WHO Mary Magdalene WHEN 25th February WHERE Salt Lake City, Utah WHAT Wake up and shake it off WARNINGS talk about death (but nothing detailed)
Before Mary even opened her eyes, her hands had flown to her throat and wrapped around it, expecting to find either Lucifer’s own sharp fingers or the burning of her own flesh. Her hands found nothing but the smooth and cool skin of her undamaged neck.
With a shuddering breath Mary opened her eyes, the memory of her last days in the desert clamping themselves firmly onto her mind and not letting go. They would, with time. (They always did.) But for now it felt omnipresent.
In the darkness of the shadowy room, Mary sat up and shivered. Outside she could hear a car passing as well as a night bird singing nearby, and as she focused on that the shapes of the building she was in began to come into focus.
Carpet beneath her naked arse and legs, a little rough, perhaps a little well walked on. To her left a wooden wall that- no, not a wooden wall, there was a top to it. More of a table than a wall. To her right, at a little distance there was… she frowned and leaned towards it but it was the windows above that caught her eye, only a little light being cast through them. Stained glass and with the image of a woman in prayer cut into it.
Ah, and now Mary knew exactly where she was, because she had been there before. That woman in the glass was her.
Salt Lake City, the Cathedral of the Madeleine. It was the only cathedral in America that was under her patronage and so it wasn’t the first time her death had decided to awaken her here.
Mary was glad she hadn’t woken alone in the desert, doomed to a second death in little time at all without food or direction. There were some mercies to be had with the whims of immortality, it seemed. Standing up Mary felt a little unsteady, like a newborn lamb. Fitting really, but she didn’t like having to lean on the altar for a moment while her vision swam.
Mary reminded herself to take a deep breath, and it was a relief that she could. No more Lucifer, no more desert, no more crushing hands and burning magic.
(Her body was probably still lying there in that desert, being eaten by birds and scavengers. She really hoped it managed to get down to not much at all before some unfortunate found her. She didn’t wish the finding of a rotting half eaten corpse upon anyone. Hopefully that destruction coupled with her lack of ID would mean she hadn’t ruined her ability to be Mary Jones still. She didn’t want to have to remake her identity, even if her line of work was mostly cash in hand and off the government’s radar.)
A shiver, and Mary rubbed at her bare arms. She really needed to find some clothes before she even began trying to get out of here. The last time she’d resurrected here in her own church it had been 1987 (or 1988?) and she’d found that the doors were all locked. Mary had a reasonable suspicion that this would be the case again tonight.
In the darkness Mary picked her way towards the side of the cathedral, searching for doors to open.
If a cleaner is still in here, Mary thought, pushing an unlocked one open, you are going to scare the life out of them.
But there was no cleaner, just a hallway. Mary didn’t even know how late or early it might be. As she slowly walked Mary kept touching her throat, always expecting to find scars and blisters. But always it was smooth, nothing left from Lucifer’s violation. Violations didn’t remain on Mary’s skin for long.
She found a room and flicked on the light. For a few seconds it was blinding and Mary blinked against it, once again having to adjust to the lighting change.
An office: big wooden desk and bookcases and cupboards and, on the wall, a clock that read just past five. That meant only a handful of hours before someone would come and unlock the place. Hopefully.
Mary moved to one of the cupboards and pulled it open, hoping to find something resembling clothes. No luck, but the second cupboard had a pile of folded dark fabric that Mary fell upon gladly, pulling it out and revealing the clean and ready cassock that God had provided for her.
Thank you, she said to him, holding the fabric close for a second. Oh God, thank you for this.
She slithered into the cassock, suddenly both warmer and less exposed. She bet the priest here hadn’t expected a woman’s naked body to be sliding around inside his clerical clothing. But needs must, and Mary’s current needs were mostly to be clothed. She was sure that it would have hung on her in an incredibly unflattering way, but maybe she could put aside the sin of vanity for now. Her feet were cold though.
Mary turned the light back off - simply because it seemed like the polite thing to do - and padded back out into the church, looking now for some sort of light out there. She found a few switches that seemed to do nebulous things somewhere else before finding a clustered group of them, one of which illuminated the altar and backpiece.
Jesus was hanging from his crucifix, suffering for mankind as he always did. Mary, who had so recently suffered and not even for the sake of mankind, felt a little weary and disillusioned at this familiar image of her dear friend. Two thousand years and they still kept him up on that cross, all of his faithful building their own gilded Golgothas across the globe.
Looking up at Jesus - not her Jesus, this pale skinny thing - Mary lifted the skirt of her cassock slightly to slowly turn and show it off, asking, “what do you think? A little too mournful?”
Jesus, tears down his face and a painted expression of never ending agony, said nothing. Mary didn’t take it personally. Instead she turned her back on the statue that wasn’t her Jesus and sat down at the top of the three stairs facing the aisle, her back against the altar.
Waiting for the dawn to slowly drag itself through the windows of the cathedral seemed to take a very long time, and most of that time Mary spent thinking about Lucifer and making sure that she couldn’t possibly forget any detail of their time together.
That fucking bastard.
She supposed they were somewhat equal for the moment: Mary had killed him and now he’d killed her right back.
It was the worst kind of equal.
Eventually the inside of the cathedral began to lighten and Mary then at least had things to look at. She got up from her spot by the altar and walked down through the pews, picking out the literature sticking out from the back of them and seeing what was being said in her name. (In His name, of course, but they had named and dedicated this church for her. Mary couldn’t help but feel a little responsible.)
But an hour of looking around led Mary to sit back down where she’d been before. Even though she’d technically been sleeping - or something like it - for almost three weeks (she’d seen the date in the foyar), Mary felt exhausted.
That meant it wasn’t hard to just sit and close her eyes, drifting a little. She could have broken a window and slipped out but that seemed rude, and it wasn’t as though she was in such a hurry to get anywhere. She couldn’t even text anyone to organise a ride home, since all the possessions she’d taken to Texas were sitting in a locker in a ranch she’d never return to.
Mary hoped that the ranch owners were okay, and that Lucifer hadn’t decided to back track that way. She hoped the other workers were okay. They were good people, hard workers just trying to make it through the day.
She hoped everyone back in New York was okay, and that she’d see them soon. It was hard not being able to always know if the people she cared for were safe, and Mary had so few of them these days.
That spoke poorly of her, Mary knew, but it was so hard to connect sometimes. It was so hard to be both Mary Magdalene and just Mary. The people who knew her as the first expected and hoped for too much, and the people who knew her only as the second would never truly understand her.
None of that was the fault of others, but it was how it was. Maybe now that she was resurrected, (walking in those footsteps of the man who was more than a man) Mary would do it all better.
(She suspected she wouldn’t.)
With a sigh she stretched out her legs, spreading her hands out across the carpet on either side of her. Outside there were cars and the sounds of the day beginning, but in here the air hung heavy with undisturbed quiet.
Mary watched a large ant make its way slowly up the cliff-face stairs and towards the hand she was leaning on.
“Hey,” Mary said casually to the little insect, the only other soul she’d seen since she died. “You come here often?”
The ant approached her hand and poked its head a few times at the fleshy wall before snapping its mandibles closed on her. “Son of a-” Mary hissed, pulling her hand up. It hadn’t hurt so much as surprised her, but the poor ant went flying somewhere behind the altar. Perhaps not the best start for her first interaction with another living being, but Mary was putting that on the ant.
Again she stood up and moved around the inside of the cathedral, stopping every time she hit a piece of art that identified itself as her. Standing in front of one of the paintings of Mary Magdalene, deep in prayer and mournful eyes lifted to the heavens, Mary found herself following that gaze into the rafters of the church. Nope. No God to be found there. This Magdalene was going to have to look higher.
This painted version was more modern and realistic than many works of art to be found in churches, the face looking more like a face and less like a pale plastic child’s idea of what a person might look like. Mary pressed down on her own nose, longer than the one in the painting. Mary thought they had similar eyes though, underneath all those tears.
“Hello?”
The voice came suddenly from nowhere and Mary turned, gaze flicking back and forth until she spotted the old man standing in the doorway to that first hallway she’d found. She wondered what he must be thinking, this young woman standing in his locked cathedral, dressed in a priest’s cassock that was too big for her (except in the chest where it felt too small).
“Hello,” Mary said cautiously, turning her attention fully to him and slowly approaching through the pews. “This is going to sound extremely strange to you but-”
“You’re her,” the old man said, his mouth and eyes both growing wide as he watched her. Mary’s brows drew together in confusion at his words, but as he didn’t seem to be afraid she kept moving towards him.
“I’m her?” Mary asked, stopping when she was close by and trying to read beyond the shock in his expression.
“You don’t remember me?” he asked and Mary looked at him more closely then, trying to find the answer to that question. He was old, probably over sixty, and he had white hair cropped close and slightly cloudy blue eyes. She didn’t think that she knew him. She must not have answered quickly enough and the man said, “It was me, the last time that you were here.”
Mary understood then. Of course she didn’t recognise this man, because the last time she’d seen him had been thirty-something years ago. The priest who had found her the last time she resurrected, who’d given her a cup of coffee and tried to find out who she was and how she’d gotten there, and if she was safe to go out into the world on her own.
Well. Safe was relative, wasn’t it.
“Ah,” said Mary, not quite sure where to go from there. She had, after all, not aged even a second since then. To his eyes he was seeing an exact image of that woman from 1987, although the image may have shifted in a few tiny ways.
But she also wasn’t going to lie to this priest. The death that had preceded her return had been a deeply traumatic one and his kindness in her waking hours had meant everything. It had reminded her of the kindness of mankind after so recently and brutally experiencing its cruelty.
“Yes,” she said to him with a nod. “That was me, and I do remember you. But, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Father Strickland,” he said as he moved closer to her and reached out a hand to touch her arm. He seemed to think better of this and dropped his hand. “Uh, Robert. Who are you?”
The question, Mary could hear, was a little more what are you? Which was completely reasonable, as Mary saw it.
How much truth to tell and how much to soften it with a lie? That was the real issue here. Although… what exactly would be the lie she chose to tell anyway?
God help me, Mary thought, and it was both frustration and a truly asked plea.
“I am…” a pause because she didn’t think this was going to work out for her. “There are certain people on this earth that God has sent to help when they can. I am one of those people.”
“You’re an angel,” Robert breathed and Mary reached out suddenly to take his arms because he looked like he was about to go down onto his knees.
“I’m not an angel,” she said firmly. “I am a person just like you, I just- well, I don’t age and I don’t leave. I stay on earth until I’m not needed anymore.”
Robert frowned and then shook his head. “I think you just look like her, that woman. You can’t be her. That was- you’d have to be seventy by now.”
“I’m much older than that.”
“I need to sit down.” Robert did just that, easing himself down into the closest pew. Mary joined him, sitting at a distance.
“I didn’t mean to come here and disturb your life, just like I didn’t last time. You were so kind to me then. You told me it was your first year out of seminary and that you wanted to be a source of strength for the people who worshiped here.” He looked up at her, clearly remembering this conversation and being surprised that she did too.
“The last priest… he’d left in disgrace… the parishioners didn’t know where to turn…”
“And have you helped them?” Mary asked. “Have you been everything that He needed you to be? It’s not easy to be called to serve - believe me, I know - but it’s a call that can’t go unanswered.”
He looked at Mary and she could see that her words were meaning something to him through the confusion of all of this. “I hope I’ve helped them,” he said after a few moments. “I hope that I’ve done all that I could. I don’t know. I can’t be sure.”
“None of us can,” Mary said with a little smile. “But we try, don’t we? We’re imperfect but God loves us anyway. We can only try to leave the world a better place than how we found it.”
“But… why do you come here?” Robert asked with a shake of his head.
“I don’t mean to,” Mary promised. “This place just sometimes drags me back to it. And,” she added, stretching out her arms to show what she was wearing, “I had to borrow this, because that dragging doesn’t have much regard for anything I might be wearing at the time.”
She’d been naked the last time, she remembered. When Robert had found her in the late afternoon behind the pews. He’d found clothes for her in the charity bin.
“What do they call you?” Robert asked, not seeming worried about his cassock for now.
“Mary,” she said, sitting in a church full of so many images of herself. “My name is Mary.”
“Like the Magdalene.”
“Very much like the Magdalene,” she agreed and managed not to laugh at the ridiculousness of life, although a tired smile still graced her lips.
There was a long pause before he asked her, “how much?”
Mary turned her gaze to him and away from the altar. “Enough. Enough to end up at this cathedral above any other.”
Robert didn’t ask any more questions and Mary volunteered nothing further. For a long time they both just sat in silence on the pew until, eventually, Robert said, “let’s find you something more comfortable to go home in.”
An hour later, fed and clothed by the priest of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, Mary made her way out into the world, enough cash in hand to get her a bus at least part of the way home. The sunshine here didn’t feel like the sunshine in the Texas desert, and today there were still the last suggestions of snow in the shadowy corners of lawns.
Today Mary was far from where she’d died and ready to return to the city where she could live.