lazy sounds of resignation leave his lips, but he bites them back like the warrior he can sense burning within his blood.
When his sleep comes, it is empty and black and soothing, the first without dreams in a very long time, and when he wakes in the darkness later, if there is wetness on his cheeks, the roof has always let in the rain.
There is a footstep upon old wood, a soft scraping that is recognizable in his deepest of dreams, and his lips shift, as though remembering a smile. Even her presence lightens the deep oppressiveness that weighs down his chest, and he looks up, skeletal, weary, aching, weak, looks up and tries to find her.
Perhaps he is not as alone as he thought.
Perhaps she still remembers him.
“I missed you, kiddo,” he whispers softly, and his eyes half close in a silent unanswered question. Did you miss me?
