exorkismos | open / heaven created a miracle

“Confessionals are alright cos in the box you can’t see facial expressions,” he says. “Trying to keep a straight face if I’m doing it less formally...that’s not easy.”

He’s talking crap. He’s taken plenty of confessions, but few of them in a formal confessional setting. Lots of people who thought they might die. Lots of guilty friends and family members. He takes it seriously. Maybe Joan can tell — or maybe she can’t. His voice is very light.

Joan can get the feeling something's off, but she doesn't know what. She assumes he's just pretending he wasn't as shitty a priest as he really was. That's his perogative-- you do a lot of work to become a priest, and nobody wants to feel like they're bad at something they studied up on for so long. But he was defrocked for a reason. It's not like that shit happens every day.

And she just can't see him as choosing to leave it behind. Not by how he talks about it, not by how he acts.

She shrugs. None of this is her business, anyway. Idle observation is just that.

"Well, don't worry. I don't do confessions anymore. Storytelling's different, but I wanted to spare your delicate sensibilities."

The song comes rolling to a close with no mention of stolen formula one engines. The mixtape crackles, and there's a distinct shift in recording quality and volume: the next song is much louder and a little clearer. Marcus actually winces and turns it down a little, but then his fingers start tapping the wheel along with it, a grin spreading across his face.

With the distraction, it takes him a moment for her words to sink in. When they do, he rolls his eyes, then shoots her a funny, crumpled-brow look sideways, and say, "Yeah, you got any smelling salts? Ain't good to faint while you're driving a bastard of a thing like this."

See, that's the thing, he's too obvious in his enjoyment, and that's a vulnerability. You can't be like that, someone will hurt you. She doesn't want to hurt him, but her reaction is engraved; earnest enthusiasm is dangerous and should be regarded with suspicion. It makes her anxious,as though someone is about to be slapped. She groans and rolls her eyes, slumping back in her seat.

"You're fucking torturing me with this shit," it's actually an okay song, "and you're insulting me hard fucking work? Jesus." She's kidding, mostly. "You're just lucky I couldn't transfer the CD player into this ancient thing."

Because she's a hypocrite, and has her own book of carefully managed mixes in her duffel bag.

Marcus, whose faith in God is perhaps only matched by his faith in his own taste in music, just scoffs happily. “This is a great mixtape,” he says, not as if starting an argument, but as if providing a helpful fact. “And CDs have no feeling to ‘em. But if Southern soul ain’t your thing, there’s a whole 90s cassette. The one down by your feet. Mouse on the cover.” Hand-drawn whiskery little cartoon mouse on lined paper taped into the cassette case, the once-black ink faded to bled-out blue. It’s nibbling a Communion wafer.

Outside, telephone poles whip by quicker. The sun’s high in the sky and the ancient AC is doing its best. It’s producing a fair amount of cold air and a disturbing amount of whirring noise.

“Seriously, rank ‘em for me. Wanna see how much of a lost soul you are. Is this better or worse than the Indigo Girls for you?”

"Everything is better than the Indigo Girls." That's girly stuff: a dangerous vulnerability for someone like her, she's sure. A weakness Marcus can take on, it's a fun quirk in an old man. Not her.

"And you're banking me on being able to tell the difference between these motherfuckers, which is a tall order." She reaches out to the dash to feel the AC whirring beneath her palm. "I'm fixing that next time we stop. It'll take maybe fifteen minutes." It's just a blockage, she's sure of it. Dust buildup, probably.

With a snort, Marcus says, "No bloody taste, see?" He glances down to where she's inspecting the AC, raps his knuckles on it. Nothing happens. "Yeah, that's been that way for a while. Sort of white noise at this point. Soothing. You looking to stop soon?"

"It's different, you're not from here. All the music you like's American." She's not entirely sure why she pointed that out. Maybe her father's obsession with Irish music-- that makes sense, actually. But more importantly- "Jesus, it's a six hour drive. I'm not into the pissing into a bottle thing, I don't care how urgent your clandestine Massachusetts drug deal is."

Jumpy, ain’t you, Marcus wants to say, but suddenly it doesn’t quite feel fair. With a wave of something like emotional vertigo he realises there’s something eerily familiar about how Joan snaps defensively at anything that could even vaguely be construed as a slight or a suggestion of weakness. He wasn’t much different in his twenties. Sometimes he’s not much different now.

So he scowls and flicks his eyes up to heaven, but he doesn’t make fun of her. Instead, he says, “Nothing good ever came out of England. You’re looking at exhibit A.”

With a sidelong glance, he grins at her, and says, “Not worried about timing, not with this engine. Just trying to work out if you’re telling me to floor it.” A beat, and he says, “You know what, I’m just gonna assume you were,” and acts accordingly.

*

Pallas, Massachusetts is a picturesque coastal tourist town, but it’s the off-season and quiet. It doesn’t feel like a great place for drug-dealing or drag-racing or ministering to the sick. It feels, to Marcus, like a great place for an exorcism, small-town frustrations bubbling up into anger in the doldrums of winter when tourist money isn’t coming in.

The O’Neills own a B&B and want Marcus to stay there, but he and Joan are in a motel just outside of town. He doesn’t tell the O’Neills that, they’d be heartbroken to hear about the cheap competition. But then they’re sort of heartbroken already. Their oldest son Daniel came home from college because he was sick and wanted to recover at home: now he’s tied up in the attic, screaming profanities in Latin night and day.

Joan’s as good as her word: they don’t see too much of each other. But Marcus feels responsible for her being here: guilty, maybe. It’s not exactly rich pickings. But she’s resourceful, she’ll make her way, he reassures himself.

Maybe that’s what makes him lax enough to not bother with convincing lies. He’s tired and she won’t care. When he comes back with a bruised throat and bloody knuckles, he just gives her a raucous grin and tells her he walked into a lamppost. He assumes she’ll find it funny.

He’s at the O’Neill’s now, no thoughts of Joan crowding his head. Daniel is trying to bite him, spitting and snarling, the ropes at his wrists fraying and starting to smoke, the lights flickering — with a snap and a spray of sparks, a bulb explodes and Marcus breaks off praying to swear.

The drive goes better at that point. Joan isn't sure why. But gift horses and whatever, and the fact that Marcus takes such clear enjoyment out of how fast his car can go. She doesn't tell him it doesn't go half as fast as it could in a proper racer. He's probably smart enough to figure that out.

But he's something like happy, and that lets her ease herself into the fake dream of being a good person. She made somebody smile with her own hard work. It's almost the kind of thing that happens to real, good, normal people. That's what work is supposed to be for, isn't it?

When they get to MA, she spends her time looking for work. Doesn't find much, except for some tourists with bad motors trying to get out of town, and she takes her payments in cash. The local mechanics are all chains, which means she's shit out of luck; her resume is spotty at best. She likes family run places that don't try to be too legit, that only care about how well she can fix a car. She likes places that don't do background checks, that aren't interested in the prospect of finding out she's a missing person, or possibly declared dead. It's been years, they've probably declared her dead by now.

But whatever.

She has cash to offer up when Marcus comes home, and while she does squirrel some of it away out of sheer paranoia, she does use the rest to buy takeout and help pitch in for the motel. When she sees the state of him, she buys a first aid kit, too. She doesn't find the joke funny. It reminds her too much about 'walked into a door', and makes her scowl and try to bandage his hands in stony silence.

Someone's whaling on him. That's becoming increasingly fucking obvious. Someone's kicking the shit out of him and he's hers in a way she doesn't care to interrogate or think too hard about. She hasn't had somebody in a long time. She thinks he'd back her up in a fight, maybe. That means she'll back him up, too.

She doesn't have anything to do the next day. She's good at tailing people from a lifetime of not trusting most of them. This town is built on a grid system anyway, which makes it easy as fuck. No long winding roads that cut off to nowhere. Joan follows Marcus a few streets behind, always out of sight, until he enters a lovely looking house that makes the hair stand up on the back of Joan's neck. She can't put her finger on it. Most be intuition.

She fumbles with the saint's metal around her neck anyway, before she begins scaling the side of the house. They've got those creeping vines with the wooden fencing she's never learned the name for, makes it easy as shit to climb near each window, listening for Marcus' particularly distinct grumble. Of course she finds it on the highest level, the fucking attic. Of course the window finds that moment to swing open with her barely touching it, nearly hitting her in the fucking face.

But it doesn't. It just hangs there, inviting. She doesn't crawl through it, though she feels this urge to jump. She looks, and finds--

Everything inside is blurry. She can't quite make it out. She can hear words that are... painful, and she doesn't know why. Something reminds her of her father. Something reminds her of the power drill in her hands the last time she saw Luke breathing. Am I going to Hell? he'd asked, like she'd know.

Her vision clears suddenly. She sees a boy on a bed crying for his parents, looking terrified, and Marcus standing over him. Her anger flares, and that's normal, but it's so much more than usual. She wants to break things. She should break him. He is, after all, hers.

She grabs more tightly onto the trellis (that's what it's called, she suddenly knows) and feels a piece snap under her fingers with a sudden surge of strength she forgets to question. "That's not how detox works, asshole!"

Marcus knows it's Joan and not some demonic hallucination, because —

He can't say how. He just knows. He whips around, and there's real alarm on his face, eyes wide and colour all gone. "You can't be here," he hisses, and then he realises that Joan is hanging off a goddamn trellis three storeys up, and that the demon in Daniel isn't the smartest one he's dealt with, but it won't miss and opportunity like that.

He dives for the window and grabs for her hand just as the wood gives way beneath her left foot. "Hold on! Jesus Christ, Joan, what the bloody hell do you think you're doing, huh?"

Joan scrabbles up through the window, though some part of her desperately doesn't want to. The rest desperately does. She's not accustomed to emotional inner conflict; she thought she cut that part of her out years ago.

She stands on creaky wood flooring and ignores Marcus entirely, slapping his hands away with impatient strength. She's usually strong, she's strong for someone her size and gender, but she feels... stronger, somehow.

She's a pro at not thinking about shit, though, so she adds that to the list.

She crouches toward the kid, calling desperately for his parents, and pulls a switchblade out of her boot. "Sh," she says in a voice that is clearly unaccustomed to providing comfort. "Sh, it'll be okay, it's all gonna be okay." She begins cutting the rope.

There's a strange urge to cut him along with it, but she ignores it. She's used to that, wanting to hurt people. Generally there's more of a reason, though. All today's been odd, if she thinks about it. Maybe she's coming down with something.

The metal at her neck itches.

Daniel's gabbling and doing a great impression of a terror-stricken teenager. He's not much younger than Joan but he looks positively childish next to her. Marcus growls in his throat and grabs Joan about the middle to haul her back, the other hand going to her wrist, trying to twist so she'll drop the knife.

"Up," he barks, "get up, get out, this isn't safe for you, trust me — "

Joan breaks his hold with the same casual strength; muscle memory from years of fighting bigger, older men doesn't fail her, and they tended to be in better health than Marcus, especially now. She holds the switchblade between them, not yet offensively (though the urge is there, itching at her mind, spiteful and hateful and-) but as a barrier.

"Isn't safe for me? Fuck you, Marcus; I thought you were too smart for this faith healing bullshit." The anger and disappointment is almost comforting in its familiarity, even if she's never quite shown this side of herself to Marcus before. "I can't believe you'd be into this fucking- drug dealing! Drug dealing, that would have been fine, fuck." It was what she was expecting. "This is torture. Is he an addict or is he gay? Do you even care?"

She wants a fight, she realizes; she wants to fight him. She can't right now. She has other shit to deal with. Joan turns her back on him again and goes back to sawing at the rope. Her metal continues to itch, but she pushes that aside, ignoring the discomfort with ease.

Her elbow catches him in the ribs as she twists away, winds him: he backs off, the heel of his boot crunching on the broken glass of the lightbulb. One bulb remains, casting a too-stark pale glow over the room: now that the demon inside Daniel's playing nice for an audience, it's still, not flickering like it was a moment ago.

"I didn't do anything," Daniel whimpers to Joan, "I didn't, I didn't do anything, I was sick — "

He can't wrestle her off. She's got a knife and she's angry and she might even have slept in the past twenty-four hours. He needs to prepare for what will happen when those ropes finally break.

"Don't listen to him," he says quietly. "Don't have time to be nice, Joan. You don't have any idea what's going on here."

Rosary, grabbed from the floor and wrapped about his wrist. Bible reclaimed from where he dropped it to grab for Joan. "You ever seen pure evil, duck? Cos he has. Step back. It's weak enough, but there's a limit to what I can protect you from when that thing gets loose."

"What are you talking about," Daniel says, his voice scaling high and tight, a few tears streaking through grime on his face. Marcus crosses himself.

"I command you, unclean spirit, whoever you are, along with all your minions now attacking this servant of God..."

Joan looks up at him with absolute rage in her eyes, head whipping around. "I have," she says, and it's with a deep set kind of conviction that (usually) doesn't book an argument. She begins sawing at the second rope.

And then- "Are you- are you fucking kidding me? An exorcism? That's what this is?" She feels a loss, and can't pinpoint why. Something is wrong. No, no, it's- it's been so long since she's felt close to another person enough to feel betrayal. It's the fact that, she realizes, if she'd found out in a way other than this, she'd have been willing to go out on a limb for him and try to believe it. It's the fact that she never lied, and he did. It's the fact that he didn't trust her.

The second rope snaps, and Daniel lurches forward to- embrace Joan, arms thrown around her in platonic friendliness. She looks up to glare at Marcus, rage barely restrained.

"No," Marcus says, and staggers forwards to get between them before he stops, and realises that Daniel isn't grabbing or biting or clawing, just holding on. And crying into Joan's shoulder, big terrified gulps.

Something's wrong. It's not that Daniel suddenly seems like any other scared young man: Marcus has seen enough demons play the victim in front of unwitting bystanders. He can't work it out, but he can feel it, at the back of his neck and tingling in his teeth.

So he doesn't react to that look of rage on Joan's face. It hurts, but only distantly, like an ache he knows he'll feel later. It's a selfish feeling and it will keep. For now, he needs to understand what he's missed, because he's sure he's missed something. His expression goes blank, watchful, eyes flitting between Joan and Daniel.

"Your medal," he says, voice flat and sort of distant. He's staring at Daniel's shaking shoulders. The medal should be hurting him, clinging to Joan as he is. It should be burning him through his clothes. "Joan. Ain't you wearing that medal?"

She grimaces, suddenly defensive. She'd be defensive about the metal in general, but suddenly it seems of more dire import. How did he find out? She never told him about it. (He's seen her walk around in a tank-top enough times that he's got to have noticed it, but the thought doesn't cross her mind through a red mist of rage.)

"How did you know about that?" She hisses, "have you been going through my shit, too? Jesus."

She turns her back on him as she helps Daniel up, helping him stagger to the door.

"But you're wearing it," Marcus says, his eyes following the pair of them, "aren't you?"

Strange sensation: his instincts know what's going on and his brain hasn't caught up yet. He takes two steps, tailing Joan and Daniel as they stagger towards the door. His eyes track Joan's arm about Daniel and, abruptly, he remembers that she has a knife.

She unlocks the door. He opens his mouth, and acts on his oldest instinct: attack first, draw fire. Provoke what's hiding out into the open. "What, you surprised I didn't tell you?" He breathes in, though it doesn't feel like it takes. He can feel sweat sticking beneath the collar of his shirt. "Why would I tell you, Joan, hm?"

Anger breaks into disappointment; she'd fight him, usually, but there's other shit to worry about. She'll break his jaw after they're out of this fucking house. "Is anybody fucking home?" She yells into a comfortably beige hallway.

Looking back over her shoulder, she glowers, "yeah, because I'm a dumb skank who can't be trusted, I got it, Holy Father."

She's always wearing her metal. She only takes it off to bathe. That doesn't seem worth explaining, though she can't figure out why, and then the thought is gone from her mind, folded neatly away and unquestioned. It still itches, and the itching is getting worse, but she's used to bearing up under pain-- is it pain? No, no, just discomfort. Minor. Even easier to ignore.

More stuff to pile up in the I'm sorry about this corner, more stuff to feel bad about later and feel nothing about now.

"Because you've got all the sodding subtlety of a ten-ton truck," he murmurs, real exasperation creeping in. He's starting to get the shape of what might be going on here, but he can't quite bring himself to shape the words in his head.

There's the clamour of footsteps on the stairs, a flight or two below. Andrea O'Neill, Marcus judges, from the sound of the footfalls. "Joan," Marcus says, "how are you feeling right now, out of interest?"

"Danny?" Andrea's calling as she comes up the stairs. "Father Marcus? What's going on?"

Joan practically throws the stupid kid at his stupid (she assumes) mom (she's sure). Gentleness has never been in her realm of possibility. "Your kid's all better," she says, "and if you do any shit like that to him again, I'll burn your fucking house down."

She should probably be... different. Maybe she would be. How did everything get so murky all of the sudden? She's usually unbridled in her conviction, decisive, forging forward. Why does she feel so listless and bereft?

Oh, right, because her only friend has finally revealed how little he thinks of her. Fucking duh, Joanie. She turns back to him, and leans in close, finger pointing a straight arrow of accusation toward his chin.

"If you're gonna goad me," she says, livid and dire, "come up with more original fucking material."

The collar of her button down is open, and it's possible to see the blister beginning to form over the cheap, tacky metal coiling that holds the pendant of Saint Margaret in place under her shirt.

Andrea stumbles, Daniel throws his arms around her. "Who the hell are you?" she gasps. And then: "Danny, oh my God, sweetie — "

Marcus says, "Take him and your husband, go to the nearest hospital, get him checked over. Just drive."

"But you — "

Seething, suddenly, far angrier than seems possible, he rounds on her and snarls, "That ain't a suggestion, that's what you're gonna do. Take your boy and go. We'll be gone by the time you get back. Go!"

He hates himself for it. Her eyes go big and scared. She almost trips dragging Daniel with her as she descends, yelling for her husband to come help her goddammit.

Just as soon as it appears, Marcus' anger melts off. He's breathing too fast, and now he can see the welt forming at Joan's collarbone. Something comes over him, dizzy and sick. He takes a few steps back, crosses the threshold of the attic door, trying to get her to crowd him in and come with him. He wants her in a small, confined space. Controllable. He can't afford to lose her in this massive house. Can't afford to lose her full stop.

Oh, Jesus Christ, what's he done.

He manages to keep the horror and the guilt from spilling out into sorry, oh my God, oh my God I'm so so so sorry. Takes a shaky breath and keeps needling. She's smart. Hopefully the demon isn't. "What, you saying you've heard that before?" Another step back. "There's a shock."

Joan watches Marcus scream at the family of dutiful idiots with a dull expression. This is already wearisome. Disappointment is so fucking regular in her life, this is-

Ha.

She knows that trick. Her dad used to do it all the time, when shit was really bad. Try to lead her into certain places in the house or the garage where he'd have a fighter's advantage, like he needed more of one being a hundred pounds and thirty-four years older than her. But even if she didn't have that experience, there's a niggling feeling, an itch in her mind- she sees a figure of shadow behind Marcus in the attic, shaking its head.

She squints, blinks, but it's gone. Probably just stress. Years after Luke died, she thought she saw him everywhere.

Anyway, back to this motherfucker. She rounds on Marcus, stomping her feet, but not getting in grabbing distance. She's best at fighting older men, it's who she grew up fighting, she knows the way they try to play it, the way they always fucking do. "You want me to lay it out for you? Lazyass. I'm dumb, I'm ugly, I'm loud, I'm mean, I'm a flat-chested bitch with a shitty face before the scar and I'm going to Hell. I get it. Fuck off with it."

It's hard to really raise someone to true froth-mouthed rage when their default setting is anger. Anger, and all its shades; anger, annoyance, rage, bitterness, fear, pain, spite, regret, disappointment, everything about this is so fucking disappointing, and it hurts. It hurts like her neck hurts, like her throat hurts, something stuck in it, like the pain on the skin of her throat-

Don't think about that.

"What I don't-" she takes a deep breath, steeling herself for... something. She isn't sure. "Get. Is you. This. Torturing people in attics. You're a smart person. Shouldn't just... believe things 'cause the church says so. Said so. A hundred years ago, Marcus! A hundred fucking years!"

"Come on, Joan," Marcus says. "That ain't why I believe it. You know that's not how it works." Come on. He needs her a bit closer. He doesn't need to grab her, he just needs to get the door bolted behind her. Contain the problem. "Hard-headed stubborn bastards like you and me, we don't look to dogma to back up faith. We like looking at what's right in front of us." Come on.

Down below, there's the clatter of a door. Outside, a car starts.

His eyes drop again to the hollow of her throat. "Your neck ain't doing so good. You feel that? It's gonna make you try to ignore it. And I think you're pretty good at ignoring pain, right? Don't."

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