Work Text:
Simon, Rocky, and Ryland were halfway to Erid and no one had the energy to pick up the remote and skip the credits. This wasn’t even one of those superhero movies that had a secret scene hiding at the end, this was just a dense block of the names of everyone who had worked on every single translation of the international release of the movie, slowly creeping across the projector screen. It was well past when they’d agreed the human bedtime would be, but no one stood to move to the dorm.
“I miss coffee,” Ryland said, breaking the silence. They’d run out almost a year ago. The caffeine withdrawals had taken weeks to fade.
“I miss orange mash,” Simon said. The sweet, somewhat fibrous meal had been a staple of achievement and success celebrations back on Eden. He hadn’t had it in years, but he remembered it very fondly. When he’d graduated from recruit to private he’d even had it with butter.
“I miss carrot cake,” Ryland said. Simon nodded, remembering holiday celebrations.
“I miss Easter.” It had been the most important holiday for Eden, celebrating life and death and plants and God and Jesus all in one holiday. Back before the betrayal at Filament Station, before his imprisonment by the COI, before the blood ocean and the Light and the eel, before he was sent to the Hail Mary and Ryland, before Rocky and the Taumoeba and Astrophage, back when he’d believed everything the Reverend Father had taught with his whole heart and soul, Easter had been the absolute highlight of his year.
“Hmm, Easter,” Ryland agreed. Then, inexplicably, he followed up with, “I miss Hunky Jesus.”
That was enough to get Simon sitting up from his sprawl across the projector room catwalk to stare at Ryland in the dim light of the movie credit crawl. Ryland looked entirely unbothered, like he hadn’t just had an entirely new form of blasphemy come out of his mouth.
“What?” Simon asked, the word coming out weakly.
“Hunky Jesus? It’s a competition they run back home every year. Great time. I didn’t have any family to visit, so it was nice having something to look forward to and get me out of the house for Easter.” Ryland said it so normally, like he was explaining public transit, or laundromats.
The slang had to be different. ‘Hunky’ had to mean something to Ryland other than what Simon was used to. There was no way this was what he meant.
“Grace explain,” Rocky cut in, “what are new words?” He didn’t have the translator running and hadn’t for months, in an effort to force the humans to learn Eridian. He was still using simple words, but had largely reverted to the typical Eridian sentence order.
“Which words do you want?” Ryland asked, “Easter?”
“Yes,” Rocky said, “that is first new word.”
“Easter is a celebration, a holiday, for religious Christians. It is popular in the country I am from. Simon, you grew up Christian, right? You might have a better idea of how to explain it.”
Simon coughed and forced himself to speak. As confused as he was, the law on the Hail Mary was that learning came first. “Easter is a holiday celebrating the day that Jesus, the son of God, rose from the dead after dying to absolve the sins of humanity.” It was more complicated, of course, but those were the basics.
Rocky made a noise of agreement, “new word is 🎶.” Simon nodded. It was a meaning translation rather than a sound translation, as all new Eridian words had to be. This one was a compound word meaning ‘not-dead-holiday’ which was about as accurate as it was going to get. Rocky was fantastically uninterested in human religion.
“Need second new word. Adjective Grace use for God-son.” Rocky said. And that was the compound word for Jesus.
Simon turned to study Ryland closely, this was a definition he wanted too. Did hunky mean the same thing to Ryland as it did to Simon?
“Hunky, it means physically attractive, usually in a masculine way. Like, well-defined muscles, that sort of thing.” Ryland explained.
Oh no. That was exactly what Simon thought that word meant.
Rocky hummed dismissively, “gender term, no need for word. Boring.” As uninterested as he was in human religion, he was far more uninterested in human genders. He picked up a piece of whatever project he was working on and set about ignoring the humans.
“Ryland,” Simon had to say, “you can’t just leave me with nothing. What do you mean ‘hunky Jesus competition’?”
“It’s at the park, people get dressed up like Jesus. You know, muscles, beard, long hair, some sort of costume, and they have a competition for who is the best hunky Jesus. It’s really fun! It’s-“ he interrupted himself, “you grew up Christian. Eden was Christian. This is probably really weird for you to think of, huh?”
“Yeah!” Simon said, voice coming out like he was being strangled, “a bit weird. For sure.” Simon felt like he was breathing weirdly. Like his body wasn’t working the way it should.
“It’s a great time, family friendly for the most part, they have an Easter egg hunt in the morning for people to bring their kids. It’s a community event!” None of this was reassuring.
“It’s… popular?” Maybe this was some small, friends only thing. Extremely obscure.
“Oh yeah, thousands of people show up every year! You gotta show up hours early if you want to snag a spot where you can actually see the stage. It’s a fantastic party, they do music, I always pack lunch and bring drinks and usually I can get a few friends who didn’t have anything else to do that day either to come with me and everyone has a lovely time.”
“That’s… great.” Simon managed. Something was wrong with his chest. He’d never quite gotten his head to wrap around the population scale of San Francisco. The full human population, across multiple space stations and two sides of a war, he was used to was under a thousand, to have multiple thousands of people all in one place was mind boggling. Especially since this didn’t sound like the main way people celebrated Easter in the city.
“They do themed Jesuses, a lot of the time. You get silly ones, like Shrek and bread, but a lot of them are political based on the particular year. It’s all run by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.” Ryland sat up, grinning in the darkness. He seemed to be catching on to just how much Simon’s body was rioting against the very concept of this event.
“Sisters of Perpetual-“ Simon trailed off. Eden had not been catholic, they had not maintained the idea of saints, but they had used the same terminology of Brothers and Sisters as the nuns and monks from pre-Rapture history.
“They’re drag queen nuns. They take the job very seriously! They’re very fun. Good outfits.” Those things sounded at odds, but Simon was very far past protesting.
“So a bunch of nuns,” Simon tried to recap, to see if saying all these things himself made the words make any more sense, “have a contest where people dress up as Jesus as an Easter celebration.”
“Hunky Jesus. They gotta be hot.” Ryland corrected. He was enjoying this torture far too much.
Simon felt light headed. Sure, he had lost a lot of his religious faith over the last few years, but apparently not quite this much. The betrayal at Filament Station had shaken his faith in the Reverend Father and Eden, his experiences under the blood ocean had shaken his faith in God specifically, and the last few years living in a metal tube with an alien and an atheist had shaken his faith in religion as a whole, but he still had traces of his childhood creeping through his bones. And all of those traces were screaming at him that he needed to run and hide from this extremely novel version of sacrilege.
“And don’t worry, there’s a competition for women too! Before they can have a Hunky Jesus they have to have a Foxy Mary!”
Simon gave up the last thread of his sanity and succumbed to drowning under the sea of hysteric, desperate laughter.