Chapter Text
Natalie Shields lost her religion long ago. Now is hardly the time to be reflecting on the path the Christian god followed as he fell out of her favor, half-drowned as she is beneath the surface of filthy bathwater made filthier by the fact that she’s only allowed to bathe when she’s being tortured, but. But. The fact of the matter is, it’s been a minute since she’s put much stock in organized religion. If a god exists, and Natalie is not convinced one does, she knows for a fact that he’s far too cruel to have earned adulation from her.
Proof of this comes in the form of the blurry shape of Father James looming menacingly above her, figure obscured by the refraction of the dim bathroom light in the waves, hands holding her shoulders bruisingly fast to the bottom of the tub.
When he finally pulls her up, gaze apathetic as she heaves for air the moment her face crests the surface of the water, he gives her approximately two seconds to catch her breath before shaking her insistently, asking, “Well?”
“Nothing,” she gasps, hacking up grimy bathwater and gagging as she sucks air too fast into greedy, starving lungs, “I see nothing, fuck you. God.”
Father James’s infamous backhand is cracking across her face before Natalie even sees it coming.
“Watch your mouth,” he says tightly as Natalie blinks stars out of her field of vision.
She hates him, with everything she has, with all the passion she can muster. It’s admittedly not much, after years of abuse from James and his acolytes, but there’s some sharp, rebellious spark in her that they haven’t been able to kill yet. On Natalie’s more jaded days, she wishes it would die. Today, though, is one of the angry, bitter days where she lets it fuel her, to bite back in the only real way she can.
“Oh,” she says, taking on a pensive affectation. “Oh, now that you’ve hit me, I do think I’m getting something - thank you.”
Natalie lets her eyes flutter shut, presses her hands to her forehead and really draws this song and dance out. She knows that Father James is leaning slightly towards her in anticipation, listening with bated breath as he always does - she can hear every droplet of water that drips from the ends of her hair and into the tub, the room is so silent. Which makes it just that much more rewarding when she opens her mouth, and says-
“Hah. That’s embarrassing. It’s your mother, sucking my dick and loving i-“
Her head is submerged again before she can finish her sentence, wicked grin collapsing shut in favor of keeping the gritty water out of her mouth. Natalie knows he won’t kill her - she’s too valuable an asset for him to be so careless - but panic creeps up her lungs nonetheless as her vision starts to fade around the edges, the duration of her submersion a punishment for her insolence. It’s worth it.
James’s day job is televangelism. In his more private life, he swindles poor, old women out of their retirements by peddling his services as a spiritual guide. In his very private life, he tends to the key to his success - Natalie - and the cult he’s built around her.
Natalie was brought up loosely Catholic - mass on Christmas and Easter and not much else, though she’d worn the cross necklace her favorite grandmother got her for her baptism to appease her for years - but a few months after she turned fourteen, something in her shifted slightly to the left, and suddenly it felt like she could see the world in Technicolor for the first time. This was when the visions started. They were small things at first, glimpses at events that occurred only moments later that she could explain away as a bizarre sense of deja vu. Within a year, though, they had developed into something entirely and inexplicably prophetic. Natalie had confided in her mother a few weeks before her sixteenth birthday, who had then told her own mother the news, and Natalie's grandmother had been overjoyed at the blessings the Lord had showered on her grandbaby.
She couldn’t wait to share Natalie’s gifts with her pastor, a very impressive man whose sermons were “on TV, Natalie, he’ll be fascinated by you, he’ll be able to help you figure out the path God has laid out in front of you.” Natalie hadn’t been convinced, but she was a sweet kid, largely - in those days, anyway - and liked making her grandma happy despite whatever other trouble she got into. Though she’d had no intrinsic need to figure out where her visions came from, more than happy to just focus on navigating high school for the time being, she’d begrudgingly joined her grandma for the half-hour car ride to the big church the next town over early one Sunday morning in June. That was the last time she ever saw her family.
Two years in the future, Natalie is dragged fully and unceremoniously from the tub she has been halfway drowned in time and time again since that sunny Sunday, and dumped onto the cheerful yellow bathmat, a shivering, sopping wreck. It hadn’t taken James long, years ago, to find out that Natalie can’t tell the future on command. She can, however, be encouraged. Pain and fear, though not infallible, quickly proved to be her visions’ most effective motivators.
When Natalie is feeling charitable, she empathizes with her grandmother - just another old, vulnerable, religious woman taken advantage of by a man who never even served the god he claimed to speak for, let alone his community. When she’s feeling less understanding, she imagines raging, curses her family over and over, fantasizes about showing her grandmother what she’d doomed Natalie to and hopes with all she’s worth that the crazy woman regrets it still, years later. It feels only fair.
James won’t look at her as she shudders and attempts to regain enough control of her limbs to stand, instead pulling the plug on the bath with his gaze fixed on the spotless tile wall, a distantly disgusted expression on his face. She wants to take a knife to the disdainful curl of his lip; hell, she wants to bite him, wants to watch him bleed however she can make him, wants to see his face tight with panic drowning in a bathtub. But where would that get her? Back in the tub? Or somewhere worse? There are dozens of men and women utterly devoted to James’s vision for the future between her and the door. She’d be caught before she had the chance to start running.
Natalie isn’t offered the opportunity to dry herself off before James forces her to her feet and out the bathroom door. Immediately they’re flanked by cult-y whackos on all sides, a posture that seems at a glance to be defensive of Natalie, but in actuality is just to keep her from making a break for it on the trek back down to her living quarters in the basement.
“A disappointing showing today, Sister,” James says blandly, still not looking at her. The title Sister used to make Natalie’s stomach turn, but at this point she just rolls her eyes.
“If I’ve told you this once, I’ve told you a hundred times, James” she snarls. “The gift of prophecy is not like the ability to make an omelet, you moron. I can’t just crack some eggs and cook up a future for you on command - it comes when it comes.”
Natalie thinks that the girl to her left is new to James’s cult, her face unfamiliar, and she is possibly the most beautiful person Natalie has ever seen, all blonde curls and meticulous, sinful red lips. Out of the corner of her eye, Natalie watches her clap a hand over that red mouth to muffle a snort.
James doesn’t dignify Natalie’s comment with a response and instead trips her on purpose, wrenching her shoulders as he drags her back to her feet.
The blonde girl goes silent after that.
Natalie finds herself strangely disappointed.