God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life

[wingwalker]

Who: GG & Xas.
What: Nattering in and about church.
Where: Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
When: Shundi, 13th of Ceidary.
Notes: N/A.
Warnings: Religion? I'll edit if anything comes up.

Xas has never been to a church service before. He'd never even been inside a church, before Baedal. Perched on a few, sure, when it was too dark for anyone to tell him from the architecture, but he didn't have any need or any patience for intermediaries.

Now, though. Now he thinks he understands people's desire - if they feel like this, adrift and disoriented, all the time - to have someone else lay a hand on their heads and speak with authority. He wants this explained to him, and he wants to be able to trust the explanation.

He isn't going to do anything so drastic as to convert. As far as he knows, he doesn't have a soul to save - and anyway, if Xas were ever going to cast his lot with Christ, he would have done it two thousand years ago. But he does take one of each of the handful of tracts near the Cathedral's entrance and plant himself in the back row to read, and to listen to the priest - and then, after the service ends, to peer at the other attendees' faces while they stand up and trickle out, wondering if they feel something he can't.

Comments

[lupa]

GG always wants to come here- and when she does, she remembers why she shouldn't. It's just that little bit wrong. She falters at the moments she should kneel and the moments she should stand, and she can't tell whether it's six years of apocalyptic non-attendance (probably something she can be forgiven for) or just because they do Mass differently here. And of course, it's in English, when for most of her life she's gone with her grandparents to Italian services and very occasionally to the French ones. She's fluent, but she doesn't know the Our Father or the profession of faith in English, and the words of the Mass aren't the familiar chant that they should be when they're in a third language. It all feels almost uncanny. At home, Mass was a ritual of belonging; here it only serves to make her feel like an alien.

She lingers in the pew while the congregation is slowly wandering out- and this too is new and strange, because she knew people back at home, before the end of the world and the estate and everything, particularly when she was with her grandmother, one of those women around whom a whole community tends to orbit- and here it's different. Entirely.

She doesn't want to go outside. The smell of church incense, at least, is familiar- slightly overpowering, but sometimes that's alright, because she's having trouble smelling what's outside the cathedral, which gives her a strange feeling of sanctuary, like there's nothing outside to deal with.

She's dawdling down the aisle, absently touching each pew as she goes, when she accidentally makes eye contact.

Never accidentally make eye contact.

Because now, after a quick smile, in the quietening cathedral, she has a sense that she should say something. Social skills aren't GG's forte exactly- not through any shyness or a lack of confidence, but through being a wolf in a world full of humans, and because she is incredibly suspicious of strangers. But then again, almost everyone in Baedal is a stranger; she can no longer rely on her family or the estate to define friend and foe.

She eyes the tracts, leaning one hip against the edge of the pew and folding her arms; "Doing your homework?" she asks, a slight grin tugging at the corners of her mouth.

[wingwalker]

"Trying," Xas says, smiling back before looking down at the tract in his hands. "It's complicated." He doesn't blame anyone for that. Complication is a natural consequence of God's secrecy, back home, and he can only imagine the mental acrobatics people engage in to make things make sense here. There is but one God - and those twelve others.

He folds the tract closed and peers at the woman, a little to try to get the measure of her but mostly to try to place her accent. It's French, or close to it, but not Parisian or Burgundian or any other variety he's used to. That might be geography or might be time. Maybe both.

Regardless, he grins and tries, because French is as close to a native language as he has outside of Heaven. "Where are you from?"

[lupa]

Very complicated- especially when you come from a place when, arguably, judgement day has happened and God didn't win.

(Or that's some people's interpretation).

A sudden, real grin appears on GG's face when Xas speaks French, however, and she responds in kind; "Québéc. Montreal, to be precise." She glances down at the tract again, and offers; "'Complicated' is an understatement, maybe."

[wingwalker]

Xas raises his eyebrows and gives his head a little shake — tell me about it — while he adds the tract in his hands to the small stack next to him on the pew. He only skimmed most of them. He'll take them with him. "Were you Catholic at home?" he asks. Quebecer or not, he doesn't want to assume; he's run into a handful of people who only come to the House because it's as good as they can get.