6 April 2004

BtVS AU: Verona Beach
rated R for non-explicit sex and Issues with Catholicism

Disclaimer: so not mine.  (cf. Joss Whedon & Baz Luhrmann)

Title from a poem by Alberto Rios.  Provided to me by the brilliant Sheila, who babysat me.

For the Verona Beach challenge.  (Take any fandom, change the setting to Verona Beach -- the setting of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, and write.)




He loves the rectory.  It's small and very old, and the housekeeper only comes twice a week.  In other churches in Verona Beach, there are bigger rectories with more priests and more people, but that wouldn't do at all.  It needs to be like this: dark and dusty, furtive, smelling like cigarettes and incense-saturated clothing.

So he comes every day, to pray and study and sit across from whatever priest the diocese has exiled to this filthy corner of the city.  Almost out of the tropical city, looking out at the filthy Mantuan Fields.  Children come here from the trailer parks, barefoot and ragged and parasite-ridden, and they don't listen.  They're sent by grandparents and tired mothers, to go and sit and be holy, or something like it.

Andrew's welcome whenever he comes.  Always in his cleanest shirt and shoes, with his nails clean and his face scrubbed.  There are books in his bag, and some of them are more interesting than they probably should be.  Books about demons, and books about other peoples, unchristian and bloodletting.  Books about Star Wars, too, and all the Star Trek ship specifications.  They sort of balance each other out.

The rectory has a television, though no satellite access.  The nights Andrew stays over, he watches Star Trek dubbed into Spanish.

There's a good reason for him to stay over, of course.  Mass starts early, 5am, and it isn't really safe for him to walk the streets at that hour.  So he stays there, in the rectory, and always on the sofa.  He's never entered the single bedroom, and he's never been the one to initiate.  But sometimes.  Usually.  He'll be lying there, watching television, and the priest, whichever priest it is this month, will open the door.  Grey-eyed men in cotton trousers and loose undershirts and baby-soft rosaries hanging from one hand.

And Andrew always sometimes (usually, always) says the same thing.  "Okay."

It's one of those nights when they come.  Andrew's in the rectory's small parlour, on his knees, lit up by the television.  Face buried in the priest's open trousers like it's what he's always wanted.  Maybe he has.  This is at least as good as assisting at Mass.  It isn't for his status as too-old altar boy that he keeps coming back.

He's been coming here for years; they only come once.  In through the front door, oddly quiet, though later he discovers they have keys, given to them by the diocese.  (And what does that mean?  That the diocese must have known, about the priest for certain, and maybe about Andrew too.)  Two girls and a boy, still in their school uniforms, shadowed by a man in monastic grey.  He never steps fully into the room, only hovers in the doorway and prays with the television light flaring off his glasses and tonsure.

It takes maybe forty-five seconds.  The blonde girl pulls Andrew away.  She throws him on the floor, seizes the priest by his shirt front, and drives a sharpened broom-handle into his heart.

By the time Andrew sits up, there's nothing left but dust.

"What?"

"It's nothing you have to worry about."

"You killed the priest."

"He was a monster."

Andrew looks at the girl.  Her school uniform's still very clean, somehow.  Plaid jumper and white blouse.  White knee-socks and black shoes.  He thinks about this particular inhabitant of the rectory, whose skin was always cold and who looked at everyone in the church like they were food.  At the girls coming to Mass before school, in the dark.

"Oh.  I'm sorry."

And the other girl, who's walking around the room, picking up objects and stroking them like an exorcist, says, "Not like that.  He was a demon."

But.  "No he wasn't.  I would have been able to tell."

"Not everyone can."  She blows on a porcelain Madonna from the shelf and it flares light across her face.

"I've studied . . . uh."  The monk is right there, watching them through squinting eyes while he cleans his glasses.  Be quiet.

"He wasn't the kind of demon you're thinking of.  The body was certainly human, only the soul was gone."  Kindly and scholarly.

A big hand hauls Andrew to his feet.  He look harder at the monk.  Magician.  The book is his hand holds spells, not prayers.  This is Andrew, then, twenty years away.  Andrew can smell the sulphur-edge of sodomy on him.

"Don't worry about it."  One more.  A boy, in trousers and dirty, untucked shirt, school tie in his pocket and jacket tied around his waist.  He's holding the keys to the rectory in the hand he didn't use to help Andrew up.  "Monster gone.  We'll find you. um.  Not another priest.  Somebody?"

Andrew shakes his head.  "They don't last here, ever.  He was just a priest."

The monk says, "Do you have somewhere to go?"

"I was supposed to serve at Mass.  It's in a couple of hours."

"You've summoned demons in the last fortnight."

"Yes…"

"You shan't serve anyone.  Xander, bring him."

"Yessir.  I serve everyone, apparently."

They take him out into the too-warm dark.  There's a tiny snap he turns toward, but it's only fireworks in the distance.  The girls are still in the house, creating something he can almost smell.  He feels very far from himself.

The car they came in doesn't really have room for Andrew, but they add him anyway.  The girls crowd into the front passenger's seat, two tiny frames in schoolgirl clothes, cuddled against each other and dozing.  Andrew sits in the back with Xander.  He watches slum children dance out of their headlights.  Sometime later, the radio crackles about a rectory fire.

They cross the entire city, and it takes hours.  Cars pour into their lane as the sun rises.  Civil workers in small, old cars, and family retainers in great sport-utility trucks with bulletproof glass replacing the original windows.  Other retainers in beautiful, slick, sporty cars, crawling over each other and trying to wake the girls in the front seat with gestures Andrew flinches from.

He didn't study to see this.

He can smell the ocean by the time they stop for gas.  The girls pour out onto the pavement and stretch, showing bright-white thighs where their skirts ride up.  Xander shrugs his shoulders a little and makes a show of looking.  Andrew doesn't bother.

The monk asks him, "Did you want a soda?"

"Yes please.  Cherry Coke."

It's open when he gets it, and it tastes a little thin.  It takes Andrew half an hour to understand that the monk dosed his soda with holy water.  Sometime after that, he falls asleep, slumping across the car's tiny back seat to rest against Xander.

He surfaces briefly into bright daylight.  Xander steers him through a courtyard and into a slightly cooler dark.  Beds in rows behind curtained windows.  Hands coax Andrew's arms up and pull his shirt off.  His shoes go, too.

He wakes up again and it's nearly dark.  Xander's reading a comic book on one of the other beds.  He's only wearing an undershirt and his shorts, and he looks tousled.  Handsome in a way utterly different from any of the priests Andrew can remember.  When Andrew pads over to him, Xander shoves over and shares the comic with Andrew.  Andrew's not really interested -- it's only an old Classics of Literature -- but he likes the smell of Xander's body.  He's not sure it's a good idea to mention that, though, so he makes a point of not touching.

After a while he says, "Can I stay here?"

"Yep.  Giles said to tell you to claim a bed, so I guess you're a convent boy.  It's not so bad.  There's lots of girls around to look at, and we don't have to study with the nuns, just with Giles."  Xander pulls away slightly and looks down at Andrew, who's lying beside him.  "Giles isn't too bad.  He's not like the guy we killed last night.  He won't, um.  Touch you."

Andrew nods, and Xander brings the comic back into Andrew's sight-line.  Andrew thinks about telling him that it wasn't like that, but then thinks he won't.  Anyway he counts it, this is better.



jane
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