Chapter Text
“Am I evil?”
“No,” his mother says. Not in the miffed, slightly off-kilter way a parent would usually answer. He’s asked this one too many times for her not to anticipate it. She answers like it’s simply one of those irrefutable facts of the universe; the grass is green, the sky is blue, and Sunday isn’t evil.
“You can’t know that.” He want her to though. Badly enough that it translates into his voice. He’d fluster because it's all high and weepy, but he’s just too scared.
“I’m afraid I can. And I do. You want to know why?” She waits until he nods, shaky and stuttering. “Because I’m your mother, and I know you. Better than anyone. Better than yourself. That means I know that you aren’t evil.” She holds her arms out, and he pushes himself into them because despite everything he craves a modicum of comfort. His mother starts to detangle the hair at the top of his head, and asks, “Why do you think you are?”
He lets himself get lulled by the motions of her hand in his hair, back-and-forth. “I had a bad thought, today.” It always makes his skin crawl to admit it. It always feels wrong. He clings onto her more fervently, lets his hands wrinkle her shirt from how hard he’s grabbing.
She starts to hum, something absentminded and without words. “You’re not evil,” she reminds him again, practiced and ritualistic. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Tell me what it was about?”
“Today was a good day. Robin and I played together in the grass, and then we saw a frog in the pond nearby. I was so happy. Watching it jump, I thought: ‘I wish every day was like today because…’” he pauses, exhales wetly, “‘I deserve it.’ I thought, ‘I deserve it’!”
His palms have been damp this whole time, but now it feels like they’re dripping. They’re wet enough that he’s viscerally uncomfortable and he can feel the sweat streaking down his arms, feel as it starts spreading through the rest of his body and it makes him shudder, makes his teeth grind together. He wants to wring his hands together to stop the feeling but that would mean letting go of his mother and he can’t let go of her because she’s his anchor. She’s the only thing keeping him steady.
His mother says his name, he thinks, but he isn’t listening. He’s doomed to only hear himself and his own terrible thoughts. They mock him for his avarice. His greed. His propensity to hunger and yearn, forever insatiable. “Am I corrupted?” He whines, “am I impure? Will They punish me for my transgressions?”
“Sunday—” she tries again.
“Is it not terribly sinful,” he whispers, “to have in excess but to always, always want more?”
His mother grabs his head, tilts it up so he looks in her eyes. “Listen to me,” she doesn’t look afraid. For him, there are a thousand different ways his mind is calling him a monster. For her, it’s just an episode she helps him through every week. “Listen. Did you pray?”
“It was one of the first things I did.” And the second. And the third, because it only felt right the third time. He had told Robin that the voice in his head was back, and he needed to be alone. She used to ask about it: the scary one ? The monster ? Now, she just nods. She scurries away quick enough that he knows she’s terribly disturbed by him.
Every time he sees her trying desperately to not watch him before he closes his eyes, he hates himself. He wonders how much she hates him too. Wonders how she would look at him when he told her that the voice in his head is just his own and the only monster is him. It’s just him.
“Then They understand that you didn’t mean it, okay?” She rubs her thumb just to the right of his eye, catches the tear that rolls out of it. “They forgive you.”
Sunday doesn’t feel forgiven. He feels dirty — unclean. Once, he’d read about lepers. Those sinners who have disavowed Them punished with disease, wrought with numbness and patches of rotting skin. Fatigued to the point of seeking repentance. He feels the same, like his entire body is riddled with disease and decay. Sometimes he looks at his skin and starts to scratch. Wonders, privately, if he’s doomed.
“Why?” It feels like something impossible to rationalize. A concept he can't hope to grasp. Why would They forgive him? After everything he’s done? “Why?” He asks again.
She sounds so frustrated when she says, “Because They do. They just…do.” that he consigns himself to crawling into bed that night and silently mouthing every prayer he can think of when he’s supposed to be sleeping so he can stop bothering her.
“...Okay.” He says, even though it isn’t really okay and it never will be. He steps back to start wiping his own eyes, wishing he could claw them out instead.
She repeats, “Okay?” like the meaning of the word must have somehow changed since the last time she’d heard it. He doesn’t blame her. Usually his outbursts last far longer.
“Okay. I believe you. I’m sorry. For…” He trails off, doesn’t say what-for because if he said for being alive or for burdening you with my existence she would be mad at him, and he doesn’t want her to be mad at him.
“You don’t have to apologize.” She taps her temple. “It’s just your head playing tricks on you, that’s all there is to it. One day, you’re going to look back on this and be happy that you’re all better. You’re going to be okay,” she speaks with conviction, about this hypothetical “one day” that she’s sure Sunday will live to see. Out of the two of them, Sunday doesn’t know who she’s trying to convince more. “Yes?”
“Yes, mother.”
She smiles at him. Really smiles. The corner of her eyes crinkle. “Good.” She looks at him like she thinks he’s smart. He feels warm with the impossible possibility that she might. Even just a little bit. “Just promise me that you’ll try your best to realize that future, okay? I want to see you try to get better." The light reflects on her halo, winks at him conspiratorially like it approves of what she says next: “Which means you don't stop praying. Ever.”
She gives him a chance to breathe before she ruffles his hair, and says he should maybe clean himself up. He winces, because he knows she’s right — he probably looks out-of-sorts. More than usual, because there is always something wrong with the way he looks no matter how much he tries to fix it. She’s very smart, his mother. She has this way of talking, he thinks, that makes it obvious that she always tries her best to make him feel better. It’s for the best that he listens to her.
So when she says: Pray , Sunday prays.
Then his mother dies, and some people — a family, the Family — come into their town and take him and his sister away. They bring him somewhere sterile and take care of his wounds — take care of everything except the noise in his ears. The chaos. And that’s all he hears, loud and ugly. The malignance of the discordance that seeped in through the hole in the roof made itself at home in his ears. It threatens him, in terrible whispers, to one day metastasize to his brain. It laughs at him when he tries to close his eyes, because all he sees is the darkness and when his mother died he didn’t see anything because his vision was obstructed by his own palms so his last memories of her don’t even include her face.
Robin is the same. He doesn’t want to ask her, doesn’t want to poke the raw wound where parts of it still bleed because they have not yet scabbed over, but he knows. Is he awful, for relishing in the kinship that brings? It was bad, but it’s a bad I share with you . He certainly feels awful, deriving comfort from something so twisted. He tries to make it up to her, in the somewhat plausible scenario where she can read his thoughts and holds it against him. When she wakes up, sobbing into her hands after a nightmare, he reaches out to her.
“Robin,” he whispers, because speaking loudly would do something like entirely damage the little atmosphere they had built together in the tiny infirmary wing. One made entirely of pain and loss and misery. “Robin, come here.” He taps the bed with the hand not wrapped in a cast, winces as the mattress jumps and jostles him.
She drags herself out and onto the floor, tears a steady stream that he can only hear. He winces when she stumbles. He would move to her, but they told him not to move his leg until at least the next week.
“Sunday,” she whispers right back, stumbling beside him. “Sunday, it’s awful.”
Your head or your body or your heart ? He doesn’t ask. He knows the answer is all of it . “I know,” He says, because he does, sweeping out his arm to cradle her against his side. “I know.”
“When does it stop?”
He hesitates, starts carding his hand through her hair. “I don’t know.”
“It has to stop at some point,” she looks up at him. Even though it’s dark, he doesn’t need to see to know how agony drapes itself across, makes itself at home on her face. “I have to get better at some point. Right?”
You’re not evil , he thinks to himself. You’re not evil . You’re not evil .
“Yes.” He lies, because she needs this. He starts separating the strands in her hair, trying to disguise the tremble in his hand. “I mean, it has to, right? At some point, it has to get better.” He breathes in, breathes out, tries to lose himself in the rhythm. “You just have to keep trying, and then one day it will be okay. Okay?”
“...Okay.” She lowers her head, tucks it under his arm. “Thank you, Sunday.” She pauses, wipes at her eyes, and then adds quietly, “I don't think I could do this alone. You make it better.”
Sunday doesn’t smile, because he’s too numb and his face doesn’t remember how to do anything but cry, but it’s close. “You too.”
They sit in silence like that, just the two of them against the world. And it’s a harsh world, he knows. One that he hates to live in. He starts to hum, absently. There’s no words — just an absentminded melody. Robin yawns, and he can feel some of the leftover tension drain from her body. It’s bad enough that he hates being alive, he thinks. He doesn’t want Robin to feel the same way he does.
Only when she falls asleep is Sunday allowed to cry.
“How are you feeling?”
One of the people that had bandaged him up said that he would meet the man who owned the mansion soon enough. You’ll know him when you see him ! They had said. Sunday traces the jagged edges of his left wing with his eyes, follows it down to where it changes from blue to black in hue, and finds that to be true. There’s something larger-than-life about him. Sunday thinks. Something so intriguing.
“Fine.” he says, because it’s hard to say anything longer than a monosyllable and not to get tired, and he doesn’t know what Mr. Gopher Wood would do if he said I don’t want to be alive. Nothing feels worth it, anymore .
“Fine?” He sounds like he doesn’t believe in Sunday, which makes sense. Sunday doesn’t believe himself either. I’m not evil , he repeats three times. Mr. Gopher Wood shifts so he can rest his hand on the white of the infirmary sheet, a furrow in his brows. “If you are absolutely positive…though, if you would pardon my rudeness just this once, I would not agree with that. You do not look fine at all. In fact, you look very tired.” Mr. Gopher Wood brushes a thumb on his lower eyelid to reference the bags, the lack of sleep. It should seem pointed, but somehow it doesn’t. Sunday still hates how visible it is — his damage. “Say, what is your name, friend? I was told that you would not tell the people who rescued you.”
Friend , like Mr. Gopher Wood sees him as an equal. “Sunday,” he manages, a little quiet. “My name is Sunday.”
His teeth glint under the fluorescents as he smiles. They’re awfully white. “Sunday,” he says, and there’s a note of satisfaction in his voice. “Thank you for telling me.” he pauses, like he's thinking about something. “It appears your sister was telling the truth, then.”
“Robin?” He cranes his neck to look at the empty bed beside him. “She already told you my—wait. Where is she?”
“She wanted to go outside to get some air.”
Sunday feels his heart lurch. It's stupid, but he thinks what if she's gone too ? If she is then it must be all his fault — he must have done something. Maybe he just can't remember, but he's sure it had to have been him to drive her away, make her leave.
“...I see,” Sunday certainly does see. Clearer now than ever before. “Does that mean…is she doing okay?” It sounds like he’s begging, high-pitched and watery. He grimaces.
Mr. Gopher Wood is silent for a moment. “Now, now,” he chides, and Sunday feels unequivocally patronized. For a moment, it’s like the profound gap that exists between the two of them is suddenly made manifest — Sunday can feel it in his soul, feels as it rakes across his bones. He shudders. “This space, this house that you will come to occupy, prioritises equality above all else. So, in the interest of equal opportunity — of fairness, I will answer you. But, that stipulation is predicated on the notion that you answer me first.”
Sunday tilts his head. “What do you want?”
“I do not ask this out of malice, Sunday,” he says, “I just wish to know how you are doing, nothing more and nothing less. Because I am fairly skeptical that you are, as you say, ‘doing fine.’”
“My mother is dead,” It’s unusual that it comes out choked, because when the people who had taken him in and poked and prodded and asked how he was feeling he was able to lie. It’s nothing , he said, I’m fine, and it came out almost believable. Now, though, his hands dig into the austere sheets and he forces his head down so Mr. Gopher Wood can’t see the tears start to bead in his eyes.
“My mother is dead,” he says again, because that’s all he needs to say. It implies it all: Nothing will ever be fine again. And, there is a part of me that is irreparably damaged , I feel it when I close my eyes . And, I never want to wake up from my dreams, because nothing else matters because my mother is there .
“If it is what They will," Mr. Gopher Wood says, "then it is something They thought you could handle. Do not let this be your undoing."
"How? How can I not let this affect me? It ruined me."
"You should not let it," he says, like it's that easy.
"Like you would know a single thing about this? About what I'm going through? Who are you to tell me what to do?" Sunday is surprised at the anger, heady and bursting. He hasn't been angry in so long.
Mr. Gopher Wood laughs. It's not one of the deep, throw-your-head-back kind of laughs. Instead it's airy, light as a breeze and gone just as fast. "You have so much to learn," he says, "and They have smiled upon you, for I am willing to teach you. Do you think nothing of those around you?" He takes his own severed wing in hand. “I have seen death, I have been a victim of my circumstances and yet, because of Them, I have risen above. I have seen destruction. More than you can hope to comprehend. I have lost so much, and gained so little. Yet, despite it all, I stand here before you. Proof that you should not let these things destroy you, because you walk a path that They — in Their infinite wisdom — deem necessary. Is it not sacrilege to give up, to spite Their name?"
Sacrilege, Sunday thinks — shudders at the form of it, the feel of it in his thoughts. Thinks of synonyms like heresy , blasphemy . "What do I do, then?"
He reaches out a hand, inches it forward so slowly like he’s scared Sunday will bite. When he proffers his hand, Sunday looks up. “You let me help you, Sunday. You let me guide you on the right path, the path of redemption. Let Them see your devotion, let Their love fill your soul. Do you agree?”
Sunday has always been enamoured with the thought of redemption . Such an elusive concept, for a sinner like him. It croons sweetly at him. “Yes,” Sunday breathes, and when he lets Mr. Gopher Wood take his hand it doesn't feel like making a deal with the Devil or signing away his soul. It feels like relief; for the first time in forever the clouds in his mind have moved, and he has has to shield his eyes when he looks up because he can finally see the sun.
It feels like peace.
“Perfect.” Mr. Gopher Wood says, overlaying his other hand on top of Sunday. Priestly, Sunday might equate it to. He clenches his fingers around a glove, desperately pretends it's human skin. "Perfect." He says again, and he might not be one of the Gods but his words feel like scripture, leave his mouth like something so important that Sunday is blessed to be hearing them.
Sunday doesn’t know how long the two of them stay there, but it must not be long. It also feels like forever. When Mr. Gopher Wood makes a move to leave, he's groggy enough that he almost lets him.
“Mr. Gopher Wood?” Sunday murmurs, “How is she?”
When he turns back around, there’s a glint of something in his eye. “Robin is doing just fine,” he says, “it does not do the mind well to be shut away. She has the right ideas — you should start doing the same."
Sunday is disappointed. She didn't leave . She should — if he could, he would leave himself, too. “Thank you, Mr. Gopher Wood.”
“Oh, no. Thank you, Sunday,” Mr. Gopher Wood smiles, “for being so honest.”
Mr. Gopher Wood leaves, walks out with one arm held primly behind his back. Sunday watches him go and, for the briefest of moments, his mind is clear.