Chapter Text
“Mi amor, we’re going to be late,” whispers Bob, one hand already on the door.
“You’re going to be late,” corrects his beloved, his eyes sparkling with his usual irrepressible mischief as he feathers another set of kisses down the Vicar of Christ’s jawline. “It’s what you deserve, making me hop back and forth between here and Manila all summer.”
Bob wrinkles his nose. “What was I supposed to do? Not have the Church’s finest online evangelizer give the mass for the Jubilee of Digital Missionaries?”
“It could have been Bishop Barron,” suggests Chito, and collapses with a slightly-hysterical wheeze against Bob’s shoulder immediately after. “Oh, the look on your face, sinta ko! I was joking!”
“It wouldn’t have made sense for you to miss the canonization mass, too,” is all Bob can say in reply, like some sort of half-hearted defense. He dislikes his own petulance; it brings him back to the previous month, to the nights of the soul and the painful silences and the vulnerability and hurt cast in between them just the morning after a night of love:
What do you mean you’re ‘taking measures’ to preserve my privacy? Is that what Roberto was doing, pulling that priest in front of the camera? Isn’t that a little too obvious?
But if word about us gets to the press, you know what dangers that will pose to both of our ministries—
Making a big deal of it will only make the Internet double down, Robert!
Chito now, however, reaches up to cup Bob’s cheek and lean their foreheads together. “I told you I would stand beside you, come what may,” he reminds him.
And yet you keep flying home right when I—when we, the Church—need you here, Bob doesn’t say, because he had said it once, weeks ago, in the midst of their fight.
The Church is the Church no matter where I go, Chito had pointed out then. God calls me to return home when I can, to remember where I come from. Just because you have no plans to go back home unless your brother’s dying—
Oh, that’s not fair; you’ve seen the state of the States, and you know full well how much those cardinals and bishops baffle me—
It’s not about politics, Robert; it’s about my family!
“And does standing beside me mean making me late for my own mass?” Bob teases now, once he’s able to wrest himself from his own memories. His hand slips down, settling against Chito’s waist, grabbing a handful of his soft grey polo.
Chito chuckles. “If you really were in a hurry, you’d stop me from doing this,” he points out, before recapturing Bob’s lips in yet another sweet, soft kiss. Bob gasps into it, his hands tightening against Chito’s shirt. His back hits the door and knocks his zucchetto off his head. He doesn’t care.
When they break apart, Chito’s cheeks are flushed, his lips slightly shiny. Bob quickly chases the kiss before he’s had a chance to catch his own breath, grinning against the half-indignant squeal Chito gives when he wraps an arm around his waist to pull him closer.
“You’re so quick with your revenge,” mutters Chito when they break again. “Giving me Albano the moment you become Pope—”
“All the easier for us to meet like this,” Bob points out sweetly.
Chito gently smacks his shoulder. “Adding me to yet another dicastery—”
“You’re the one who regularly gave me homework for the Dicastery of Evangelization.”
“Why wouldn’t I, when you actually do the readings?” Chito’s laughter turns into a quick pout when Bob chases his lips again. “You’re incorrigible, sinta ko.”
“If you really didn’t like it, I think I’d know,” Bob shoots back.
Chito’s grin dims a little, possibly at the shared memory of their fight. But before he could say anything, his phone rings, and he steps back to answer. Bob is left to lean against the door, trying to remember how to breathe as he drinks in the form of his beloved: the slope of his shoulders, the beam of his smile, the way he brushes absently at the stray lock of grey hair that stubbornly falls into his eyes.
It is here that forgiveness reveals all its power and manifests the true face of hope. It is not forgetfulness; it is not weakness. It is the ability to set the other free, while loving him to the end.
He had meant it—he had forgiven Chito for their fight the morning after the Digital Missionaries Jubilee, for all the pain of the weeks between that and their last on-record private audience before Chito’s return to Manila in August. His hand still aches a little from all the writing he’d done that afternoon—that long, wonderful afternoon where he’d cancelled all his other audiences just to spend more time with his beloved. Lord knows how many Apostolic Blessings he would’ve handwritten, just to make Chito happy.
And, of course, the most important is the touch. They feel consoled when their hands are touched. That’s why we love taking their photos when they—even with difficulty—try to reach out to each other’s hands.
Chito reaches for his hands now, a sheepish grin on his face. “That was Father Edgard wondering where you are.”
“He could’ve texted me,” scoffs Bob as he squeezes Chito’s hands for reassurance, grounding himself once again in their soft warmth. The hands of a scholar, a theologian—so different from his own with all the scars and calluses of missionary work.
“Apparently there are a couple more parts of the castello grounds for you to tour this afternoon,” muses Chito, now bending to fetch Bob his fallen zucchetto. He then smooths over his pelligrina, makes sure all the buttons on his cassock are neatly fastened. “Heard they want you to try and feed some fish.”
“Edgard told you that?” Bob can’t help but grin.
“Well, you won’t get the chance to if I keep you here all to myself,” says Chito mock-thoughtfully, before brushing one last kiss across Bob’s lips. He reaches out to grab the door handle, and Bob nearly stumbles out into the Villa Barberini’s main parlor moments later when the door gives way.
In the end, Bob is just late enough to the mass that all of the pre-mass greetings have to be rushed through, with the golf cart zooming at almost breakneck speeds through the grounds of Castel Gandolfo.
The trade-off had been worth it, though, Bob thinks, as he closes his eyes against the afternoon sun filtering gently through the windows of the Borgo Laudato Sí. Every stolen minute with him is a minute more of peace.