Work Text:
Matt asked if he could go to church a couple months in to his time with Stick.
He missed it, the way the church smelled, the sound and feel of the place. It’d been too raw at first, after his dad died, he didn’t want the people there to see him. But there was space now, and Matt wanted to go back. He wanted to go to Mass, he wanted to go to confession.
He’d just killed someone for the first time, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about it. It wasn’t a sin, Stick had explained it to him. Or, well, Stick didn’t use the word, but Matt knew it wasn’t a sin, rules were different for war, David was close to Matt’s age, probably, when he killed Goliath, and that wasn’t a sin. But there were other sins he wanted to confess, all the times he’d been disobedient with Stick, all the times he’d been selfish, the times he got angry for no reason like something inside him just exploded.
Stick said they were fighting a war. He said that criminals deserved to be killed, that they were the ones who started it. And everything that Stick said made sense, but Matt could still smell the blood when he went to sleep. He wanted to talk it out with his priest, he wanted a second opinion. He wanted to ask God if he was doing the right thing, wanted to go to Mass and let the holiness wash over him and make things make sense.
Stick smacked him over the head when he asked.
“Don’t tell me you still believe in all that fairytale bullshit, kid,” he said, “You’d think you’d’ve been through enough by now to get a clue. There’s no God smiling down on you, Matty, and if there is he ain’t your friend.”
So that was a no on church.
Matt didn’t ask about it when he joined the hand.
He didn’t even know if they had Catholics in Japan. He thought he’d read once that they killed all the priests here, but that was a long time ago, centuries probably.
Some of the higher ups in the Hand were really, really old. He wondered if any of them had killed priests.
But that wasn’t really why he didn’t ask, nor was it the fact that he knew it wouldn’t matter, that he belonged to the Hand now, and they weren’t about to share him with God. He didn’t ask because he didn’t want to.
Or, no, that wasn’t quite right. Sometimes you can want and not want something so much at the same time, and it’s not two separate impulses conflicting, but one impulse, churning and consuming and desperate.
Matt knows better than to darken a church’s doorstep. It’s not that he thinks he can’t be forgiven, that’s the whole point, forgiveness, redemption, it’s that he doesn’t want to be.
The Hand killed Stick, and then Matt started killing the Hand. He doesn’t know how many he killed, just that he kept fighting and fighting until the ground was slick with blood, and that he didn’t stop fighting until he was too exhausted to keep track of the world and the Hand captured him.
And he didn’t kill because it was war. And once he got started he wasn’t even killing for revenge, really. He killed because Stick was dead and they weren’t, because Stick was dead and he wasn’t. And then he just kept killing because it was fun.
He wasn’t sure that anything else could be fun these days.
It was hard to feel anything properly now. Matt felt like he had an empty space somewhere in his core. He thought it might be where his soul was meant to be, he thought he must have lost it somewhere along the way. He liked it better this way, it hurt less. He didn’t want God to put his soul back into him.
His mom was in a coma, probably, though he hadn’t checked in over a year. His dad was dead, and now Stick was dead too. All Matt had was the emptiness where his soul should be, and the joy that came from listening to someone’s own heart pumping the blood from their body.
So Matt didn’t want to be redeemed, didn’t want to be cleansed, sanctified, made holy and good. Matt wanted to burn.
The hand had killed Stick and made him watch. And then Matt killed the Hand until the air was so thick with blood it made him choke, and the ground was so thick with blood it made him slip. And that had made the Hand impressed, pleased , delighted at the deaths of their own people because Matt had done so well.
The Hand were evil, devils and monsters and nightmares from hell, and Matt wanted nothing more than to join them.