Work Text:
Suicide is a sin. Mark knows this, had known it from his childhood, and knew it even when he was inflicting that very first stab wound onto himself. Suicide is murder, and that’s what makes it so bad in the eyes of God. But how can suicide be murder if he never truly died?
Whether the act of suicide itself was a sin or not, he knew that the state of his body afterwards definitely was. An ugly, vile thing. A freakish shell that not even a God could love. So, Mark thought it’d be his best bet to try to redeem himself in the eyes of the Lord. He wanted to convince God he was pure, an innocent and pathetic little being, anything but the empty pile of flesh he really was. He would hold the cross his mother gave him as a child with his rotting hand, and would pray to the God that kept him alive to suffer, either begging Him to take him or thank Him for keeping him alive. But believing in a God in a state like that can destroy a mind, make it think its situation means something more than it really does. To turn a broken man into a believer would be like trying to convince a sacrificial lamb that God is loving.
And when that broken man has already transcended human behaviour, when he has died and been brought back like Jesus but has been brought back again and again after that like a sinner in hellfire, how could anyone blame him for shifting his worship from Jesus to himself? When your God answers your prayers with nothing but stabbings and pain, how could you keep faith in that same God?
When he saw Damien in that same position he used to constantly put himself in, kneeling on the dirty ground of the flimsily put together cabin and praying for a nonexistent God to show him the way, he didn’t feel pity. Nor did he feel any empathy. What he did feel, however, was responsibility.
Of course. Jesus did not, after emerging from his death, sit in a filthy bedroom praying God had properly taken him. Jesus did not sit there and pity himself, poking and prodding at the infected holes made by the nails in the cross. No. He gave deliverance. Salvation. He showed sinners the way.
Damien would be an easy soul to save. Poor, sweet Damien never really understood how or why the world was breaking apart around him. He was clueless even until his last moments in his body. But he won’t have to understand. Mark has learned that a God does not have to answer to any of his inferior creations, no matter how hard they beg or plead. He will purify Damien and make everything all right again, and Mark will do it the very same way God refused to do for him.