Kyrie Eleison
Kyra Cullinan
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Angel was Catholic once.
Disclaimer: Angel belongs to the nice people who made him and Catholicism
does not.
Author's Note: Inspired by a Kickstarts challenge, my first Angelfic, which
even I'm surprised to be writing. Thanks to s.a., Gabe and Julie for betas,
and to my hopelessly Irish Catholic childhood. Latin translations at the
end.
Website: http://narrowstreets.net
*
Things have changed; he knows
this. The language itself, the direction of things, everything softening to
fit this modern world. It's a feeling he knows well. He doesn't remember
when or how he found out about the upheaval in the half century since --
probably during all the commotion at the time -- but it's only the latest
chapter of a story he likes to keep aware of in general. Immortality brings
an appreciation for the constants, whatever they may be.
It's one of the things he
remembers best from those increasingly hazy years before, from the life he
led as Liam. Memories bred into him by years of repetition, the comforting
routine of In nomine Patris, the feel of hard wood digging into his
knees, flickering rows of candles, the communion plate clutched beneath his
chin. These things became as much a part of him as the soft, perpetual
rain; pressed into his very skin, for all that he wasn't particularly
devout. That wasn't what mattered in those days anyway, and years of
childhood rituals couldn't be entirely erased by his later predilection for
things less religious. It had been part of his life, as much as the smell
of horses, the taste of potatoes, the color of his mother's eyes.
But unlike them, the Church was
not something he could destroy or deny when he turned. The taste of power
glittered on his tongue along with the blood of his family as he tore a
great, gaping wound through his village, laying waste to everything from
his past while Darla beamed with pride. It was the first of countless
nights reduced in memory to a haze of blood and fire, but he remembers
laughing, a giddy, disbelieving sound bubbling out of him as the demon
spurred him onward into the reckless freedom of total unrestraint.
The doors of the church stopped
him short, shocked him utterly. He was startled to find himself hissing and
recoiling from the cross carved in the thick wood, and bewildered at the
sudden alienation of something so familiar. It was a feeling as strange to
him as the sudden lust for blood and violence and he hated it instantly.
Hated the fact that something opposed his new power like he might have
hated the sun, but this was an enemy far more personal and complex.
He became obsessed. Darla
alternately humored him and praised him. She encouraged his fascination,
his desire to overcome, to defeat. He carved crosses on his victims’ cheeks
and marveled at how he could create the very symbol which repelled him and
how it could do so even while smelling of blood and pain, his delights.
Sometimes he'd turn his prey to watch them scream and claw at their faces
upon reawakening, tearing themselves apart over the impossibility of two
such opposite things existing in the same body. He wondered if this was
what it would be like to turn a Slayer, or a nun.
He got his answer to the second
question later, with Drusilla. Her lovely dark eyes inspired in him the
same division of fascination and revulsion as did everything else pure --
which he knew, of course, was why Darla chose her for him, just as she'd
given him his name. The fear and trust in her voice filtering through the
confessional's screen had held promise as sweet as the blood of the priest
limp in his arms, both tinged with the perverse joy of sacrilege. She was
the receptacle into which he could pour all his hatred of the Church, the
mirror of his own experiences magnified to perfection.
The iconography, he discovered
soon after being turned, becomes routine, part of the undead existence
equally familiar whether in life one was Muslim or an atheist or an altar
boy at Saint Brecan's. It made it difficult for him to explain what
transfixed him so, when any vampire could attest to having been repelled by
a cross, perhaps burned by holy water. What they didn't, couldn't
understand was the absurdity of it all. He could remember so clearly the
dampness of that same holy water on his fingertips, its trickle down his
forehead like a benediction, the comforting smell of incense, the cool
weight of his mother's rosary in his hand. Drusilla, he thinks, understood
it better than any of the others could, better than Darla whose bitterness
had let her reject God long before being turned, better than Spike with his
vague Church of England upbringing. Drusilla knew the strange and unwelcome
ache of knowing that your cold, undying flesh was once baptized by holy
water which had cleansed rather than burned. The peculiar anguish of
recalling purity while remaining so far from it.
He used to whisper to her about
the day of her First Communion, making her see the white-clad little girl
as something twisted and evil in memory, until she had worked herself into
one of her fits, screaming and rocking. Not even Darla telling him off for
setting her going could tear him away from the lusciousness of that
control. He's always wondered how much of Drusilla’s insanity grew from his
torment of her, the shock of her family's murder, and how much of it was
her mind being torn apart by the dichotomies of consecration and damnation
twisted into her being.
And then. Romanian woods, an
everywhere chanting in a language that wasn't Latin but was close enough to
make his skin crawl, his soul sliding back into place after so many years
and he, bewildered about what to do with it --
Buddhism astounded him. Its long
silences, its solitariness, its focus on an escape from physicality were
all in such drastic opposition to everything he knew of Catholicism, of
religion at all, that it was almost more shocking than the strange new
feeling of his soul scratching up against the demon. He stumbled over its
strange structure, its insistence on meditation when what he wanted was
penance, its offer of reflection rather than absolution. But it welcomed
him without the barriers of symbols designed to hurt him and let him create
a peace within himself. For that, he became increasingly grateful. At
nearly two hundred years old he began to discover spirituality, in a way he
never had before. He was surprised to find that somewhere along the way it
had let him find peace with Catholicism, too.
He is not Liam now; even with a
soul he often feels more removed from that life than he does from Angelus's
existence. It's been centuries since he rose before dawn to walk to Mass,
blowing plumes of white breath ahead of him into the cold darkness. He can
barely recall the feel of the wafer on his tongue and the details of the
priest's robes grow hazy in his mind. For all intents he is so sullied by
his crimes, by over two hundred years of being saturated by demonic energy
as to be more distant from the Church than the most secluded heathen
oblivious to its very existence. But he feels now a deeper connection than
he could have fathomed as an Irish peasant, an understanding he never
achieved in all his years of experiment and torture. Mea culpa, mea
culpa, mea maxima culpa he thinks, remembering the fluidity of the
words in synchronism with his fist knocking against his heart. My most
grievous fault. Words which now have a weight even Latin couldn't give them
three centuries ago.
And he cannot help but draw
parallels. Comparing the life he first knew with the one he knows now. The
wine as blood. The gnawing hunger of a full night's fasting. The
exclusivity, the mythos, the dim light of candles flickering on stone
walls. The feeling of belonging to something greater than one's self. And
in these later years, the pleas for mercy, for peace, for grace. Kyrie
eleison, he thinks. Christe eleison. Mercy. Forgiveness.
Everything is so much more complex
now; he's got the Powers to somehow work into his understanding of things,
alongside Catholicism and Buddhism. It's a puzzle he tries not to worry
over too much. He'll understand it someday, and he's okay with waiting for
that someday, with using the patience of his age to bide his time for it
and all the others. One of those somedays, he knows, is going to change
things forever, and while that's one he really tries not to think about, in
the back of his mind there's a list of things he's going to do. Sunlight
figures into it, as does ice cream. But he's reserved a spot for burnished
wooden pews and genuflection, and when he closes his eyes he can almost
hear Confiteor Deo omnipotenti ringing out.
*
In nomine patris - 'In the name of the Father'; the opening words of
Mass.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa - 'My fault, my fault, my
most grievious fault'; part of the Penitential Rite
Kyrie eleison - 'Lord, have mercy'.
Christe eleison - 'Christ, have mercy'.
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti - 'I confess to almighty God'; the opening
lines of the Penitential Rite.
*
The events mentioned in the first paragraph are part of the changeover to
Vatican II, a massive restructuring of the Mass and other elements of the
Church, which took place in the early 1960s.
--
