Work Text:
Eddie kneels on the wooden bench, his knees pressing into the rough grain beneath his uniform.
He shifts forward, head bowed, hands clasped in prayer, the quiet of the hospital chapel settling over him like a suffocating burial cloth pressed unrelentingly against the face of the living.
A body arranged for worship.
It’s different from the churches of his childhood, thick with incense and the sweet-sour decay of flowers already beginning to die.
There, organ music flooded the marble alcoves in waves so total that there was never any possibility of escape, no matter how small he tried to make himself, no matter how tightly he folded inward or how far back he pressed into the dim side chapels.
The sound always found him, dooming and reverberating through his bones and breath alike, clinging to his ribs like a possession. A droning sacred pressure binding him to the inquiring eyes of the angels carved into the walls.
The angels saw everything. Eddie had known this since he was a child.
White marble bodies suspended in eternal devotion, gold-leaf halos catching the faint light of the building, forever frozen in prayer, eyes heavy with both suffering and accusation.
You’re just like us, Eddie could almost hear them whisper. A statue trapped in a place of worship with no way out. Made to endure. Made to be offered.
Suffering as inheritance, guilt as purification, the body as instrument and altar both. Sacrifice as the only purifying force that could lead him to the only salvation he understood.
Self-immolation— kneeling, opening himself up until he was nothing but an empty vessel for the spirit to fill.
Empty yourself. Become worthy of being filled.
It had terrified him as a child in a way that went beyond fear and into something closer to spiritual nausea, the idea that he could be opened, hollowed, made transparent to forces that did not ask permission, and that when he was finally exposed in full there would be nothing inside him that could withstand the weight of being seen.
Because he knew, he had always known, that if he laid himself open beneath those marble eyes, they would not soften or hesitate or translate him into something more forgivable, but would instead see exactly what was there and judge it without pause.
There was something wrong with him.
Something that resisted the church’s demand to bend, to submit, to follow. Something that did not align with the narrow architecture of devotion he was supposed to inhabit. A sin he hated almost as much as he hated stepping into those sanctuaries, where everything was visible to those who knew how to look.
Stripped bare in that space, he was already laid out upon an altar he had not consented to approach but had nevertheless never been able to leave.
The angels saw his dreams. His fantasies. the way his gaze lingered too long on bodies he was not meant to notice. The quiet, shameful what ifs that gathered in the early hours of morning, when he could pretend he was alone.
But he was never alone. No, because nothing about him had ever been unobserved.
Not by them. Not by Him. God saw. The angels saw.
And He was preparing his own demise, a path of punishment that could only ever match the weight of his sins.
At first he believed he could hide it, that if he lowered his gaze enough, if he refused even the smallest act of recognition toward the sacred images around him, the rot inside him might remain contained, might fail to announce itself to the world.
But the music still reached him.
No matter how deeply he bowed his head, how tightly he shut his eyes, how hard he clenched his fists until his nails bit into his palms, the music would not stop. Until every hymn became a reminder that he was not only seen but already judged.
Condemned.
And that he would be punished.
It was what he deserved. Sinners had to pay.
So he learned the shape of punishment instead, as something he could practice, refine even, through war, through trying to love people he could not love, through hurting others just to be hurt in return.
He gave his body repeatedly to impact, to exhaustion, to the slow erosion of being worn down into something less resistant, less complicated, something that might finally resemble what he had always been told a man like him should be.
And when that was not enough, he let himself be broken in smaller pieces, inviting hurt where it was not necessary, mistaking damage for purification, because suffering at least made the shape of his existence comprehensible.
Because only through that self-immolation had he ever felt worthy. Worthy of survival, worthy of God’s love, worthy of the soft smiles his aunt and grandmother gave him.
He knew, deep down, that they only treated him kindly because they didn’t know what he truly was. The malfunction inside him, the thing that dragged him back, again and again, to the same thoughts.
So he kept up the facade and bent down and begged for forgiveness every night. He had made himself small and prayed and prayed that absolution might one day find him.
But it hadn’t been enough.
Eddie squeezes his eyes shut now in the chapel, tears burning hot at the edges.
All that self-immolation had been useless, all that self-inflicted hollowing-out, all that swallowing of guilt and duty and righteousness, it had done nothing, he had still failed.
Athena was still about to die. And it was his fault.
It had been his fault for pulling her into this, for making her care, and Athena— steady soldier, unweavering savior— had followed him into battle without knowing about the curse in his veins. He had led her straight into the place where all things that touch him eventually end.
They all got ruined. They all died. Disappeared.
Shannon. His abuela. Bobby.
Buck.
The name fractures inside him before he can hold it, and the sob that follows breaks through him like something tearing at his throat.
“God, please… make it stop,” he whispers. “They didn’t do anything. It’s me.”
Because it has always been him. The origin point of consequence, the body through which punishment distributes itself outward.
And all his life, he had run from it, letting others take the hit, turning them into sacrifices when it should have been him from the start.
His chest aches as another broken sob escapes him.
And slowly, through the ache and the shaking, something shifts inside him until even prayer changes shape, until it is no longer plea but transaction.
No longer asking, but offering: retribution.
A life for a life.
“It should have been me,” he whispers, lifting his head toward the cross on the wall, where carved wood suspends the memory of another body already broken in the name of saving what could not save itself, “I’ll pay for it. All of it. Just let her live. Please, God… please.”
Behind him, the door creaks open, and Eddie has only the smallest fragment of time to turn before he hears he shot.
When he collapses, pain blooming hot in his abdomen, his vision already blurring, the falling, the that irreversible descent, comes with no confusion, only the terrible clarity of recognition.
He has been heard.
The weight that has lived inside him for as long as he can remember suddenly lifts. This is it. His damnation.
His redemption.
At last, he can do what he should have done all along, pay the price.
And as his vision begins to soften at the edges, the cross above him remains fixed in place as final acknowledgment of what he has become in this last moment.
A sacrifice finally completed.
And they will live.