Chapter Text
breathe.
breathe.
“The boys must come with us!” bellow the soldiers—not much older than the seminarians quivering in the minibus behind him. “You, priest, you stay behind. The boys must go!”
He looks down the barrel of a gun. Down the barrel of many guns, enough to shoot everyone in the bus dead twice over. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Funny how it’s in these sorts of moments when the Holy Spirit is the loudest.
“These boys are going to be priests,” he tells the soldiers. “They cannot go with you to the barracks.”
breathe.
breathe.
“Your Holiness! Your Holiness, stay with us—”
He is jostled back to the present, to the inside of an ambulance. breathe. This isn’t the first time he’s been shot at, though it is the first time he’s been shot.
“Hail Mary, full of grace,” one of the paramedics is muttering under their breath, their panic tripping up a childhood’s worth of memorization. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be Thy Name—
breathe.
The smell of blood fills the air, gushes over his hands. The guerilla soldiers are shouting from somewhere past the ringing in his ears. A priest dressed in plainclothes collapses in his arms, but he can’t call for help now, he has to get to safety—has to get them both to safety—
So much blood, and so much of it is coming from the priest’s head—that’s bad, right? A shot to the head killed Lincoln and Kennedy, too. But this man is still warm, still heavy in his arms…
breathe.
“Stay with us, Your Holiness!” The insides of the ambulance are pulsing and spinning. Delirium from the pain, maybe? It feels localized to his shoulder, at least. They’ll have to cut the cassock off him; the pain makes it hard to think, much less move. He tries to smile anyway. Maybe it looks more like a grimace, because it makes the paramedic burst into tears.
He’s being lifted. He’s being placed on a gurney. The hospital corridors are flung wide open. Red crosses. He recognises the hallway, even through the haze. He had been born here, decades ago. It had been called Mercy Hospital back then. The smell of antiseptic is thick in the air, a secular incense meant to sanctify a space for healing.
breathe. He prays the rosary, the Latin now coming through as fast as the sliding beads. Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary. The candles flicker low in remembrance. He is weightless and yet weighted in grief.
His mother. His father. His mentor. Himself?
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of breathe.
“He’s crashing, he’s crashing; we’re going to need more oxygen—”
“There are people dying here; if you cannot figure out how to better allocate the funds to stop that from happening, then step back and let me take care of it—”
“You can’t go out in that flood, Father Roberto; it’s too dangerous—”
“The Venezuelans are here for the same reason as you: a better life, a safer life, a community full of God and love. They deserve to be welcomed, for the treatment we give the least of our fellow man, we give to the Lord Himself—”
The smell of milk and ashes. The weight of those martyred souls in his hands. Peace walks hand in hand with justice, reads the sign he carries like a cross to protest against President Fujimori’s disregard for the rule of law. Tents spring up like wildflowers in the parks. The poor and the needy congregate at church doors. Justice walks hand in hand with truth.
He is carrying the cross through empty Peruvian streets—at the head of a band of pilgrims for the Jubilee—up the narrow, winding road to Calvary. His hands are thick with blood, bleeding bitter crimson. A stigmata. A miracle. A crown of thorns digs into his head in the brim of the Papal mitre.
Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem?
Louis hangs up on him, and the line of static grows bitter. They shouldn’t have broken the law. If you sneak in here across the border then you deserve to be deported.
Would you have deported our Lord and his parents, too?
The blood on his hands now flows like ink onto Santa Marta stationery. Accepto.
Quo nomine vis vocari?
“Have you picked out a name yet?” John asks him on that last, fateful night before their sequestration.
“I had a couple ideas, but it’s never going to be me. They’ll never pick an American.”
Thank God, I’m never going to become bishop. Let’s just say not all of my encounters with Cardinal Bergoglio ended in agreement.
“I don’t want to be Pope!”
Leone, breathe.
His mother plays “Ave Maria” on the Church organ, her dulcet singing voice carrying above the crowd. She smells of caramel and old library books. He sits at the foot of his bed in the Augustinian communal hall, silently packing a suitcase, running prayers through his head for her immortal soul.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The flood water rises past his ankles as he fords the muddy flow. Chito hands him a caramel in the midst of the Sistine Chapel. His goddaughter smiles up at him for the first time as he holds her; how could he ever leave her alone? How could he leave his flock just when they need him the most?
breathe.
Bob wakes to a room in papal white. Moments later, the beeps of machines fade in, and with it the rest of mortal life: his thinning hair, the ache from his bad knee, his shoulder stiff with bandages underneath the ill-fitting hospital gown. John is sitting at his bedside, loosely clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee stains as he sleeps. His glasses have gone lopsided; his cheeks are shiny with tears.
Bob decides to let him sleep, and casts about the nightstand for his phone instead. At some point the notifications had stopped pouring in—too many of them to answer. He fires off responses to Edgard, to the Curia, to Mildred, to his niece, to the Augustinians—
Call me when you wake. I’m praying for you to wake.
Chito.
The call goes through on the second ring—a miracle, considering the time difference between Chicago and Rome, and how busy Chito had been when Bob set out on this ill-fated homecoming Papal visit. He’d barely had the time to see Bob off on Shepherd One (and what a laugh they’d had over the concept of the Pope flying in Shepherd One!), but at least he’d let Bob hold his hand during the drive to the airfield.
“I’ll pray for your safe return,” he’d said, as Bob squeezed his hand just before he exited the car. “Come back to us, all right? Don’t make me fly over there to come get you.”
Come back to me. I’m praying for you to wake.
On FaceTime, Chito looks like he’s aged decades. “I can’t have been out for that long,” Bob protests at the sight of him. “You seem to have grown new gray hairs in my absence.”
“Oh, thank God,” sobs Chito. “It’s really you.”
Bob tries for a reassuring smile. “It’s me,” he agrees. Chito exhales, loud and staticky. “How long have I been out?”
“About a day,” says Chito, desperately blinking back his tears. “We’ve all been praying for you. We—we did a rosary—”
A matching lump rises in Bob’s throat, choking down any words he could have said. How loved must he be, to drive beloved Chito to such preemptive grief? I would not live halved, and therefore perchance I feared to die, lest he whom I had much loved should die wholly.
“Will you come meet me when I return?” he asks, a little selfishly. He’ll confess to coveting later. Right now all he needs is the assurance that Chito will be there for him when he gets back, so that there is something—someone tangible, someone warm—worth going back to.
“I’ve had my schedule cleared; I couldn’t think straight the moment I heard the news,” says Chito, punctuating it with a self-deprecating chuckle. “I’ll fly out to you, if you want. Pray at your bedside instead of in St Peter’s Square where I can’t see you.”
The right thing would be to emphasize his duty to the people—the flock—the Church. “I’d like that very much,” is what Bob says instead. Coveting yet again.
The arrival of the nurse interrupts their call—Chito promises to call back once he’s booked his flight to Chicago—and now it's just the nurse apprising him of his current condition, while a freshly-roused John twists at his coffee cup like the beads of a rosary. Bob had been a few months shy of solemn vows when Pope John Paul II had almost been assassinated; he remembers almost like a flashbulb imprint the silence and shock throughout the seminary when the news had first broken.
Chicago now, once again, seems to be holding its breath. John offers to turn the TV on to show him the news. Bob opts for a newspaper instead, and a Styrofoam cup of hospital coffee that tastes like El Niño and shocks like a car battery.
“The police managed to apprehend the shooter, you know,” John says, handing Bob his glasses with trembling hands. The heart rate monitor next to Bob’s bed jolts a little. How did John Paul II have it in him to forgive his would-be killer?
He takes a couple deep breaths. “Who?” he asks, after a moment.
John tells him the name. “They searched his socials. Practically a sede, mired deep in all that… stuff about you being the Antichrist and too ‘woke’ and undermining the Church and the West…”
“All this for giving speeches about peace and being One in God?”
“For not supporting, well. You know.” John purses his lips. Bob knows, and is weary for it all the same. “Look, I’m sure your Vatican people will tell you more about the next steps. I’ll go fetch them for you, if you’d like.”
Bob nods, settling back against the pillow. John ruffles his hair—or what’s left of it, anyway—before he leaves the room.
The phone buzzes again, this time with a text. Heading out in a couple of hours, will be in Chicago by tomorrow night.
Can’t wait, Bob texts back, and impulsively, foolishly, sends a heart. ❤️
A knock at the door. The wound in Bob’s shoulder aches with the knowledge of what is to come. When he is discharged, he’ll ask to see his shooter. Like John Paul II, he’ll look this man in the eye and try to lead him out of his own hatred. Disarm our words, and we disarm the world.
Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
“Come in,” says Pope Leo.
The door opens.