Snippet Saturday!
Thank you so much @bad-writer for the tag! Enjoy something from one of my Prayers WIPs for this year, a semi-sequel to Admiral’s Folly featuring Fingon’s POV again (because I love writing it so much) and a Daddy Finarfin cameo! Tagging @queerofthedagger @zealouswerewolfcollector @melestasflight @slashmarks @isilme-among-the-stars ✨cw: religious trauma, homophobia.
But don’t let it be said I have learned nothing from the Church. I have learned that most men do not frequent fancy-shops or paint their fingernails or lace their hair with golden ribbons or make themselves the laughing stock of the town just because they wanted to wear a hibiscus behind their ear because frankly the damned thing just looked nice for fuck’s sake, why must a fellow have a reason to wear a flower behind his ear? When our all-knowing god put billions of flowers upon this earth for our pleasure and joy, did he add a caveat excluding Fingon of Kozhikode’s left ear?
I have also learned that most men exist at several removes from their hearts: they've learned to operate the acceptable version of themselves so fluently that they forget there's anything else. And so they live. They just keep building outward, constructing entire lives in the portions deemed safe, and from the outside, it looks complete. It's remarkable, one has to admit, just how much you can construct on top of a foundation buried deep enough. That's what the Church counts on, I think. That is the gospel truth each mission propagates, the scaffolding all faiths teeter atop. There is god, there is man, and there is the conviction that you could exile entire parts of yourself and the remaining fraction would still be enough to generate something resembling a life.
And so, on the day I first laid with Russo, my father saw not a lavish garden sprouting in his doorway, but a ruin which the weeds had taken for their own. That is why he stood from his chair with a hand on his heart and orphaned me with his gaze alone. Five years later, he was made the Bishop of Kochi, ascended so young because of his unshakeable faith. But I swear to you my friend, on that day I watched that faith of his sway upon a sharp sea-cliff, sway harder than it did at any point in his life. Harder even than the day he came across Dickhead Cousin Finarfin the Nutcracker sitting on the chapel roof after skipping catechism class, chainsmoking and throwing paper aeroplanes at the exiting congregation while shoving handfuls of communion wafers into his mouth like they were potato chips.
Mind you, this swaying was not because he loved me. Even though he did so in his way, love was never enough to uproot the foundation his tower was built upon. It was because as he looked at me through bitter tears, I saw myself in his eyes for a moment, myself as he saw me, not dance-master-Finnu with-the-ribbons-in-his-hair. Deliriously delighted, I stood in the doorway as that tiger of a sunrise roared behind me, forging my hair into gossamer and spinning my skin into gold. And across all his desperate dives into the book he was made to know, my father had always taken for granted that the divine were said to glow.
