Chapter Text
The first thing he notices, of course, is that everything is dark.
The second thing he notices is the faint smell of incense from the connected Church, and he only notices that before the smell of come because it’s what he’d always prefer to notice. Incense is a comfort. Prayer candles. Tiny crucifixes that fit in his palm, the corpus always a lithe, bare figure. The nuns usually press the crucifixes down corpus-first to his palm rather than cross-first. With good reason. It is God’s figure, Christ’s figure he must register first. That is the point of a crucifix. It would be lost if they’d placed them in his open palm face-up, Jesus staring upward, Matt’s blind eyes noticing nothing, his hand feeling only the cross and not the body nailed to it.
He prefers the smell of incense. The waxy, strangely fermented scent of those candles Father Cathal particularly enjoyed. The smell of a house of Prayer, a House of God.
Matt’s body is supposed to be a temple fit for God. Jesus lives in the confines of his heart, just as he does for every girl and boy on the planet. He learned this. It’s comforting. Or, it should be.
His body is not a temple now. It is obedient, but though the memories sludge through his head in trails of molasses, he knows it has been obedient to the wrong thing. Not to God. To someone else.
The third thing he notices is that his hand is on the windowsill.
The fourth thing he notices is that he has been crying. He is ten years old—for too old for crying, if he is to listen to the man who isn’t his God.
But Matt’s God cried, and Matt does, too.
His prayers are whispers, pleads. They’re all spoken in the tongue he feels closest to God, the ones the nuns use when they read Scripture to themselves when seeking the clearest Word, the one used in papal-permitted ceremony. His tongue falters in English, but it knows its Latin. It knows its Scripture. It knows the purest source of language it has to be close to God, even if it is still not close enough. He makes do. He pleads. His right hand is still on the windowsill even as he kneels, and it feels like blasphemy when he performs the sign of the cross with his left hand.
He is meant for God. He is meant for God. The body as a temple, as something holy, something to protect. Everything happens for a reason, Matt knows this, and yet he cannot understand a world where he’d take all that his nuns had taught him, his Father had taught him, his God had taught him, and throw it away. He is something disgusting, something wretched, something broken. The curse of the original sin is nothing compared to what he has chosen to partake, the sins he has indulged in since.
He should be punished.
It’s confusing. The man punished him, but his punishment was unGodly. A sin in itself. And Matt’s choice to endure it was equally unGodly.
But this?
His hand on the windowsill.
This is a punishment that would make sense. No unGodliness lies this way. He can endure.
Matt stands up from his knees, rolls the back of his left hand under his nose, and considers the window latched open.
God wants Matt to prove himself to Him. That must be what this is. Be like Job. Endure.
Matt unlatches the window, then drives it down hard into his hand.
The pain is immediate, intense bursts of fire aligning with the cracks of bone. It’s hot and it hurts and it’s horrible, and he slams it down on his hand again. And again.
Then he blinks.
R - right. He. He’d come here after Stick left. After Stick demanded he find a way to make his left hand equal to his right, or he’d cut off the spare himself.
Matt remembers coming to his room and deciding this is how he would do it, but he doesn’t remember the choice to start. Maybe he blacked out from the pain. Weak.
He brings his throbbing hand to his chest with a hiss as he breathes hard, chokes back the sobs until he’s no longer crying, only shaking from the shock and the pain.
He’s learning. And Stick will have that aloof pride he has when Matt manages to do something like this. Maybe he’ll give a “Good job, Matty.” Maybe Matt won’t have to do the worst of the training tomorrow “My boy has to be prepared for anything. You hear me? Anything, kid. And if you ain’t ready, or you’re not good enough, you’re what? Dead. Now go on. Be a good boy.” or, God forbid, maybe he’ll get a break. They could get ice cream, sit on the benches, and Matt could toy with his senses, their reach, their specificity.
He’s still shaking.
Quietly, he resolves to find one of the nuns to wrap and splint his hand. He could do it himself, but he thinks he needs a touch that is gentle. For now, at least.