Work Text:
"I'M SURE THERE AINT A HEAVEN BUT THAT DON'T MEAN I DON'T LIKE TO PICTURE YOU THERE."
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Joseph was never a religious man. As a boy, Erina would make him go to church every Sunday morning, but he never paid mind to what was being preached.
Caesar was a practicing Catholic. Of course he was. It was 1938. In Italy. Of course he was. Joseph would watch as Caesar did his silent prayers. The way he painted the cross across his body, sealing his message to God with a kiss.
Joseph knew the basic traditions that took place in a church, like asking God for forgiveness and confessing your sins. He never understood the concept, nor felt the need to do any of that.
Then Caesar died.
No body to recover. All that was left was the blood that seeped out from under the debris that ultimately became his undoing. Not the fight with Wamuu. Not his wounds or loss of blood. But a piece of fallen ceiling, cut out in the shape of a cross.
He didn't know when he started doing it, but after Caesar's passing, Joseph found himself making silent prayers too. Suddenly, the words of many priest struck nerves and left pins and needles in his fingertips.
His grandmother passed. Then Speedwagon. Grief became a choking hazard for Joseph and he would eventually grow around the painful tightness in his chest but still, he would sit on the church bench and stare at the stained glass and the statues of Mary holding her bloody son.
He found himself in a confessional booth one day.
"Forgive me Father for I have sinned-"
Infidelity was his crime. Above it all, he still didn't really care for the teachings of a thousand-year-old book. He wasn't even asking for forgiveness from a being who casts it's gaze aside from the masses that worship it.
No.
Really, he's asking for a million pardons from a friend.
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