Dante Lot (unseen_miami) wrote in olympian_rewind, @ 2011-06-14 23:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | dante lot, hades |
Who: Hades/Dante Lot (solo)
What: Flashback
Where: Sicily, Italy
When: In the 1970s.
Warning: 1) assume Italian as the default language, 2) |Latin language tag|, 3) not from Hades’ point of view, 4) while completely obvious, “The guest” is Hades.
Fr. Dominick immediately sighed as he entered the sanctuary of the small church he presided over. It had been disturbed. The stained glass windows were in perfect condition. The floors were clean. The murals and statues free of any form of graffiti and the gold vessels and adornments were all polished and shining, but still the sanctuary had been disturbed.
His guest had disturbed it by sleeping in one of the pews. He shook his head lightly, allowing his guest to sleep a little longer as he knelt before the altar and tabernacle to do his Lauds… morning prayers.
“… Lord make haste to help me. Glory be to the…” he recited slowly, reading from the small leather breviary in his hands. He wasn’t sure what was odder to him – reciting his prayers in Italian instead of Latin or accepting everything his guest said to him.
Definitely his guest.
Italian and Latin were relatively similar.
As his guest stirred from his slumber, he was nearing the end of his prayers. Perfect timing, “May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil and bring us to everlasting life. Amen.”
“Bless you. Leave me out of it,” his guest quickly corrected him in soft Italian as he sat up and dusted himself off.
Dominick merely smiled as he blessed himself and stood, placing his breviary in the pew before addressing him. “I asked you not to sleep here.”
His guest met his eyes with his deep black ones. A fierce malice glinted in them, not at the young, Italian priest, but in general, a malice that danced with a sorrow more profound than he had ever seen in any other man. It was the kind of sorrow he imagined the Lord had on the night before His Passion in the garden… just without the malice. The man shrugged, “|You locked the rectory. Did you want me to break in? Bother the convent next door? Sleep on the street? You told me not to sleep on the street. You only asked me not to sleep in here.|”
Dominick was grateful that his guest spoke slowly. Italian and Latin were close in language and he had learned some Latin from the old liturgy and prayers but his guest’s perfect conversational Latin could often throw him at times. And it always intrigued him. He nodded, “I didn’t realize I had locked the doors. Just knock next time. I thought maybe you had moved on.”
“|I swore to you that you had until I learned Italian fluently to convince me of the love of G-d, didn’t I?|”
The priest nodded, “You did. You’re learning so fast…”
“|Then you should be happy you locked me out. I’m behind a lesson now.|” His guest then stood up and left the pew, glancing at the altar. His eyes narrowed, but Dominick saw passed his normal and perpetual anger. There was a sense of remembrance in that look. Maybe his theory of him being a defrocked priest, or at least a former seminarian, was correct. It would explain the Latin to some degree. His guest pointed to the altar, “|Do you really think your god is in that little box?|”
“Yes. I believe He deigns to be with us in a humble way to be closer still. And I would die for that belief,” Dominick answered easily but firmly. He had said it to his guest before.
His guest turned to him and stared at him intensely. The priest stood still and tried not to think about how it felt like his very soul quaked inside of him under that dark gaze, but then his guest looked away. “|I believe you.|” He then shook his head, “|I believe you would die for that belief. I’m not convinced of your god-box.|”
“Please don’t call the Tabernacle a ‘god-box’,” Dominick again said firmly but losing his previous ease.
“Tabernacle,” he muttered, testing the word on his lips and then turned again with almost a curious look. The priest smiled. He had learned that look often brought an intriguing comment out of his guest. “From the Latin ‘Tabernaculum’?” he then asked in soft Italian.
Dominick nodded, and internally returned to his seemingly continual debate of if his guest had been trained in any way as a priest. Maybe he had amnesia. Everything seemed new to him and yet not.
“|Why would you call that a ‘tabernaculum’? That’s a box. You can sleep in a tabernaculum (tent),” his guest continued in his normal Latin.
Dominick had to pause, taken back a moment as he glanced at the altar and then laughed softly. He had always taken the word for granted, even when it was used in a Latin sentence. “You see, it’s in remembrance of how the ancient Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant in a tent. We use the same word.”
His guest shook his head, “|Try again in Latin. I missed too many words, which means I stay for another day at least. I think you did that on purpose.|”
“A little, but you asked a difficult question,” Dominick smiled and then took another moment to try to think about how to repeat all of that in Latin. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes trying to remember every Latin lesson he had ever learned and every Latin Mass he had ever celebrated for all the words he needed before trying.
“|Your grammar needs work, but I understood.|” His guest then simply shrugged and walked away. His movement lacked purpose. He just moved to move. Dominick felt such sympathy for the man. He seemed to wander through life without feeling a sense of love, just anger and loss.
Suddenly, the man turned to him again, “|Why would you be willing to die for that belief? Out of virtue? Isn’t life the most desired state for humanity to dwell?|”
Dominick was startled that he had manage to understand such a philosophical question completely in Latin. His time conversing with his guest was doing wonders for his own language skills. There was no hesitation in his Italian reply. “I don’t fear death. Death by the mercy of the Lord brings peace and paradise, which I welcome when He calls me.”
His guest shook his head with a disgusted sigh, “|Sentiments like that are a few millennia late to be any worth to me.|”
Blinking, Dominick reached out and placed a hand along his guest’s shoulder. He had understood the words, but what they meant… Their meaning didn’t make any sense to him. But, regardless, he couldn’t help but reach out and try to offer some comfort.
His guest’s desperate need for it radiated off of him.
But even so, the man flinched at the contact. “|I have seen the everlasting burning and paradise beyond compare. No dead would choose to remain if given a chance at life again and no living would want to their loved ones to remain dead.|”
This was a deeper despair than he had previously seen from his guest. It was etched on his face, reflected in his pained frown and glistened in a slight wetness on those dark eyes of his. Dominick could almost see his heart weighed down in dolorous chains. He couldn’t bother to question how his guest had supposedly seen Heaven and Hell. His own desire was to offer an explanation that would relieve a little of his clear agony. “You’re right in a way. Even those in Heaven long for a return to life, but not as the world is now. They long for the life after death when the just are resurrected and live again on a new Earth and in a new Heaven.”
“|I knew it! There had to have been something! That’s how He’s doing it! You’re happy to die because you won’t stay dead. Clever…|” His guest nearly growled and then collapsed down to the pew. His voice then softened along with his rage, “|Don’t call them ‘just’. Plenty of just people will burn forever. There is no justice. That’s why I hate them both.|”
Dominick frowned and sat down next to his guest in silence. The outburst he could ignore but the quiet rebuke… That filled him with guilt. Not compassion, not sympathy but guilt. He was a priest, a pastor for this village… but did he care as much for the souls of his flock to be so grieved at even the possibility that any of them made lose the grace of Heaven and be condemned to the fires of Hell? If he didn’t care as much for them, to whom he was responsible for, while his guest did for people he was not so bound to… Dominick felt like a fiend in the face of such charity.
But finally, he broke the oppressive silence, “Recently, the Holy See did clarify that those who through no fault of their own did not accept the Lord should be entrusted to the His infinite Divine Mercy. We cannot judge or declare anyone to be in He –“
“|Clear your conscience so you can sleep at night any way you wish. Excuses all of them…|” The anger remained in his tone but any of his guest’s strength was crushed under the weight of despair, “|Your god condemns those who are not saved to the grip of the Devil, who delights in his trophies and now Man makes excuses to do nothing to prevent it? I was angry before that your god condemns the just. Are you trying to move my anger to Man? Because now I’m angry at them, too.|” A wicked, false smile appeared on his face then, “|Looks like you got me believing in a trinity, just not the one you wanted.|”
Dominick frowned more, “You have no trust in mercy…”
“|I have seen the everlasting burning. There is no mercy,|” he replied lightly and then stood again, “|I don’t want to be here anymore. If you’re right, I don’t want Him looking at me through His fake tent.|”
The priest sighed but didn’t respond to his choice of words. “Fake tent” was better than “god-box”. But as he led his guest out of the sanctuary, his guest’s words haunted him. There is no mercy. His guest would never be able to truly enjoy a moment of his life with such a belief weighing so heavily upon him.
He couldn’t help as his eyes lifted heavenward, Eternal Father, your Son taught that to the merciful, mercy would be shown. Through Christ, our Lord and High Priest, please send forth your Spirit and renew your --
His silent, mental prayer was interrupted by his guest shoving his shoulder lightly. His eyes lowered and instantly met his guest’s dark narrowed eyes staring directly at him. “|Stop praying for me,|” his guest warned in a hushed but firm tone.
Dominick managed to smile again. His guest had said those four words so many times since they had first met they were beginning to lose meaning. They had long since ceased to startle him. “I was praying for the whole world, not just you. Do you want me to stop praying for the world, too?”
His guest immediately shook his head, “|No. They need all the help they can get considering they can still be kept from burning in the flames of Hell. Just leave me out of it. Your prayers won’t help me.|”
Slowly, in the same manner many would approach to soothe an injured animal in the wild, the priest placed a hand upon his guest’s shoulder, “Are you not part of the world?”
“|I’m in the world, not of it. I’m going to the rectory. If I stay here one more minute, I’m going to break something and for your sake, I’m restraining myself.|” Without another word, he pushed Dominick’s hand from his shoulder and briskly pushed through the church door’s to proceed to the building adjacent to it.
The priest was left for a moment dumbfounded as the church doors swung back closed. In the world, not of it. If it wasn’t for his guest’s pain, grief and anger, he would believe he said such intriguing things on purpose.
The fact that it wasn’t on purpose only made it more intriguing though.
But he blessed himself once more and then left through the church doors to join his guest in the rectory. Some breakfast wouldn’t soothe his guest’s soul any, but perhaps it would ease his emotions even just a little.
Summary: There was a time in relatively recent history where Dante Lot was even less social and even more bitter than any time of his stay in Miami, outside of his withdrawal from drugs. One of those times was in the 1970s in Sicily, where he was a guest of a young Italian priest named Fr. Dominick. The fate of those condemned to the Hellish Underworld has been on Dante Lot’s mind for a long time it seems.