Chapter Text
The first Choi brother Soobin meets is the youngest. It’s a Sunday, his second in town, when Soobin finds him sitting on a beat-up plastic chair in the sacristy, glowering at his Nintendo Switch. The contrast between the scowl and the pristine surplice is discordant, the combination making the boy seem simultaneously angelic and sullen. Soobin’s heart sinks a little, anticipating difficulties.
Nevertheless, he puts on his best disarming smile. “Hello,” he says mildly, holding out his hand. “Are you serving today? I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. I’m Father Soobin.”
He expects, maybe, a shrug of the shoulders and some kind of prepubescent grunt, as generally offered by the altar servers at his last parish. The smile that breaks out on the boy’s face is a revelation, the firm handshake even more so. “Choi Gunwoo,” he returns, immediate and bright.
He’s pretty, Soobin notes detachedly. In five years, he’ll be handsome. Soobin wishes he wasn’t the sort of priest to whom such realizations come naturally, but wishing has never done him very much good. It could be worse. His observations, at least, are consigned to the purely objective, constrained to innocence by the smoothness of Gunwoo’s face, his narrow, little-boy shoulders. To some, these things would be enticements.
“Pleased to meet you, Gunwoo,” Soobin says, and means it. He half expects Gunwoo to return to his game, let Soobin finish blessing the water and fixing his vestments, but the boy sets the game console aside on an empty seat, eyebrows drawing inquisitively together.
“I like your name. It sounds like an angel’s name, like those in the Book of Enoch.”
Soobin blinks for a moment, astounded. It’s literally the first time in his life that anyone has known the origin of his name, beyond vague guesses, and Gunwoo throws out the comment like it’s obvious, something he remembers from grade school. “How on earth do you know about the Book of Enoch?”
Gunwoo shrugs, mouth tugging up at the corners, quietly pleased with himself. “I like angels. I got interested. Beomgyu says there’s no such thing, but that’s just because he’s a jerk.”
“Is Beomgyu a friend?”
Gunwoo snorts and shakes his head. “He’s my brother,” he says, almost derisively, as if Beomgyu is so very much his brother that the idea of his being anything else is laughable. “He’s meant to be serving today too, but he went off somewhere. To the ‘bathroom’,”—Gunwoo makes air quotes with his fingers—“except that was fifteen minutes ago and nobody takes that long to pee.”
Soobin laughs softly. “Well, there’s time yet. I suppose you two know what you’re doing?”
“Been doing it three years,” Gunwoo returns, nodding. “Since I was ten. And Beomgyu’s been doing it since he was ten and he’s seventeen now, so I guess you could say we pretty much have it down.”
Seventeen. Soobin squares his shoulders and makes himself go on smiling, trying not to imagine what kind of seventeen-year-old this boy’s brother might make. Gunwoo’s small right now, but there’s height anticipated by his big feet and long legs. Any brother of his would doubtless be tall, broad in the shoulders. Gunwoo’s eyes are big, intriguing. Soobin hopes this isn’t a family trait. For both their sakes, he hopes Beomgyu is the plainer brother.
When the other boy enters the room, Soobin is straightening his vestments, back turned on the sound of approaching footsteps.
“Hey, bitchface,” says the newcomer, glib and self-assured, although there’s fondness under the insult.
“Beomgyu,” Gunwoo hisses, scandalized, and Beomgyu laughs.
“Sorry. Forgot you don’t like to be picked on in front of servants of the Lord.”
And herein lies the trouble he’d expected when he’d first laid eyes on Gunwoo. He finishes arranging his sash and turns around.
Beomgyu is… definitely not the plainer brother. Gunwoo is cute. When he grows up, he’ll be extremely appealing. Beomgyu, six feet at seventeen, is to “appealing” what the sun is to a keychain flashlight. His surplice is immaculate, stiff starched and formal, but it sits on his shoulders with a kind of casual familiarity that suggests a level of ease in his own skin that Soobin has never enjoyed. Not that he can blame the boy for it, given that Beomgyu is far and away the most physically perfect person he’s ever seen in real life. He’s fairer than his brother, pale golden skin and dark black curls, a faint constellation of freckles just visible over the bridge of his perfect nose. He does have eyes. Damn. The line of his jaw is sharp enough to cut butter on, his lips as soft as sin.
Soobin is utterly undone.
Choi Beomgyu is entirely unaware of the massive wrench he has thrown into his new padre’s life by the very fact of his existence. Certainly, he holds out his (square, long-fingered) hand for Soobin to shake, as if he has no idea that all the vileness in Soobin wants to take that hand and pull him close, debauch and consume him and never let him go.
Of course Beomgyu has no idea. Why should he? Priests aren’t supposed to be like Soobin. Soobin is an abomination.
He bids himself to be calm, takes the proffered hand and shakes it. His voice, when it emerges—“Hello, Beomgyu. Good to meet you. I’ve just been talking to your brother, here.”—is perfectly steady, revealing nothing. Soobin is twenty-six years old, and he has been concealing himself from the world since he was fourteen. Twelve years of practice, it seems, can help a man cope with challenges that once would have been insurmountable.
“Sorry about him,” Beomgyu says and laughs. Soobin feels an absurd urge to lick the boy’s (perfect) teeth, abruptly followed by a surge of guilt that shoots hot through his jaw like a vein of molten silver.
“Not at all,” Soobin protests, and the fact that his voice continues to be even is nothing short of astonishing. He smooths his sash, fussily and unnecessarily. His palms are damp against the cloth. “He was very illuminating.”
Beomgyu laughs again and clicks his tongue. “Oh, I bet. Trash talking me to the new priest already, huh, Gunnie?”
Gunwoo crosses his arms and tosses his head in a gesture several years too old for his childish frame, eyebrows raised scornfully. “Was not. Believe it or not, I do have better things to talk about, Beomgyu. And it’s Gunwoo.”
“Oh, right. Of course. I forgot about how you’re all grown up now.” Beomgyu shoots out an arm, curls it around his brother’s head, and drags him into something that might have been a headlock but could equally just be an attempt to smother Gunwoo with his armpit. It’s immature and rough, and Gunwoo’s protesting forcefully while he pummels Beomgyu with his far-smaller fists, but there’s nothing but fondness in it, really, and both of them are laughing as they grapple.
The foolish, obscene twist of jealousy in Soobin’s gut is simply further evidence of the true hopelessness of his situation. He is a grown man—a man of the cloth, moreover, sworn husband to the Church of Christ and no other—and he’s envious of the thirteen-year-old whose face is currently smushed into Choi Beomgyu’s armpit.
“Holy Mary, pray for us sinners,” he mutters in a voice inaudible to earthly ears as he heads out into the sanctuary.
It doesn’t do much to reassure him, but currently, it’s the best plan he has.
The boys serve the Mass more efficiently than anyone Soobin’s ever worked with before, even including the fifteen-year-old girl who’d spoken to him about entering a convent. These boys serve as if they’ve known this service about as long as they’ve known language, and as far as Soobin knows, it could be true. Their matching expressions of quiet devotion make him smile a little as he circulates the chalice, remembering the way they’d teased each other earlier, irreverent and carefree. They’re both evidently anxious to display their devotion to their work.
When he meets their parents, when the Mass has been served and the congregation is filing past him into the graveyard, Soobin has a better understanding of why. The boys disappear back into the sacristy to put things away and change back into their own clothes, which takes long enough that their parents are required to hang back from the line to wait for them, making them easily identifiable. By the time the little family reaches Soobin at the door, the church is empty, the smell of incense headier in the silence that’s fallen.
“Mr. and Mrs. Choi, I presume,” Soobin says, putting on his most inviting smile as he holds out his hand for them to take.
Mr. Choi’s grip is strong, insistent. There’s something militaristic in his bearing too, and both things together suggest some time in armed service. His free hand is clasped on Gunwoo’s shoulder, but it isn’t a reassuring touch, nor a particularly friendly one. It’s a firm hand, rather, as if he feels that his youngest son is somehow in need of stern handling, and the picture they make is altogether too familiar. Soobin has known a lot of “firm-hand” fathers in his time in the ministry, all of them reminiscent of his own.
The gruff voice is absolutely in accord with the man. “Choi Dongwook,” he says, and then, “and it’s Captain.”
Soobin isn’t sure whether to congratulate himself on his precise observation or flush at being so pointedly corrected. In the end, he simply smiles awkwardly, and Dongwook obligingly continues, unabated.
“Good to meet you, Father; good to meet you. I hope my boys here didn’t give you any grief?”
Soobin laughs and shakes his head. “They’re extraordinarily well behaved. The best altar servers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, in fact. You should be proud.”
“Oh, we are.”
Mrs. Choi’s tone leaves Soobin in no doubt as to her sincerity, even if her husband’s white-knuckled grip leaves him questioning. She’s slightly built and with shoulder-length hair and evidently the source of her eldest son’s good looks. She delicately declines to shake Soobin’s outstretched hand—an affectation Soobin has rarely seen in women below the age of seventy—but her smile is very genuine and oddly familiar.
“And I should hope they do serve a perfect Mass. We always run through it in Saturday-morning school, before we study the catechism, so there’s no excuse not to. Is there?” She grins sidelong at her eldest son, squeezing his hand affectionately.
“None,” Beomgyu tells her flatly. He’s looking at the ground, patient but rather expressionless. Soobin finds himself wishing the boy would look up, but admittedly it is probably for the best that he doesn’t.
“Do you teach a special Saturday class, then, Mrs. Choi?” he asks, politely inquisitive.
“Yunhee, please.” Yunhee smiles at him, and it’s Beomgyu’s smile, straight-toothed and compelling. “I homeschool them, actually; I trained as a teacher, but obviously, after these two came along….” She laughs and spreads her hands, as if the rest is self-explanatory—as indeed it is. Choi Yunhee is clearly a very conservative Roman Catholic. Soobin wonders if this is the general attitude in this parish—that married women ought not to work outside of the home—or if she is simply exceptionally pious. His last parish had been rather tolerable on such matters.
“She’s a marvel,” Dongwook puts in, his tone fond but rather blunt. Soobin recognizes it immediately. It is undoubtedly the tone of a man eager to quiet his wife before she can launch into a twenty-minute narrative about a subject in which he is entirely uninterested. He reaches over Gunwoo’s head for Yunhee’s hand, squeezes, and tugs, his intention unmistakable. “Aren’t you?”
Yunhee laughs. “Whatever you say, hon.”
Soobin has seen many women hold firm under this kind of attack, stubbornly continuing their anecdotes while their husbands pull on their arms with an increasing lack of subtlety. Choi Yunhee is evidently not that sort of woman. She takes the hint gracefully, obediently, lacing her fingers through her husband’s and turning toward the door. “It was lovely to meet you, Father. I hope you’ll be very happy here.”
“Bless you,” Soobin says vaguely as they file out. The boys are quiet, scuffing their sneakers as they follow their parents out into the sunlit churchyard. Soobin remembers the way they were in the sacristy, both of them outspoken and laughing. For a moment, the contrast gives him pause.
Then he thinks about Yunhee’s face, the look of quiet pride when she spoke of her sons. No trace of a sign of anything there but love and the passing on of piety. They’re a normal family, two boys and their good Catholic parents. Homeschooling isn’t something Soobin has come across before, but that doesn’t permit him to be prejudiced against it. Everybody knows the public school system is a joke, and a Godless one, at that. If Soobin had children, he might well want to teach them himself, given the extortionate fees Catholic schools charge.
But Soobin has no children and never will. He has his flock, his duties, and his prayers. His vows make him a shepherd and a son but forbid him the path of fatherhood.
The cross of the Mass is heavy around his neck, solid and cool when he closes his fingers around it. It is his protection, his security, and his guide. Sometimes, he stands like this before the mirror, reminds himself that this is what the whole world sees. Here is a man removed from normality by his own choice, by the strength of his love of God. He denies himself the pleasures of women because Saint Paul commanded it, and through fidelity to the Holy Roman Church. In another life, he could have been anyone, a lover and a husband and a father.
Sometimes, he can almost believe the lie.
But then there are boys like Choi Beomgyu, young and strong and so beautiful that Soobin can feel the flames. Pure sons of pious families, and the evil in himself yearns to smear its filth all over them.
Soobin is a blind man leading the blind, and sometimes it is hard to forget it. It is a sin to bear false witness, and he is sinning every day of his life.
There are greater sins. Soobin envisions them in Beomgyu’s mouth, in all the smooth lines of his body.
As consolation goes, it isn’t the best, but Soobin’s used to that. For years, he has plodded on as the lesser of two evils.
Beomgyu isn’t the first boy to have moved him to lust and frustration and anguish. There is no reason why he has to be any different than all the ones who have come before.
This is a lie, of course, but he is used to that and has his ways around it.
He prescribes himself a hundred Hail Marys and fumbles out his rosary. The words trip over his tongue half-felt, familiar, and by the time he has prayed ten, Choi Beomgyu is out of his mind, Soobin untouchable like this, wrapped in his endless circle of prayer.
He tidies the sanctuary as he prays, then retreats to the rectory. There’s half a bottle of sacramental wine left over. He sets it on the side table as he enters the house and looks at it.
He has to drink it. The Church is very clear on this question. “This is my blood, poured out for many.” To fail to consume the sacrament is a grave blasphemy, and Soobin wouldn’t dream of it. The congregation had been unusually small this morning, though, a lot of families out of town for the Labor Day weekend, and the resultant leftovers are correspondingly great. Probably, he should dispose of the wine in small amounts, rationed throughout the day.
By two in the afternoon, the bottle is entirely empty, Soobin’s duty fulfilled. The room is swimming around him, the quantity of alcohol unfamiliar and affecting him overmuch, but his mind is blissfully empty.
It will be all right, he thinks. Everything has always been all right before.
~
Monday morning, Soobin wakes at five. There’s an early Latin Mass on Mondays and Thursdays, and Soobin, as much a scholar as a priest, rather looks forward to it. His previous parish had been smaller and far less well attended and had not offered either Latin Mass or a full-sung Eucharist. This church, contrarily, indulges itself in tradition wherever it can, and Soobin enjoys it. He would have been happy to chant the service even into an empty seven o’clock void. It is beyond pleasing that there are actually people here at this hour to listen as he declaims the ancient words. It isn’t exactly a full house, but fifteen people is an excellent turnout for this kind of service, and Soobin glows with it.
He hopes it isn’t too obvious, as he steps up to the altar, that his enjoyment of the Latin is almost indecent. He should not, perhaps, be smiling as the words trip transcendent from his tongue, but he can’t seem to help it. Like this, he feels that he is speaking the language of the Lord, that the angels must truly be listening. It’s a baseless feeling, he knows. It isn’t as if he really thinks that God speaks Latin, but nevertheless, he can’t shake it. The confiteor in the Latin feels like exorcism, like uplifting his heart to be cleansed.
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, omnibus Sanctis, et vobis fratres, quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper Virginem, beatum Michaelem Archangelum, beatum Joannem Baptistam, sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum, omnes Sanctos, et vos fratres, orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum.
They will pray for him, he thinks, the host of saints and angels, and his sins of thought and word and deed are confessed. As the words roll out of him, a little of his guilt rolls with them, until he is so light that it’s vertiginous. This, he thinks, is why he loves the Church; this euphoria and a Mass that feels like spell work.
The Brethren wish Soobin’s God’s forgiveness, and he luxuriates for a moment in it, loving the sound of the Latin, like benediction or magic. He likes this parish, and the parishioners like him. He will fit in here. Everything will be fine.
It will. Soobin has faith.
~
For six days, everything just is. Soobin visits elderly ladies and mothers with new babies, watches the bell ringers with interest when they practice in the belfry, and presides over coffee mornings for older people. This is a sleepy parish, old-fashioned and quiet in an autumnal, and Soobin loves it.
On the seventh day, God rested, but Soobin couldn’t.
The average age of a congregation goes a long way toward determining what activities are provided, and Soobin’s is a little young, all told. Consequently, he finds his schedule filled with things that women over forty might enjoy but is not called upon to operate a Sunday school. What children there are in the church seem to be educated in the catechism by their parents.
Soobin is used to having his altar servers be older people for midweek Masses, but ordinarily, the list of teenagers forced by their parents into serving on Sundays is long. In his last post—already beginning to feel like another life—Soobin had been required to devise a sort of rota, assigning Sundays to volunteers over a six- or seven-week period. In this town, things are far simpler. The first and third Sundays of the month are served, without exception, by the Choi boys. Alternate Sundays fall to the Park girls, who served the Mass his first Sunday presiding. The Choi brothers, which Soobin had failed to recognize in time, had not been there that week, perhaps out of town for some reason.
This week, the boys are very much present.
The Park’s, while less adept than Beomgyu and Gunwoo, certainly know the service to the letter and perform their required tasks without any interference from Soobin. Soobin is grateful to be able to leave these things to trust. There’s nothing worse than attempting to give a heartfelt sermon through a niggling sense that the altar servers are about to accidently set the sanctuary alight. Today, Soobin has prepared a homily based upon the life of the apostle Mark, which he is more than a little proud of, and he looks forward to delivering it in good form. Mark is, after all, his favorite.
At least it can be said that he begins well. The congregation seems to have taken to him, Soobin is pleased to note, and their attentive faces do much for his confidence. “We are never,” he begins, “so close to Jesus as we are brought through the good news of the Gospels. This is most true of Mark’s Gospel, which….”
Oration is one of the skills in which every seminarian is trained, and Soobin has always been especially good at it. He knows as well as anyone that eye contact is one of the simplest and most useful things an orator can do to engage people’s interest, and an interested congregation makes the difference between a good homilist and a bad one. Soobin’s homily is well rehearsed, and he lets his gaze travel over the faces of his parishioners as he speaks, easy and assuring.
He doesn’t know all their names yet, but, with all the fervor of a young priest with his first full parish, he most certainly means to. He tests himself in his head as he scans the second row of pews, naming those he can and mentally marking those he can’t to speak to later, so that he’ll remember them next Sunday. Beyond them is a single woman in her thirties, whose name Soobin does not know, and then—he has to drop his gaze a few inches—Choi Gunwoo. He appears to be finding his knees terribly interesting, even if the only interesting thing about Choi Gunwoo’s knees is that they are bare, because his parents seem to believe in the archaic custom of shorts-on-Sunday-until-you-grow. Teenagers don’t listen to homilies unless they have vocations, and Soobin doesn’t hold it against them.
So when Soobin’s eyes drift on over to Gunwoo’s left and alight immediately upon Beomgyu’s, he’s a little surprised. Every other person in the church below the age of twenty-five appears to be studying the floor, but Choi Beomgyu—beautiful, with his angel face that brings out all the evil in Soobin—is staring straight back at him.
It’s a little unsettling.
“It’s possible,” Soobin hears himself saying, “it’s… possible… I mean… some scholars believe that we do get… get a glimpse of Mark in his own Gospel, um. That he writes himself in, as it were, like Vonnegut.”
The little ripple of amusement that spreads through the church at that makes Soobin feel a little better about the stumble, but his cheeks still feel overheated. He is speaking, for goodness’ sake, and Beomgyu is looking at him. The concurrence of events is hardly unprecedented. He ought to be pleased.
He ought, in fact, to be looking somewhere in the region on the far side of the pew by now, but for some reason, he is still staring straight at Beomgyu, as if waiting for the boy to break eye contact before he can tear his eyes away. Beomgyu’s not doing anything except look, but his eyes are so steady, so endlessly, emphatically big, that Soobin cannot bring himself to forsake them. The thought crosses his mind that it must feel rather like this to be in thrall, as in the old stories. He is still speaking, and he knows that his voice is even and measured, that his words are emerging exactly as intended, but the homily is an afterthought, now, nothing but a footnote to the all-consuming Book of Beomgyu. It’s ridiculous, but the thought of moving on rings an ache in Soobin’s head, a promise of pain.
And then Beomgyu moves.
It isn’t, to be honest, the sort of movement that would be obvious to anyone else, unless they, too, were fixated on his face. Soobin cannot understand why everyone in the church is not fixated on Beomgyu’s face, but then, he supposes, most people are less easily drawn than he is. As it is, he can see nobody else watching and must presume that the quirk of Beomgyu’s eyebrow, the slow, lopsided smile, are for him alone. Beomgyu’s face goes from studious to smirking in the space of a second, and Soobin’s cheeks are already heating with it when Beomgyu puts out his tongue—not reserved, but as if it is of no importance, naturally—and wets his lips.
It’s only a flash of pink on pink and a shimmer of lingering dampness, but Beomgyu is still looking right at him, and Soobin is abruptly, shamefully, half-hard.
He jerks his eyes away, heart thundering in his chest, and struggles wildly for speech.
“Of course the, um, the, the disciples of Jesus, those who were… who were with him on his ministry…”
It’s a good save because he is a good speaker, and the congregation doesn’t seem to have noticed, but Soobn knows, can still feel beneath his cassock the heat engendered by his treacherous thoughts. For a moment, he is blindingly, terrifyingly sure that Beomgyu somehow knows his secret, that the boy is toying with him with intent.
When, ten minutes later, he dares a glance back at Beomgyu, he finds him kicking surreptitiously at his brother’s feet, the two of them grinning at each other with their heads ducked. Everything about his posture is innocent and young, and Soobin immediately feels wrong on every level, not only feeling these things for this boy, but trying to thrust the blame upon his shoulders. Beomgyu is just a boy whose face has probably caused him enough trouble as it is. The last thing he needs is to be saddled with Soobin’s desires and mistaken assumptions and fears.
After the service, Soobin is unexpectedly overtaken by a blinding headache. He cannot possibly stay to wish the congregation well. He is terribly sorry, but he’s sure his deacon will perform the task very well on his own.
He retreats to the rectory like a deserter gone to ground and buries his face in his pillow.