Chapter Text
This island was a strange, in-between kind of place. Not quite Chilean, not quite Antarctic. Half alive, half dead. Down here, by the beach, everything was mostly brown and drab. Lichen and moss, stone and sand. And the penguins. The squawking, squabbling penguins. Something about them called to mind a lackadaisical horde of old men.
Today, Misato enticed a pair of them to stumble over to her. They pressed their wings down, and lengthened their spines to stare at her with eyes like bright, black beads.
“You are not cute,” she said, because their caterwauling always woke her up hours ahead of time. She bent down to get a closer look. “Well, maybe a little…”
“Miss Katsuragi?”
“Oh. Yeah, hello!” She straightened her posture, and plastered a smile on her face. The island’s multinational group of scientists were personable, unpretentious, and their generosity made Misato feel like an endearing stray dog. Often it drove her further and further inland, until the implacable glaciers forced her to retreat. (Once, for variety’s sake, she had wandered the edge of a dormant volcano, and returned with a fistful of dark ash. But she hadn’t been allowed to keep it. Environmental treaties, and all that.)
One of the Russian scientists stood on the horizon, squinting down at her. Like Misato, he was bundled into a cumbersome jacket. Unlike Misato, he appeared as though he belonged in it.
“Doing anything important?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve become very popular,” Misato joked, extending a hand to point at the penguins. However, when she turned to look at them, she saw that they were already toddling away. Soon, she couldn’t pick them out in the crowd even if she tried. “Fickle bastards.”
The man laughed. “My superiors reminded me that you probably haven’t seen the chapel yet. Or are they wrong?”
Her first Sunday morning on the island, Misato had heard footsteps crunching outside her window. Kneeling in her bed to look outside, she had seen a handful of bundled up scientists tromping off into the horizon. In the meager sunlight, they had looked far more awake than she could ever imagine being. She had quickly dived back under the pillows, twisting blankets around her body, effectively blotting out the world.
“No, I’ve never been there. I, uh, don’t know what services are like though. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, sounding rather contrite. Or perhaps that was a hangover from his halting speech; early on, he had decided to test his Japanese on Misato, and she had responded in kind with her English (since she knew no Russian). “I just thought… Well, it’s pretty interesting. Something new to look at.”
“True.”
They definitely see me as some stray.
On the way, they passed long-abandoned whaling stations. Giant, rusting metallic drums, century-old whale bones, and toppled columns galore; it looked like something out of a painting of hell. If ghosts existed in this archipelago, they probably lived here.
The chapel, in comparison, was a tiny, unassuming structure. There was something almost pastoral about it, even though it was nestled within gray sky and grayer moss. From the outside, Misato estimated that it was about half the size of the apartment she shared with her mother back home.
“My country… We flew in our own timber to construct this.” By explaining this, the scientist spared Misato the need to ask where they’d managed to find trees out here.
Misato pressed her gloved fingers against its walls. She hoped to breathe in the scents of some distant Siberian forest, but mostly it smelled like the rest of the island; stone, salt, and frozen mud.
The door made no sound upon opening it, and the stomp-clomp-stomp of their boots were discordant notes in their peaceful surroundings. Misato twirled around, slowly, eyes drinking in the crucifix, the iconography, and the scant handful of chairs.
“Whenever I cross this threshold people go from seeing me as a scientist to seeing me as their priest. So strange how one can cast aside and take on identities with such ease.”
Misato tilted her head, processing what he had just said. “So they have you conduct services?”
“It’s economical to have employees here take on as many functions as possible.” He meandered down the aisle. “I’m glad to do it.”
“A scientist and a priest, huh? Do you ever get mixed up? Do you ever accidentally give a…” Misato struggled a bit, her second language flickering in and out like an ancient light bulb. “Do you ever start to give a sermon,” there, that was the word, “but you end up lecturing on moss instead of God by accident?”
The man had been rummaging around in a small desk near the altar, but he took a break to laugh. “I can’t say that-”
His walkie-talkie blared to life, filling the room with a static screech. Her companion held it to his ear, speaking intermittently in Russian.
“Yes. Yes. Alright, I’ll bring her over right now.”
Ice began pumping through Misato’s veins. Even if she had been standing at the equator, no amount of warmth could find its way under skin.
“Your father’s ship just arrived.” The man held the walkie-talkie just below his chin. “Do you want to talk to him?”
Misato shook her head so hard her ponytail thwacked her in the face. She tasted copper when she licked her lips. They must have cracked and bled in the dry air.
“I thought he was several days away.”
“The floes cleared up, I suppose.”
Misato didn’t know she was rocking from side-to-side, until she heard the creaking of the wood. She made herself go still, like that statue of the Virgin Mary up on the altar.
The scientist/priest’s eyes went soft, not quite pitying, but still too sympathetic to bear. He ended the walkie-talkie communication, and then followed this up by shutting the desk drawer.
“Here,” he said, placing something in Misato’s hand. “Remember how I told you how we brought wood over to build this chapel? There was a surplus of it, and we carved some of these as a result. We don’t give them away to just anyone, you know.”
Misato grabbed the crucifix by its chord, held it up so that the cross was level with her eyes. Someone had whittled the thing to uniform smoothness, and then painted it silver. When she slipped it over her head, the crucifix felt reassuringly durable against her heart.
“Thank you,” she said. “I guess I get a souvenir from this island after all.”
The man hesitated just as he laid his hand on the doorknob. “Do you want to pause for prayers?”
Whenever Misato went to the dentist, she’d sit there in the waiting room, legs shaking, almost sick with the need to get the unpleasant thing over with. She felt this again, now, mere minutes from her father.
“No,” she said. “Let’s postpone that until my trip back.”