Work Text:
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And the Glory Are Yours
by kaikamahine
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He came awake in the dark so suddenly it was like a shove.
Some noise outside – the backfiring of a motorbike or the loud male shouting of one security guard to another – had reached into his hindbrain like a shepherd’s crook and yanked him into wide-awake readiness.
A quick glance at the candle on the nightstand told him he’d been asleep for two hours, maybe two and a half. It was a tall, mass-produced candle in glass – Sister Evelynne, the first person he’d asked, back when he was just one more stranger in red, said they had hundreds and please to not worry about taking them, padre – and in the international section of an Italian supermarket, it would have come with the image of a saint or the Virgin or Bob Marley or a footballer, but here it was just a blank votive with white wax slowly bowing down to the flame inside.
In the beginning, when he could not sleep for the weight of what had just fallen on him, when the Holy Spirit sat in the room with him with all the stern unignorable presence of an Olmec head from home, he’d learned to tell how much time elapsed by how far the candle burnt down. Sometimes the wick went sideways and he was reduced to guessing – he never claimed it was foolproof, but if he was going to come out of this insomnia with anything to show for it, he thought, it would at least be useful.
He shifted position, hoping that the same instinct that woke him would send him right back to sleep – to power down again, Father Singh had called it, and he would know –
– and startled badly when his hand encountered something broad and warm and very solid.
For a moment, he thought it was Manzanita or one of her puppies full-grown, or Singh who had sometimes slept back-to-back with him on the batik mats in front of the door on crowded nights – but only for a moment. He was the breadth of Alexander’s empire away from there and then, and in the next instant, time righted itself and he knew the expanse of bare back in bed with him.
Thomas Lawrence did not immediately stir when Vincent, overwhelmed by the sudden fierce contraction of his heart, rolled over and pressed his forehead to his spine.
From there, in peace, he got to indulge in several long moments of simple touching, pulling back just far enough to see the landscape he was working with – the dark liver spot by Thomas’s elbow, the patch of dry skin turned silvery between his shoulder blades, the faint indentation of a scar in the middle of his back – and so, with some amazement, felt the moment Thomas woke up.
“What are you doing?” was mumbled in his direction, soft and puzzled. Then, before Vincent could answer, “blast, excuse me a moment.”
He rolled upright and threw the covers off, then disappeared into the bathroom, grumbling about the necessity. Vincent was surprised, then obscurely delighted, to see that he hadn’t given in to embarrassment and put his boxers back on to sleep. He would have bet at least ten cigarettes or a sim card that Thomas Lawrence wouldn’t have been comfortable sleeping nude no matter what. Some people weren’t, it wasn’t a judgement.
He could see it starting to occur to him though when he came back out, blinking owlishly in the candlelit dark after the white electric light of the bathroom.
When he hesitated, Vincent said, “Well? Do you feel like something was taken from you?”
Thomas snorted. “If I did,” he said, “it hasn’t gone far, you’ve got it,” and then, “oh, no, don’t smile at me,” when Vincent lifted his head, charmed by this. “What time is it?”
He looked around, pointlessly, for a clock; he already knew Vincent didn’t like digital faces where he slept. So he went to retrieve his phone, another patch of electric light coming and going. Then, at last, came back to sit on the edge of the bed.
Vincent wanted to crowd in immediately and touch, but settled only for reaching out to brush the backs of his knuckles against his spine and asking, “What are you thinking?”
Thomas’s back expanded into his hand with the force of his sigh.
“That I probably shouldn’t have slept. There was a record of me arriving, and there will be a record of me leaving, and both those things will have timestamps.”
It took Vincent a moment to shift onto this track of thought; he was talking about the papal security detail. This was an unusually late-night visit, and would be noted. Trying to sneak past them was laughably out of the question even if they were much younger men, and would definitely be noted.
“This set go off-shift at seven,” he tried, but could tell that wasn’t the point. He wriggled across the bedspread to get into Thomas’s periphery, and waited until Thomas met his eyes before saying, “Please do not take this the wrong way, my dear friend, but I doubt the first thing anyone will think if they see the record is that you must have been fucking the pope.”
The vulgarity made Thomas startle, darting a sharp look down at him which Vincent met directly, eyebrows up – and finally, he vented his surprise into a laugh.
“You’d be surprised. Once you become known as a group who famously don’t have sex, people find new and fascinating ways to indulge their prurience.”
“I know,” Vincent said, thinking of the nuns.
They were silent for a moment.
“You know, if anyone were to ask, you would not even have to lie.”
Thomas’s brow furrowed. It was a very large brow and there were quite a number of furrows, so that when he frowned they all accordioned together like a cartoon car crash. Vincent adored this.
“And what will I say?”
He dropped his eyes and demurred, “Only that we were together in prayer.”
And Thomas said, “oh, absolutely not,” and, hilariously, attempted to cover Vincent’s expression with his hand, as if trying to scrub it out. “Don’t do that, I cannot afford to get those wires crossed.”
Vincent batted him off, delighted. He hadn’t even been trying!
Thomas kept shaking his head, eyes lifted to the ceiling as if hoping for intervention, then gave in and flopped back. He was too long a person to make it an easy gesture, and Vincent had to move both himself and the covers to accommodate, but eventually Thomas settled his head against his hip more or less comfortably. Vincent’s stomach decided that was an excellent moment to gurgle for no good reason, and Thomas, the most generous of men, did not comment.
Outside, someone’s (technically, forbidden) window-mounted aircon unit clicked on. Vincent ran his fingers along the thinning line of hair beneath his hand, only a prayer’s width away from becoming a tonsure – and there came a square English word shouldering blockily into his consciousness if there ever was one, but one he liked in spite of himself. Tonsure. It was so uselessly English.
There were a lot more liver spots up here, where the skin was very thin and no hair protected it. Vincent was lucky that he took after his father’s side of the family, mostly; everyone left the world looking much the same way they had coming into it, squashed and ugly but sporting a full head of hair. Although, he’d read somewhere that balding was a very specific chromosomal trait – so, in his case, who knew.
“Well?” Thomas ventured. “What’s the verdict? Do I have a future selling my hair?”
Vincent grinned. His bottom lip, which had been warning him for the past several smiles that it was simply too dry for that nonsense, now split in protest, making him wince.
“Only for very, very fine paintbrushes, perhaps,” he said, wetting the sore spot with his tongue. “The kind used to paint easter eggs, or the faces of wristwatches.”
Thomas crinkled his eyes at him. “Then you’re not really worried about it?”
Meaning the guards and the people whose job it was to notice that the Dean of the College of Cardinals had spent the entire night in the papal apartments.
“No,” said Vincent, who knew the logbooks were filled in with pencil. “It’s not something we have to worry about yet, regardless.”
Thomas checked his face, then did a double-take and checked it again, and, indignantly, informed him, “I am seventy-one years old. I am unaccountably lucky I could go one round and if you think I can manage another, you are being irrepressibly optimistic. Your Holiness.”
Vincent bit back his first teasing comment – would you say that you were blessed? – and kept his face steady. He drummed his fingers against Thomas’s skull in thought.
“A fair charge,” he admitted. “And we are perhaps in the very worst place in the world to go seeking medical assistance.”
Horrified, Thomas shaded his eyes with a hand.
All right, so maybe Vincent couldn’t resist teasing a little.
“However,” he continued brightly. “This is the twenty-first century and a prescription for Viagra is not the only option anymore. They do sell such things on the Internet – discreetly, even, so it comes up as something nondescript on bank statements and mailing labels.”
“How do you know this?”
It was hard to tell in the dark and between the fingers, but judging by the faintness in Thomas’s voice, he’d gone red. It would spread to the top of his head in a moment.
“I sat next to a man on the train once who saw my collar and felt the need to tell me all about it – at great length, it was not a fast train.”
Ah, yes. There it was, a dull red like wine soaked in.
“Prurience,” Thomas muttered. “Why do people like talking to us about sex so much.”
“A panic response, probably,” said Vincent, whose conversations with laypeople throughout his life had been more along the lines of, where am I going to get the money, and, sorry, I had to leave everything I had, but he would admit his experience wasn’t everyone’s. He continued, “I could show you how to do it on your phone, but we would need to install some privacy safeguards and that might void your warranty. Just so you know.”
“Are you allowed to do that?”
This, with the tone of a man who’d only just come around to understanding his phone could respond to voice commands and could not tell you what his warranty entailed or even where he kept the paperwork.
“Fortunately,” Vincent said, “I answer to God and not the Apple corporation. In Afghanistan, you must do everything from your phone – I will show you and you will get your medication. No one will know.”
He said it as breezily as he could, but Thomas sat up with spine-popping abruptness and stared down at him.
“You’re serious,” he said. Not a question. “You want to do this again. With me.”
At this, Vincent sat up, too, so they were face-to-face.
“What,” he ventured, slow, “did you think?”
“That you did it to humble me,” Thomas said immediately, and then blanched with shock. “No,” he held up a hand between them. “Wait. I didn’t mean it like that. I think,” he felt his way along it, much more carefully, “that you wanted me to know something about you, and that I was being – obtuse? Blind? Convinced I was right. But. Once corrected, it – didn’t need to be repeated.”
He stole a quick glance at Vincent’s face and grimaced, as if to say, sorry, it doesn’t get any clearer than that.
Instead of saying anything, Vincent leaned forward and bumped their heads together, gentle as a lamb. Instinctively, Thomas craned into the gesture, rolling his forehead against Vincent’s own.
Finally, Vincent managed, “You are a very smart man, but that was not a very smart thing to say.”
“My apologies.”
He leaned back fractionally, curiosity getting the better of him. “Truly?” he asked. “You would have returned to your everyday duties as if nothing had changed?”
“Of course things would have changed,” Thomas told him, with that edge of brisk impatience that so characterized him. “But I would not have let it disrupt a thing.”
“I see. How awkward would we have been, next we saw each other – what would you have done?”
“Same as any other day. Wished you well and asked God to bless you, always.”
“And if, by chance, we found ourselves alone, say – oh, in the gardens, they’re wonderful. No entourage. You would not be tempted to kiss me? Even a little?”
“No.”
“What about any one of those interminable dressing rooms whose Latin names I still haven’t learned?”
“There are plaques – ah. No.”
“Hm.” Vincent pursed his lips in thought. His bottom lip still stung, petulantly. “And if you came to dinner again, even if you stayed after every guest had left – you would not have even looked towards this bed, or remembered us in it?”
“No. I would not.”
His hand was on Vincent’s ribs, thumb moving restlessly in the manner of someone correcting a speech in red pen. It swayed them closer together.
“My Thomas,” Vincent murmured, immensely fond. “Of the indomitable self-control. I believe you. But,” because Thomas did not seem to be breathing, “it is not what I want. Or, I think, you.”
Hand at his ribs, riveting nearly all of his attention to the weight of it – nearly, because Thomas was only a hair’s breadth from his mouth, too.
“Are we,” he murmured back, “still under your absolution?”
Vincent made a magnanimous gesture. “Of course.”
It hooked into the corner of Thomas’s mouth and tugged it up. “You can’t promise that, you’re off the clock.”
“Oh,” blinked Vincent. “Damn. You’re right.”
He was still speaking when Thomas leaned forward, fast, and kissed him at last.
*
For his first official overseas trip as pope, from which he’d only returned two days ago – actually, it hadn’t meant to be an overseas trip at all. His clerics had suggested continental Europe at first, that being the easiest to organize. Vincent told them no, that he would like to go home, and anyone who would criticize him for that would have criticized him no matter what he did. As if it was partiality or favoritism to pay your respects to the land that clayed, kilned, and fired you.
Vincent Benítez had not returned to Mexico in – what was it now? – thirty-one years. He’d left ministry work in Veracruz for the cobalt-mining region of the Congo in 1994 and hadn’t felt that any amount of homesickness was a good excuse for leaving a humanitarian crisis, not once his parents died and his brother left him no up-to-date mailing address.
But now, by the grace of God – well, God, Thomas Lawrence, and Jamil Abubakr – he was pope. His presence, impossibly, was a blessing that he could bestow.
And no country in the world loved God the way Mexico loved God – or, rather, no country God loved the way He loved Mexico – and it was, simply, the right thing to do: to go home before he went anywhere else.
If he had his way, he would have stayed for months, visited every state and praised every patched curtainwork in every sacristy in every hilltop church, let all his languages slip but for his father’s, and probably pick up where he left off in 1994 without batting an eye. But his two top organizers – Archbishop Mandorf, again, and Jacapo Modentus, the prelate who’d worked very, very, very hard his entire life to gain the credentials to tell the pope what to do – said it wouldn’t be fair, Your Holiness.
He was no longer so small a presence either that he could stay in one place, either, and so let them take him to that next bastion of Catholicism, Brazil, where he reunited joyfully with Cardinal Saaza.
“My friend, my friend,” said Saaza, after all the kissing and hugging, “My dear Innocent, do you remember what we discussed at the conclave?”
And, with complete honesty, Vincent answered, “I only remember bits and pieces of the conclave, I’m afraid.”
This earned a nod, like it was perfectly understandable.
“Then, truly, the Holy Spirit must have been operating through you.”
Vincent, who thought it had more to do with jet leg and the slow release of many years of pent-up terror in the face of sheer internecine inanity masquerading as a conclave, said only, “That’s kind of you to say,” and proceeded to grill him gently for the rest of the evening until the Archbishop of Brasilia was looking red in the face and thoroughly barbecued. Served him right. It was one thing to stand as a dictator’s confessor – even they deserved the chance – and it was another to ignore entirely the state-sanctioned degradation of the two (two!) orders of sisterhood most responsible for serving the victims.
And to be honest, he hadn’t expected to feel much of anything upon return to Rome, except perhaps the relief of not having a schedule booked end-to-end for perhaps a week, maybe even ten days. The Vatican wasn’t home, not the way it was for lifelong curia like Mondentus, who’d stood under Michaelangelo’s paintings since the age of fifteen and didn’t even see it as scenery anymore.
Except … except then he was alone at last in the papal apartments, and something that he hadn’t even felt riding his shoulders melted away.
He didn’t have anything to unpack – that was done for him, now, and someday he might even get used to it – and so for a long time indulged in nothing more than standing inside a space that was his and realizing that he loved it. If he didn’t love it here, he at least loved it here.
The papal apartments of Innocent XIV were, by personal preference, sparse. How a pope chose to furnish his rooms was the first litmus test of his politics, he’d been told, whether he meant it to or not: will he be humble, or lavish?
Vincent had tipped one shoulder, assuming he’d fall on the latter side, and learned very quickly that his definition of the words varied drastically from that of his European prelates’. The homes that Goffredo Tedesco’s sort lived in had their own libraries, their own chapels, and even Thomas Lawrence, his staunch supporter, had a lovely glossy black piano in his rooms and didn’t seem to think it remarkable – and here Vincent had been worried about craving a few comforts.
He had an armchair that got good light, and a long table with the wooden chairs upholstered in jute universal to frugal households everywhere, and a perforated partition with teal glass inlays separating dining area from kitchenette that reminded him, viscerally, of his childhood home.
He couldn’t tell you how. Something about the way it caught the light, slanted it.
The kitchen in his parents’ house, fifteen miles west out of Guadelajara on Mexico’s west coast, had been painted orange and yellow in the mismatched shades of people forced to buy whatever paint cans were available. One perfect latticed stone wall faced the rising sun. It let in bars of light like ingots of gold, the necessary breeze, and the grumpy complaining of the hens in the yard, oblivious to their eggs frying on the stove for breakfast. In every version of himself, there was a part left permanently sitting in that kitchen. Memory conjured the weight of the sun on his arms, the top of his head, the touch as physical now as it’d been a lifetime ago.
Past the dining area and the nook of the kitchenette was the bathroom (unremarkable, built with the elderly in mind,) and the bedroom.
There was a crucifix on the wall above the bed that had been there when he moved in, and would likely remain there long after he’d gone to God. He didn’t bother moving it, merely added alongside it a flat ceramic icon of the Lady of Guadelupe, because his mother would have been disappointed if he didn’t, and a pendant that Khadija’s large, silent husband had given him when the government first put a tail on him, claiming it would ward Azrael from his shadow. He’d kept, too, the drawings from the Lingala-speaking schoolgirls at the mission just inside the demarcation line between the two countries of the Congo – had tucked them carefully into the rolled seam of the lampshade so they’d always be lit from behind.
On the bedside table with his timekeeping candle, he had two woodcarved dog figurines that had followed him from seminary, one stretched out with its head on its paws and the other asleep on its side, paired to each other by their quirky triangular heads and bold painted splotches.
Compared to the profligate splendor of Vatican art, they were crude and folkish, and Vincent loved them unbearably for it.
The way art sometimes did, the crudeness had stopped looking like the inexpertise of an amateur and became a personality, became art, and to be frank, Vincent saw more life in his little Veracruzano dogs than he did in the Apollo Belvedere or any of its ilk in the Musei.
They didn’t look anything like Manzanita, it was true, but sometimes he rubbed the spaces between their ears and missed her terribly nonetheless. She’d been no slender hound, Afghan or Italian or otherwise, but a squat, bullish brown dog with a square head disproportionately large for her frame who, in her later years, dribbled drool out the side of her mouth with the fewest remaining teeth, ensuring that Vincent, in turn, always smelled faintly of dog breath – or so his deacons told him.
None of their neighbors in Kabul countenanced having dogs inside the house, much less where they slept, but Vincent learned within days that it was easier to sleep with her bulk beside him, where the reassuring rumble of her growls kept him alert to searchlights or truck engines or, later, as the West experimented its technology on them, the hum of an approaching drone.
She’d been dead for over a decade now, but Vincent still couldn’t sleep in the middle of a bed, the same swamp of leftover instinct telling him he needed to leave room for her.
*
It hurt, stupidly, because of the lip.
For a few heady, wonderful moments, Vincent was able to ignore it and answer the kiss as it deserved. But Catholic he might be, there was no praise in continuing to suffer when one had chapstick close at hand. Somewhere. If only one would reach for it.
He pulled back, wincing, and then, seeing the flash of recrimination in Thomas’s face, said swiftly, “No, it’s fine. Split lip. Excuse me.”
Thomas’s hand went from his ribs to his jaw, thumb skating across his mouth and finding the sore spot unerringly.
“Did I do that? Last night – when – ?” he tried.
Entirely unable to help it, Vincent flashed him a joyful grin, which didn’t help the lip situation. “No, my dear. I am just old.”
Which, as it always did, made Thomas snort, but in the next moment he tipped Vincent’s jaw up and set to kissing his throat instead. It threw a spanner into Vincent’s plans to ransack his bedside drawers, and he wavered over which need was greater – but only for a moment. Then he slung one arm around Thomas’s back and one leg around his hip and hiked them flush together. It made Thomas grunt with effort, and Vincent asked him innocently, “have we pulled something yet?”
“You’re not funny.”
“On the contrary –”
They went over sideways. Vincent yelped and laughed at the same time. His head fell short of the pillows, which would be uncomfortable in a moment, but not right now, because he got to stretch out against Thomas Lawrence’s naked body and that was better than anything else.
And baffled he might be in the face of Roman statuary, Roman architecture, the white-gold crown of history that Rome wore like it thought it deserved it, but he wasn’t jaded to the wonder of this: that when Thomas rolled on top of him, he slipped an arm under Vincent’s head to cushion it; that his eyes were such a demographically improbable shade of blue, even up so close they’d gone cyclopsian. He felt so capable of marvel, all at once.
“I can’t help but notice,” Thomas murmured, after several minutes of not saying anything, “that you don’t have any need for medication.”
And Vincent put his hands together humbly and admitted, “I am what God made me.”
Then laughed, bright and irrepressible, at the look on Thomas’s face.
*
He attended vespers on the night he returned. While it was no secret that the pope was back in the Holy See, he still surprised people. The sisters had it easy – they curtsied – but the clergy he startled had a bad habit of going straight into genuflection, and that, unfortunately, was contagious. Singh would have said something caustic about a genetic fear of kings. Vincent tried to meet it with grace.
“You would not do that to any old sinner you encountered – why do it to me?” he was saying to a pale-faced man in a bishop’s amaranths who’d told him, with little prompting, that yes, it was his first time in Rome. “Please, my friend, on your feet.”
And saw, out of the corner of his eye, three familiar faces.
“Excuse me,” he said gently, and peeled away.
Beyond a cluster of prelates whose function Vincent couldn’t tell based on their uniforms were the Cardinals Lawrence and Sabbadin and Monsignor O’Malley. He greeted them all and said, surprised and delighted, “you’re back!” to Thomas Lawrence, who’d been absent from the Vatican some weeks before Vincent’s departure.
“With respect, Your Holiness, that should be my line,” Thomas responded, but he was smiling.
At Vincent’s gesture, they rose from their knees – the prelates wasted no time in scooting down the corridor – but Sabbadin rose slower than the rest. He’d had a knee replacement the year before and it seemed it wasn’t going to take. He smiled in tight embarrassment when Vincent’s supporting hand caught discreetly under his forearm, and Vincent tried hard to reassure him with touch alone that there was nothing to be embarrassed about.
For a moment, he was reminded, strongly, of Jorges under the broad palm leaves using his gun to lever himself up, and the ever-present crack in his heart contracted, hard.
When Sabbadin was steady, he let go and found Thomas peering at him.
“Are you well?”
“Delirious with exhaustion,” Vincent said cheerfully. “It will pass, it always does. Are you headed to vespers as well?”
No, said the expressions of O’Malley and Sabbadin, but Thomas’s poker face was better. “Not tonight, Your Holiness.”
Vincent shrugged equitably, then, on impulse, invited Thomas to dinner the next night instead.
He’d been cautious about that at first, because all the people he invited to eat with him were very busy people in their own right who might be reluctant to say no to him. But then it occurred to him that “can’t tonight, the pope asked for me,” was exactly the kind of foolproof excuse some needed to skip whatever obligation they’d originally been scheduled for. Thomas was not above doing the same.
He saw, beside him, Monsignor O’Malley give an imperceptible nod right before Thomas did, and smiled.
He was fond of O’Malley, both out of the necessity of secret-keepers and out of genuine feeling. He was one of those crafty bureaucratic sorts who had a knack for appearing where and when you couldn’t turn him away without being rude, and had used it with Vincent exactly once, intercepting him as he crossed the palatial grounds early on in his papacy, for once mostly alone except for a perimeter of guards.
There’d been nothing for it at the time but to see what he wanted, and so Vincent waited expectantly through the “the gardens are lovely no matter the time of year, aren’t they?” and the “if you have a moment, please, Your Holiness?”
The guilt coming off him had been thick as paste, and finally, O’Malley got to it.
“You should know, Holiness, that I was the one who dug up the information about the clinic in Geneva for Cardinal Lawrence.”
“Ah,” said Vincent, a flash of understanding hitting the pan. “And you expect me to be angry about it.”
O’Malley’s already angular face tightened further.
“I suppose, in a different context, I would be. But you were right, it was something the dean needed to know.” He checked their surroundings, reasonably certain they were alone and couldn’t be overheard – unless there were listening devices in the shrubbery, but if he started thinking like that he’d never sleep, so he folded his hands, took a deep breath, and began, “Then you should know, before your imagination colors in the details incorrectly, that –”
“No, I already know,” O’Malley interrupted. “There’s a term for it – intersex – I don’t know if it was in common usage when you were diagnosed. It is not, I’m told, even that uncommon.”
“Oh,” said Vincent.
Then, a beat later:
“You know, that’s the shortest version of that conversation I’ve ever had.”
It earned him a wry but, he thought, entirely real smile from O’Malley, who murmured, “With respect to Cardinal Lawrence, I was not sequestered at the time and could use Google.”
“Hm. If you were able to access the – it was a financial record, I presume? – on such short notice, I should prepare for the inevitability that others will, too.”
“Ah. Hm. About that.”
Vincent lifted his eyebrows.
O’Malley made an equivocal gesture. “I may have, through deep negligence, filed those records back under the incorrect heading. A gross oversight on my part, Your Holiness. Won’t happen again.”
“What on earth prompted you to do that?”
The answer came without hesitation. “Using the clues available to me – mainly, that the dean did nothing to impede your ascendency – I concluded that whatever judgment may come, the Lord God wanted you to do the work first. I merely assisted with the paperwork.”
For a long moment, there’d been nothing but their footsteps in the gravel and the thoughtful nodding of the branches overhead. The quiet seemed to discomfort O’Malley.
As if operating on the idea that if he knew one of the pope’s secrets, then it was only fair the pope should have one of his, he proceeded to confess that as a young man, he’d been married for five years to a woman named Alice, and in 1995 they moved across the border into Ireland where divorce had just been legalized without as many restrictions, after which he’d returned to Belfast to take holy orders.
And, like catching the sheen of an animal’s eyes in the dark, Vincent sighted the truth. “And you think that being a divorcee should have been a bigger impediment to your rise in the Vatican than it has been.”
O’Malley flinched. Direct hit.
“I don’t see how.” Vincent made his voice as mild as possible. “I think the fact you were so obviously destined for the church made it a no-fault divorce if there ever was one.”
Which was such an un-Catholic thing to say that O’Malley simply stopped walking.
Vincent stopped too, smiling politely, and was surprised when, all at once, Ray O’Malley genuflected to one knee, took his hand, and kissed it, then rose with an alacrity that was enviable.
It was a clear, heartfelt gesture of gratitude, but what came out of him as he rose was a deep sigh.
“You,” he said, with resignation, “are going to cause so many news bulletins.”
*
He wasn’t even lying:
He really, truly did not remember much of the conclave.
He’d spent nearly every waking moment of the preceding three weeks – since almost the moment their phones lit up with breaking news and Vincent saw through the glare on his screen only ”dead at 81,” and knew – making arrangements. He had to travel through and then back around the mountains to reach each of his priests in person and leave instructions for his absence. Provisions had to be made for the schools and the soup kitchen and the safe houses. And through it all: that awful, bitter argument with Father Singh, like a wound turning to pus.
Then, to find a way to leave Afghanistan without alerting his government handlers, who had to know he’d be attempting something – actually entering seclusion at St. Peter’s had felt like hitting a marble wall with all the force of an ACME cartoon.
He remembered the kindness of Sister Evelynne, showing him where to find the candles without making him confess he’d lost the habit of electric lighting.
He remembered the row of tables in the Sistine Chapel, the little booklets at each place outlining the voting procedure, looking surprisingly similar to an instruction manual for some new Apple device, everyone flipping through to an alphabet they knew.
He’d been assigned the seat beside the cardinal from Lhasa, who promptly confessed he’d left his hearing aids “somewhere in my good Tibet, eh, maybe on purpose,” and trusted the Holy Spirit to guide him.
“It is not going to be me, of course, the Holy Spirit would not be so politically inconvenient as all that,” and he’d winked and folded his hands over his belly and promptly fell into the doze of a frequent train commuter.
When he was roused to vote, he voted for whoever’d just had the last misfortune – whoever was the first to sneeze after he picked up his pen, or, once, after Villanueva caught the hem of his choir dress on the end of Kraczinski’s walking stick and nearly sprawled face-first into the row of cardinals queueing in front of him. “Eh! I told you. The Holy Spirit at work!” he’d whispered, and winked again, seeing Vincent suppress a smile.
He remembered he had a clear view to where Thomas sat, the first always to rise and the last to leave.
He remembered the stupor, the gloom of a big shuttered space like a ribcage, and then –
– unmistakable, the sound, like a firework in someone else’s compound, a landmine in someone else’s field –
– the screech of the window leaving its stone perch, the whistling dive, the cacophony of glass exploding –
– and Vincent, for the first time since arriving, woke up.
*
The first thing he’d done, coming in from the balcony in stiff new white fabric and still blinking the spots from his eyes as someone whose face he couldn’t see removed the wires to his mic, was to ask to go straight to the hospital to see the victims.
“Your Holiness,” protested someone on his right. “We don’t have anything ready – nothing yet printed in your pontifical name to issue –”
“Willie! What does that matter!” snapped someone else – this, he would eventually learn, was Modentus, the local boy. “Of course, your Holiness. We’ll go at once. The Swiss Guards can give us a lift, they’ve got clearance.”
Within twenty-four hours, the Roman police made an arrest.
Not of the suicide bomber, for obvious reasons, but of the man who’d orchestrated both that and the simultaneous car bombings. It hadn’t been any great feat of detective work, admittedly – he’d come right out and announced it on social media and walked out of his apartment building to meet the police when they showed up, robbing them of the satisfaction of busting his door down. From there, it was only a matter of sharing jurisdiction with the Vatican’s own law enforcement on what to charge him with.
And then Vincent had opened his mouth and said, “I would like to speak with him.”
Every single person in his vicinity told him, immediately and vehemently and at great length, why that was a very bad idea, and Vincent hadn’t tried to argue. It was a bad idea, and he needed to do it anyway.
He needed to see the man more responsible than even the conclave for making him pope.
Eventually, a compromise was reached. Vincent would be granted an interview (“shouldn’t it be the other way around?” muttered Willie Mandorf, offended on his behalf,) but only over video chat. That way, no trip to the prison had to be arranged and – more importantly – no explanation for a trip to the prison had to be given.
The bombmaker’s name, Vincent learned, was Jamil Abubakr – not likely his real name – and he was Libyan.
(Libya and Italy had something less of a relationship with one other as they did a permanent sense of teeth in the other’s jugular, each poised to bite down and shake at a moment’s notice.)
They didn’t have any language in common except for English. Abubakr spoke Arabic, both high and low, which they didn’t use at all in Afghanistan except for in a very few religious schools and once, catastrophically, in the government. There it was the same, functionally, as Latin – you knew what was important for the prayers. Except, unlike Latin, Arabic was very much a living language elsewhere.
He filed that thought away to tell Cardinal Bellini, the only one of them interested in picking fights with the back-to-Latin traditionalists. Tell them they want what Islam has.
“That was a lot of dark suits and walkie-talkies,” Abubakr remarked, resettling in his metal chair and raising his cuffed hands to his mouth to mimic the walkie-talkie noise, tscht tscht. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m –”
Vincent, he almost said.
Father Benítez, he almost said.
“ – the new pope. My name is Innocent.”
That caught his attention. He leaned forward into the screen, gaze turning keen. His head was uncovered, but he had the lopsided hat hair that suggested there’d been a covering when he was arrested. His beard and teeth were very neat.
“Didn’t think they allowed any of our color to that job,” he remarked. “What do you want. I don’t need anything from you.”
Vincent folded his hands in his lap.
“Yesterday,” he said, “I had to listen to a very tedious speech from a very tedious man about Islam declaring war on our church.”
A loud snort. The speakers crackled.
“Quite,” Vincent agreed. “He could not contemplate the idea that your attack had nothing to do with him, or with us.”
“And you think you will tell me what ‘my’ attack was about? The fifty-four dead. Fifty-five, if you include my beloved friend the martyr.”
Maybe it was the secondhand language making it harder to mask, but hairline cracks ran through his voice as he said it, making Vincent think, ah.
And, Jamil, you will never forget that number. You will see it everywhere.
“You attacked our pilgrims at a vulnerable moment to make us angry, and indiscriminate in who our anger fell on – you’re targeting your own.”
“Aha! Correct!” Abubakr rocked in his chair, abruptly gleeful. “It is – you have a brother, yes? You poke him and poke him, maybe blow up a car, boom, until he hits you, and then he gets in trouble for starting the fight. Oh, it makes him so angry.”
“And,” said Vincent, feeling the truth of it, “Anti-Muslim sentiment makes no distinction in who it hurts. The moderate among you are driven away from us, and thus, to you – the truer faith.”
“And you,” Abubakr said with a waggle of his finger, “are not obliging me. That’s not nice, Mister Innocent.”
Then he showed all his teeth.
“Are we Muslims not your younger brother? Has your church not provided us with the exact model we are following? To our calendar, we are only in the year 1446 – do I need tell you what Catholics were doing in your fifteenth century?”
He reminded Vincent, suddenly and viscerally, of Jorges, the junta captain who’d came by the mission in the Congo to collect rent.
Well – to extort money, as the mission was separate from the government and the mines and didn’t owe rent, which offended somebody, somewhere. Hence, Jorges.
He did this very politely and very apologetically, but he did it carrying a very large gun and surrounded by a lot of men doing the same. He’d had skin so black it seemed galactic and his smile curved like moonshine, teeth fluoride white. But he had a diabetic’s hands, so dry that ravines of cracked skin split his cuticles to the quick, and so nerveless he couldn’t have pulled the trigger even if he wanted to.
He kept this fact from his men by never putting himself in a situation where he had to.
Vincent knew this.
So Jorges came to the mission and sat down with him in lawn chairs under leafy palms far from the windows and doors and smiled with aggressive charm and talked the world into being what he wanted it to be, and Vincent paid the bribe and did not tell Jorges’s men that the captain they feared so much was helpless. The “rent” never increased and the men never came inside to hassle the women and children.
He was surely dead by now, and Vincent wished him mercy. He hadn’t been a cruel man, just calm and implacable and absolutely, utterly convinced he was correcting the grave injustice of what had come before.
Jamil Abubakr was just the same.
There was nothing more to say.
“I will let you go,” he said to the screen, and to the multitude of people monitoring them. “As it is almost time for maghreb. They took your phone from you, yes?” That being the most common type of compass in this age. “The Qiblah is behind you. I checked before we established the call.”
“HA!” Abubakr’s eyes brightened in fascination. “Good luck with your tedious men, Mister Innocent. Try not to put out too many of my fires.”
*
He had to admit – they might have gotten distracted.
“– should still have his number in my phone, though with your access obtaining it shouldn’t be a problem even if it has changed since then. I would check if you’d move your arm.”
Thomas did not move his arm. “If you mean Youssef, he died in 2019.”
“Oh.”
There was no reason for that information to hit like a gunstock to his stomach, but it did. He struggled, winded.
“But the man who took over the Patriarchate in Damascus is of the same cloth. I haven’t kept up with these younger men, so I’m afraid I can’t tell you his name. It’s a good idea. Belongs to the same Orthodox but would rather fling his hat across the room than take Turkiye’s side on principle. I will ask. Thank you.”
“Of course,” said Vincent faintly. “And – ?”
“And the sisterhood there. Yes. I will ask them too.”
Thomas’s brow furrowed. Crunch, crash, thought Vincent.
“How did you wind up on personal number terms with Youssef Aziz anyway? He always looked at me like I was something he’d found on the bottom of his shoe.”
“Had a shepherd who was raised in the Persian tradition. Oldest woman you’d ever seen in your life – still was, when I left. But she asked me if I couldn’t do just one Mass the right way. Just once.”
“More traditional than the traditionalists,” Thomas murmured.
“Of course I couldn’t. Not enough candles in the world. But I sent some e-mails and after awhile wound up with the Patriarch, of all people. So I went back to Samil’s home with my generator –” that had been before his beloved solar-powered one, but Vincent had learned the trick of hooking its predecessor up to a bicycle and powering it that way. It was his secret fitness technique, should the tabloids ask. “And made a long-distance call and then handed her the phone. They talked and prayed for ...” He shrugged. “Hours? I can’t imagine how busy he must have been, and to stop and talk to me, some Mexican archbishop in a hellhole – his words – and then to my parishioner … I will always remember that kindness.”
“Hm.”
Thomas had one hand curled under his cheek, the other anchored around Vincent’s ribs. Their legs were tucked between each other’s. Vincent’s erection had faded and Thomas’s had never stirred, but neglecting those had been second nature all their lives.
He did not look behind him at the candle on his bedside table. He did not want to know how much time had passed – or, rather, how little they had left.
He shifted his head closer to Thomas’s on the pillow.
“Are they truly so unmanageable? Your squabbling academics?”
“Of course not,” he said. “You’re only hearing about it because they’re frustrating me. They are the best at what they do and I would much rather they continue publishing aggressive papers at each other than resorting to fisticuffs in the Piazza.”
“Is that likely?”
“Always,” Thomas deadpanned, and his eyes danced in response to Vincent’s laughter. He went on, “They’re old and stubborn and there’s always iceberg levels of cultural collisions happening that I can’t see, but I still prefer them over – well, Tremblay calls them the millennials, so make of that what you will.”
Vincent widened his eyes. “Is this where we complain about the youth?”
And as Thomas always did, he walked back his criticism. “No, they’re fine. It’s just they’re so young that everything still happens quickly to them. It frustrates them when things don’t move on their time scale.”
In Vincent’s experience, things did move quickly, but he assumed Thomas meant organic change or structural change, where most of the changes in Vincent’s life were as inorganic as a repurposed warhead detonating in the street or the knife of an emergency surgeon.
He blinked the spots of memory from his eyes and refocused on what Thomas was saying.
“– feel I live in dread of the moment they bring up the most fanciful castle in the sky they can think of – female ordination or something like.”
Vincent tutted. “Thomas, that’s rude. I’m already here.”
“You’re not –” he started, almost indignant. Then his face changed, and he propped himself up on his elbow, studying Vincent with renewed intensity.
“Did you forget?” Vincent asked him, unsure if he was insulted or not.
“Momentarily.”
“Not so easy maintaining your certainty when other people exist outside of it, is it,” and Thomas’s mouth twitched at having his own words thrown back at him.
“I stand corrected. You truly intend to claim both identities?”
“I intend to set a precedent for whoever wants to make the argument, yes. Assuming the papacy I lead is a good one –”
“It is.”
“– hush. It’s far too soon to tell.”
Thomas smiled, shook his head once, but didn’t press the point.
“I intend for people to point at me, my double-X chromosomes, and say it’s already been done, irrefutably and without argument from God, therefore it can be done again. I intend to be useful, long after I am gone, yes.”
“And if, God forbid, you should die without your situation coming to light?”
“I have left instructions with my physician to insist on an autopsy no matter the circumstances.”
Thomas couldn’t quite suppress his grimace of distaste, but that, Vincent thought, had more to do with autopsies than with him.
“You think the Church,” the capital letter was audible, “will survive it?”
“Of course I do. If the Catholic Church can be washed away at its foundations by some peculiarity of my body, then it deserves to be,” and Thomas made a warding gesture.
“I hope I am long gone from this world when that happens.” And, scraping for humor, “either the fall of the church or your death, whichever comes first.”
Vincent touched his shoulder and murmured back, “I do not.”
A sigh.
“If we’re going to have this conversation,” Thomas said, “I would like to put my clothes on.”
“Oh, that would be a tragedy,” said Vincent, heartfelt, and kissed him while he was still looking flummoxed by this. “Actually, if I am honest, I am surprised you didn’t sooner. It was very …”
He paused, trying to find a different word than the one he was about to use, but, too late, Thomas saw the shape of it.
“Brave?” he guessed, droll. “It’s fine, you can say it. I won’t think you condescending.”
“I’d asked you to take a lot on faith very suddenly!” Vincent protested. “You did not set out yesterday evening expecting to be naked right now – breaking routine is no small thing, at our age. It was brave!”
“Vincent …”
He had the gall, now, to sound amused. Huffing in exasperation, Vincent grabbed his face and pulled him down to kiss him again, because that, at least, was not going to get old.
*
The list of people who knew the truth were:
The previous Holy Father and the surgeon who performed his appendectomy in 1999, both dead.
Cardinal Thomas Lawrence and Monsignor Ray O’Malley.
His personal physician here in the Vatican, who’d been puzzled by the strenuous vetting she’d gone through and then, abruptly, a lot less puzzled and a lot more scandalized that it’d been over twenty years since Vincent had any kind of wellness check outside of what could be done in the truck bed of a Toyota Hilux with a flashlight – bodies went wrong often enough on their own without adding additional jigsaw pieces!
The ultrasound technician assisting the aforementioned Kinois surgeon, to whom he was probably only an interesting footnote in a varied career.
And the nice woman with the paprika-red lipstick and the bustier top at the bar in the airport hotel in Monaco, who plunked her drink down next to him and announced, “I could smell a panicking Catholic priest from across the room. There’s a whole bunch of them in this city, couldn’t tell you why, you just congregate here. What’s eating you? Is it Y2K?”
And Vincent, early thirties, had, somewhere between cancelling his appointment in Geneva and the connecting flight here, swung so far out of his self-loathing he had no idea where he was, told her the truth.
She listened, eyebrows climbing, and then she said, “Damn, you don’t hear that every day. Tell you what, I’ll call a friend of mine – good with priests, you won’t be his first. Won’t tell him about the sex stuff – well, yes about sex, not about the secret girl parts, damn. Unless they’re not so secret. Do you know – ? No, sorry, of course you don’t, that’s why you’re asking. The two of us will sort you out. Sit tight,” and she’d hopped down from her stool, brisk and purposeful like this was something people asked her for all the time, then stopped and looked him right in the eye and said, “sure is something being one of the world’s most unique creations, isn’t it?”
He hoped she was having a good day, wherever she was.
*
Once, in passing, Thomas mentioned that in his youth he’d worked the late summers threshing barley with other itinerants.
To Vincent, all the decades of academia that followed didn’t seem to matter, for even under the liver spots and frown-lined forehead, his body hadn’t forgotten the fact it had long ago hauled barley and might at any moment be asked to do it again, built wider in the shoulder than his frame was lean, and Vincent adored this fact. He wished he could tell anyone about it. Wished confessionals were for sharing what was important, like how Thomas Lawrence’s shoulders were in perfect proportion when you were beneath them, instead of for the useless tallying up of sins.
In an effort to leave his sore lip alone, instead of kissing him Thomas kept putting his mouth on strange spots of Vincent’s skin – places it hadn’t even occurred to him anyone would want to kiss, like his eyebrows or the insides of his elbows. It made the nerves there hum, alight, like these places hadn’t been part of the Vincent entire before and now were.
Maybe all lovers had this discovery. He didn’t know and neither, obviously, did Thomas. It made him want to hold still in wonder. It made him feel awake.
Noticing a tremor run through Thomas’s arms, then another, he nudged him with his knee and murmured, “Hey. This is usually the point where we roll over.”
“Is it?” Thomas said, with a noticeably relieved weakening in his shoulders that made Vincent’s already overlarge heart catch against his ribs, like it was still trying to grow another size larger in fondness for this man.
“Yes. One of the euphemistic words is ‘tumble’, is it not?”
“I don’t know, you tell me. You’re the expert here.”
This carried them over – not gracefully, perhaps, but that would come with practice.
Settling astride his hips, Vincent distractedly shook out his disarrayed hair and laughed at the idea. “Hardly! If I was, I would know more of what we could do than this.”
Thomas’s eyebrows went up in alarm.
“This is fine! This is adventurous enough.”
And then such a thoughtful look crossed his face that Vincent dipped his head towards it in fascination in spite of himself. Before he could ask, Thomas cut him off.
“If I may ask – ?”
“Once. Well, twice now,” he amended, and reared back in surprise when Thomas startled, pushing himself half-way up and nearly cracking their skulls together.
“You’re serious,” he confirmed, and huffed an incredulous laugh. “But you were so …” he trailed off, then did something extremely expressive with his face in lieu of any particular word.
“Well,” said Vincent, matter-of-fact. “One of us had to be, or we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.”
Thomas laughed again, collapsing back down and letting his hands skate up and down Vincent’s thighs, like he would try to kiss them too if he could bend in that direction. “I cannot imagine,” he said, with feeling. “Anyone else I would rather follow. Even here. Especially here.”
That, ridiculously, made Vincent flush down to his toes. His own dick, as interested in the proceedings as Thomas’s was not, felt incredibly obvious lying against Thomas’s stomach, and when he resettled into a more comfortable position, the drag of skin alone made him swallow.
Misinterpreting the reason for his glance, Thomas muttered, “sorry,” and, “I did warn you,” and, very deliberately, Vincent braced his hands on his chest, which was flushed blotchy and red a lot more telling than the flaccid dick.
“You,” he said, soft, “cannot see the look on your own face. You look –”
Worshipful, he almost said. Like you asked for me and I was already turning to answer you.
But he remembered what Thomas said about not getting wires crossed about prayer and sex – it would, he admitted privately, probably make work difficult.
“Trust me,” he said instead, “I want you all the same.”
Thomas didn’t look entirely convinced, and Vincent wished for one fierce, impractical moment that they’d met when they were younger men. He couldn’t fathom what circumstances would have led to that happening; the wanting didn’t bother with that, merely put them right in the middle with the less decrepit bodies and the life built up around them. No holy orders, probably, but that mattered less than it might have – people did good works without the excuse of a church all the time – and little else might have changed, except for that they were young and together and had all the time in the world to do what Vincent Benítez and Thomas Lawrence were trying to make up for now with the thinnest crescent of stolen time.
“I want you,” Vincent said again, feeling like this desire was leaking out of him in every direction, “all the same.”
Thomas’s expression shifted, and he reached for him, cupping his face and pulling him down to kiss him like he could catch all of it. Vincent hadn’t known until this moment that you could kiss like it was a drink, and his world moved one more time, expanding to include this amazing, impossible thing.
“Vincent…”
“Hm,” Vincent said discouragingly, and it was several minutes before Thomas tried again.
“Vincent.”
“Hm?”
“Do you think I would enjoy being fucked?”
Vincent’s heart gave a wild thrash, and he managed, in a manner that was not the slightest bit calm, “We could find out. Yes, absolutely.”
“Not right now,” said Thomas, like he genuinely believed that was something Vincent, the pope, could pull off with no warning. “Sometime. Later. I think …” he felt his way along the edge of it. “I think I’d like the anticipation.”
And then he laughed with surprised when Vincent’s dick skidded against his stomach, reflexively putting a hand to the wet streak it left behind.
“I suppose,” Vincent started, with what little dignity he could claw back. “That would be one way to confuse the issue with security. Give them too much data to work with. Be here so often that leaving at dawn becomes unremarkable.”
“Not sure I have enough hours in the day,” Thomas temporized.
But since his hand was on Vincent’s dick as he said it, thumb tracing its underside with agonizing lightness, Vincent didn’t pay the protestation much attention.
“Well. Not on lean days, of course.”
“Oh, of course.”
“No red meat and no sex on lean days, except one doesn’t usually apply to us.”
“Mmhm.”
Vincent made a thoughtful noise in his throat. It came out only a little more high-pitched than normal. “I suppose it wasn’t really his fault, as he was only recording first-century observations, but if you’re going to blame anybody for the rule, blame Josephus –”
Thomas actually bucked.
“Fucking –” flew out of him, pure rage response, and Vincent burst out laughing and fell down into the sheets beside him while he spluttered. Thomas threw him a look of outrage, and Vincent gathered him close in apology.
“I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “My dear. I’m sorry. That was cruel.”
But when he stretched out against his body again, his knees cracked audibly, and to them Thomas said, “hey, that’s my line,” and then smiled in appreciation of his own joke, so he couldn’t be that offended.
“Maybe once you spend weeks with every known fragment of that man’s writing with some of the most insufferable people you know, you’ll have the same response,” he muttered, but he was smiling and drawing Vincent’s leg over his hip as he said it.
“Perhaps. It’s been my impression that the Orthodox cardinals could hardly care less about my opinion on them. Their churches predate the papacy altogether. Better a strong dog in the yard than a strong king in Kabul, as the saying goes.”
“I’ve never heard that one.”
“Well, maybe you had to be there,” Vincent allowed, and, “oh, do touch me again, please.”
Thomas outright grinned. “Suppose I could.”
*
There’d been a photograph, taken sometime in the late 2010s and dredged up from who-knows-where, that accompanied the first full-length magazine article published after his ascension and now seemed to reappear in any article that mentioned his life pre-papacy.
In it, Vincent had been sitting on an upturned bucket inside the compound wall, gate visible beyond the tangle of bicycles right behind him.
Though he sat in shade, the sunlight blazed so hot that in the photograph the stones at the top of the wall were completely whited out.
At his side, a personal solar panel the size of a liturgical tome sat open and plugged into a generator – my closest, dearest friend, Vincent called it, just to hear Singh snort. Plugged into the generator was both his laptop and his cell phone, the later providing an Internet hot spot for the former. He had his legs outstretched and crossed in front of him, laptop angled sharply down them, and was frowning pensively at whatever had been on the screen.
He remembered the initial piece remarking about how he’d gone native – you could see his clerical collar and the peak of the rosary wrapped around his wrist, sure, but his overcoat and pants were loose and he was sandaled and kerchiefed like any other Afghan man expecting to sweat in the sun – but also stressing that blending in was the point, a fact later publications usually forgot to include in their rush to draw whatever conclusion would produce the most clicks.
Besides, Vincent liked that photograph better than the one of Father Singh and his Kalashnikov.
*
A.J. Singh – and no, Vincent didn’t know what it was short for, if anything – had been part of that displaced population growing up in an internal refugee camp in post-Soviet Afghanistan, the generation destined to never have a home despite never leaving home.
When they first met, Vincent’s Farsi was still toddling and crossed wires with his Pashto vocabulary to often comedic effect, and Singh knew only one word of Spanish – bueno, bueno – and used it to judiciously plod his way through conversation like any other man would use a walking stick. He was more comfortable holding a gun than the Eucharist, but tried with such hard-nosed conviction that Vincent had made him his deacon and never looked back.
When, eighteen years later, Vincent said, “There will be a conclave. I must go to Rome,” Singh had been vicious in his disbelief.
The danger was obvious. It didn’t need saying. How could it possibly matter what he owed the Holy Father? The guy was dead! Tits up! He was bird food! Vincent was usually the first to throw out arcane tradition when it didn’t fit, so why was this one so important? Surely he wasn’t the first cardinal who couldn’t make it.
Who did he owe it to more, those people in the Vatican who didn’t care he existed or his community here, who did.
“Do you understand what you are doing!” he’d cried, finally. “You will never be able to come back! They will shoot you for sure! You’d put us through that? For what!”
And sometimes, when it was too quiet or too much or both, Vincent would pull his phone out of the inner compartment of his papal vestments to read the last message Singh had sent. It’d arrived as soon as he’d activated a new sim card in Italy.
It said only, succinctly, Fuck you.
There’d been nothing from him after Vincent’s ascension, when his story had, naturally, swung an awful glaring spotlight on the Catholics still living in Taliban-occupied Afghanistan.
His stubborn heart, fissured straight through, continuing regardless, hoped that the lack of boasting about it meant he hadn’t been killed yet.
Please, God.
It was, of course, Thomas who saw through to the truth. Said to him, so very gentle, “We are grieving but one man, our late Holy Father. You are grieving two.”
Vincent flinched, full-body, and Thomas’s eyes tarnished nearly to silver in sympathy.
He tried a lighter tone. “Though – that does explain why you always look vaguely like you’re hoping Krazcinski will fall down a flight of stairs.”
Kraczinski was their representative from New York and a not-infrequent table guest of Rudy Guiliani when at home and Goffredo Tedesco when in Rome. Vincent had, perhaps being too heavy-handed and definitely being too impolitic, personally ex-communicated four of the man’s underlings, budding white supremacists with a lot of Facebook attention. It’d earned him Kraczinski’s undying enmity, true, but had the benefit of making other cardinals, archbishops, and the like sit up and straighten out their social media presences. That would matter for the people who followed them. Vincent didn’t regret it.
“Is it true, what they say,” Thomas continued. “That it was the Americans who funded the Taliban in the first place, during the Cold War?”
Vincent sighed. “Yes and no. The American ally in the region was Pakistan. They only ever sent money there. It was Pakistan who found the little group of student dissidents opposing the Soviets and funneled them money and weapons. Did America know? Yes, of course. But,” he shrugged. “Plausible deniability.”
“I’m sorry,” murmured Thomas, and grimaced at the inadequacy of the words.
Vincent shook his head and said, dismissive, “It’s not about them. The Americans are not that important.”
Alert to something in his voice, Thomas caught his hands between his own and squeezed, and Vincent added, quieter, “Have grace for them. They sucked the blood from Afghanistan, and it’s poisoning them.”
*
The same way the Congo had stripped its forests for rubber, then when that was gone slashed the trees to grow manioc and the thick prickly monocot that produced palm oil, the tropical man’s petroleum, the same way they’d eradicated the local varieties of maize to plant Monsanto corn in Veracruz, there was one cash crop in Afghanistan that pushed out everything else:
The opium poppy.
When harvested and sold it, in turn, became the pain medication that, according to the headlines, killed more Americans by addiction and overdose than anything of its kind.
An uneven retribution, one might say.
Every retribution inevitably was.
*
Three times, as the biblical narrative goes, the city of Kabul burnt.
And that was modern Kabul, mind – so three times in the last two hundred years.
The first had been in 1842. The British cared about protecting its golden goose, its pot of wealth, its territory in India, far more than it cared to keep Afghanistan. But neither could it abide anyone else having it, and so burned Kabul down deliberately before ceding the territory.
The second was after Afghan communism collapsed. The Soviets did one better than the British, burning Kabul and then systematically depopulating the countryside on the way out. The name Gorbachev still made old Afghans spit, herdsmen still found landmines crowned with Cyrillic characters in their fields, and one-fourth of the population became refugees inside their own country, thus creating Afghanistan’s greatest source of labor – gunmen.
The third was by the Americans, in 2001.
The late Holy Father did not send Vincent Benítez to the city for another five years. By then, his one mission in the Congo had expanded into three, run entirely now by women from the communities they served. It left Vincent feeling vestigial, which was a wonderful way to know you’d succeeded.
At first, he hadn’t understood why here. Foreign investors were everywhere, everyone had plans, and you couldn’t go two blocks without someone trying to sell you a DVD or an mp3 player or a transportable generator. But then he began to feel it, in his gut, in his sense memory, the physical weight of premonition. The optimism was a soap bubble grown too big at the end of a wand, its iridescence shimmering and unstable – something bad was about to happen.
For as long as there’s been an Afghanistan, he learned, the world had wanted to pin it down.
Not for its resources, though those were not insignificant.
Not for its people, though they were not insignificant.
But for its location, caught between Europe and the Indo-Chinese abundance, between communism and capitalism. For the impossible, impassable bulwark of its mountains, so vast you could hide even God.
*
He wished he had a good story about Kabul, something he could make into a moral in fifteen minutes or less, the way they’d been taught in seminary.
Something … oh, something like how every hedge bursting with fruit he’d ever encountered there also had thorns, and there was no point resenting the scratches because the only point of thorns was to protect what was sweet.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he had people.
Singh, who kept all his identification papers in a plastic envelope hanging at all times from a chain around his neck, the same kind Sister Agnes used for her reading glasses.
The old Orthodox woman, Samil, who raised sheep whose wool, famously, was sought as lining for the iconic RAF bomber jackets and never let a gospel reading about shepherds go by without elucidating everyone on the reality, who claimed her family grazed the same high meadows in the Kush since her ancestors came with the Mongols eight hundred years ago, who got rosy-cheeked with delight when mentioning she had more family in the area now, embarrassingly irreligious cousins from China who came with the Soviets in the 70’s to invest in Afghan resources and stayed even after the Soviets booked it. She claimed they even bought her a tailor-made suit, although no one in her parrish had yet seen it because it was too precious to wear.
Khadija’s schoolgirls whose faces Vincent hadn’t seen since the Taliban took back the city. They all wore burqa outside the home and took the Eucharist between their palms to eat privately in the back of the room and Vincent sometimes saw them clustered together in the yard on Sundays while their parents talked, giggling contagiously and passing their Airpods from one girl to the next, loosening the bands around their faces to slip the little white plastic into their ears, captivated by a world still full of music they hadn’t heard yet.
He didn’t have a story, except for how sometimes they died anyway, indiscriminately.
He didn’t have a story, except for how targeting one group of people, one square on the board, knocked down everyone else, too.
He didn’t have a story, just Manzanita beside him in bed with her head on her paws, watching the door. Just every shelf in the compound lined with twine so no jar or teacup could shiver off and break during a bombing. Just sometimes strangers sleeping in the inner rooms and Vincent and Singh and Singh’s Kalashnikov on the mats inside the door, in case it burst open.
All people really want, he found, is relief.
Relief, and someone to help them shift rubble and someone who cared enough to organize that help, something that Cardinal Saaza was failing to do in Brazil and something Cardinal Tedesco with his Italian marble floors couldn’t even imagine needed doing.
Vincent had done it in Veracruz and done it in Kinshasa with the officials and then with Jorges, gone to his government tail in Kabul with his softest voice to ask for their help, and then gone to the Taliban and paid with opium buds for the use of their trucks to help clear the streets outside people’s homes, and the bullseye this put on him mattered less than the fact it needed doing.
And that was simply a story he didn’t know how to tell in a pulpit in fifteen minutes or less.
Yet, anyway.
*
“Remind me,” Aldo Bellini had said to him, three days before his removal as Secretary of State, and Vincent was already sure this conversation would be part of those death throes. “Just how large was your diocese in Kabul?”
He remembered crossing his hands over one another and gripping his own wrists inside his ivory sleeves, feeling he needed the balance.
“I think,” he said, “and the late Holy Father agreed with me –”
That, he thought, was what galled Bellini the most – the previous pope had shared enough secrets with Bellini, his own and other’s, for Bellini to assume he was trusted above everyone else. But he hadn’t known this secret.
“– that in this case, the quantity of the many mattered less than the quality of the few.”
“And was it so exemplar, this quality of your Arab Christians?”
Vincent’s fingers tightened.
He wished they weren’t having this conversation in English.
He wished Bellini, an American from Los Angeles for God’s sake, knew enough Spanish to debate him intelligently. Or Farsi – Farsi was built for debate.
He wished he could tell him about the altarpieces, all easily dismantled; about the fish motifs applied above the doors, serving the same function in 2024 as they’d done in 124; about the lace – oh, the Arabic lace. In times past, the Byzantines who migrated into the mountains of the Middle East wore albs made entirely of lace; the oldest in Afghanistan was nearly eight centuries old and currently in an airtight underground bunker in Fallujah with the saints’ icons and the museum pieces, its location known only to Vincent, Singh, and the museum curator.
“From a certain perspective,” he said, instead of any of this. “The first Christians were Arab Christians.”
“They were a lot of things,” Bellini dismissed him. “But they were not from Kabul.”
“Nevertheless. They were important enough to the late Holy Father that he sent me.”
The pope had summoned Vincent to Rome to name him a cardinal late in 2021, after the Americans withdrew their military and the Taliban surged into Kabul, the tenacious, victorious underdogs. Afghanistan had been his home for fifteen years by then, and Rome, now, was as alien as the surface of the moon.
He’d protested, of course.
But I didn’t even get everyone through it alive!
There’d been Amira, and schoolboy Trey who’d helped them with Urdu, the Losandu brothers found the next morning in the dry well, and then Khadija’s husband – well, they were Muslim, it was true, but somebody’s aunt’s closest friend from school and became part of their parrish by virtue of sharing a table and sharing the same kind of secret, Khadija’s school for girls and Vincent’s church, and their compound had been desolate when Vincent and Singh made it through the checkpoints to go look for them.
The punishments for Muslims seen to slip were always worse than for the infidels themselves.
In hindsight, Vincent thought his elevation had less to do with his successes or failures and more to do with the pope’s late-stage heart failure.
He’d kept ticking along for another three years after giving him his reds, but he acted like there was never enough time left, and Vincent Benítez still bore the road rash of that decision.
“Yes, I’ve heard a lot recently about the saintliness of your work,” Bellini remarked, but if he was trying to last out, he couldn’t sustain his anger; he twitched his side of the conversation along like he had it on a marionette. “If you are expecting all of us to live up to your standard, I suspect you’ll be waiting a long time.”
Neurotic, the late Holy Father had called him.
Coward, Thomas Lawrence had said, then took it back and equivocated, My oldest, dearest friend.
“Forgive me,” he said now in the face of Vincent’s silence, and shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said anything. We are all God’s children.”
“It’s all right,” Vincent said softly, because he was expected to.
Then he turned his head, met Bellini’s eyes directly, and let him see his teeth.
For Singh, his deacons and priests, for the widow Khadija, each individual Arab Christian and the Muslim neighbors who mattered to them.
“If we all followed your example, we’d go nowhere. I shall take struggling imperfection over stagnant perfection any day.”
*
It was the theme of every place he’d ever lived.
Jalisco to Veracruz to Kinshasa to Kandahar to Kabul, the West came and opened the veins of the world and then complained about the mess.
He hadn’t known before he was asked to come north and live here, installed as head of state in a glorified palace built on the bones of the poor, how much it would bother him.
There was little he could do about it now, but he could go and sit in the cafeteria with people like him until it stopped being so unbearable: Cardinal Mendoza from Manila; Sister Bernice from north Vietnam; the cardinals from Accra and Casablanca generously pausing their ongoing arguments with each other to quarrel with him instead; the Jimínez brothers, both bishops from Cancun who claimed they could follow their matrilineal line all the way back to the days of the Triple Alliance and the Meshica grandmother who’d stood up to her thighs in swamp water and watched the eagle kill the snake on the place that would be Tenochtítlan. They were here too.
They knew what it was like, loving a God and believing in a salvation their ancestors wouldn’t have known without violence, to pluck faith from the jaws of conquest and say, Yes, thank you, this is ours.
You’ve had it long enough. We’ll take it from here.
*
And in spite of it all, people carved wooden dogs with their heads on their paws. Children pressed too hard with their markers when drawing pictures of their parents and their animals and their happiness.
In spite of it all, there were people like Thomas, saying, No, don’t eat alone. Come, let me introduce you to someone.
*
When he came, shuddering, toes curling, it was completely silent except for Thomas’s gentle, “Ah, there you are,” and he put his face against his neck and looked past him into the gilt marble presence of the Holy Spirit, and Vincent Benítez, crude and folkish, bared all his teeth. You may have every part of me but this, he thought. This is mine alone.
*
When Thomas Lawrence had stopped by the papal apartments that evening, he came, unsurprisingly, with a bundle of papers under his arm.
Vincent tried on and discarded four separate teasing comments about it, but didn’t get to decide on one before Thomas silently handed them over, and he realized they were newspapers, opened and refolded over the weekly comics, his favorite. Three of them, one for each week he’d been away.
Ah, he thought, with the feeling of a sudden hard deceleration in his chest, the press it put on his heart. Ah. All right then.
Before he could say something embarrassing, Thomas lifted his chin.
“What are you making? It smells … strong.”
“Oh, faint praise!” Vincent objected, but he carefully tucked the newspapers away in a safe spot and returned to the kitchenette, gesturing for Thomas to join him and explaining that – as he well knew – most of the things the pope ate outside his own household were, by necessity, lightly-colored and lightly-oiled and not at all prone to dripping, for the obvious white vestment related reasons. Which all made sense, of course, but did mean Vincent was a lot more inclined towards anything else when he was on his own. Thick stew. Tomato-based.
“Hence –” he gestured to his uncollared blacks. Which might as well be pajamas at this point, for how offended Modentus got whenever he tried to wear them outside the apartments.
“Do you need any help?”
“No, no. Pull up a stool while I finish. I can’t help but notice, my dear friend – you didn’t bring any work with you at all. Are you feeling well?”
“Ha,” said Thomas dryly, and held up both empty hands. “No work. I came only to eat your wonderful soup and say maybe one word in twenty while you tell me about your trip.”
Vincent beamed at him. “Well, now I feel contrary and don’t want to.” Then admitted, just as fast, “No, that’s a lie. I very much want to tell you about Mexico. Garnish?”
“No, I thank you. I’m one of those cilantro-is-soap people.”
“Why does God curse his most devoted of servants.”
Thomas, too, was grinning now. “Are you allowed to say that, Your Holiness?”
“It’s Vincent with friends. As you know.”
He turned the heat off the hob and handed Thomas the second bowl. Fetching drinks and a cutting board for the crusty bread, they went out past the partition to the dining table, where Vincent promptly neglected to eat any of his stew, so busy was he with stories of home. He’d dreamt the night before of running water and citrus and woke up with the swamp of it in his body, the perpetual motion of bumping over rural roads.
This led, naturally, to discussing their parents and their childhoods. Vincent’s father and brother had both been called Xenén, his mother Celestine, and she’d had hair so beautiful and black and perfectly straight that a man came from La Union to buy her trimmings to make paintbrushes.
“Honest, my hand to God,” he insisted to Thomas, whose parents’ names had been Tom and Pearl. “Imagine her disappointment when I took after my father.”
“Ah, yes,” laughed Thomas. “The Catholic mother, disappointed in her son the pope.”
Vincent lifted one shoulder, dropped it, allowing for the vast complexity that had been his mother, but Thomas’s eyes moved, snagged on another thought.
“You’re not that old,” he said. “Are your parents alive?”
“Ah. No. They both died shortly after I left for Africa.”
Thomas winced in sympathy and, plainly concerned that he’d seem too intrusive, did not ask the obvious follow-up question. Vincent was glad. He would not have had to explain it to Mendoza or Sister Bernice, that for all their accomplishments and for all he loved them still, he’d had parents who believed if it couldn’t be cured with a goose’s urine and an offering to the saints, then there was nothing a Spanish-speaking doctor’s stethoscope could do for it either. But if Thomas would think it a judgment, he didn’t want to know.
At his coaxing, Thomas admitted in turn that he’d been away at an academic conference in Milan that had long unspooled past its initial scheduling.
These things usually ticked along without his oversight as dean, but he liked to put in an appearance every now and then and it was a good thing he had, because the Orthodox cardinals from mainland Greece and Istanbul had presentations, and someone allowed them too close together. Hence the long-overstayed welcome. Both the police and Sabbadin, Archbishop of Milan, got involved at different points.
“Oh, dear,” remarked Vincent, trying for mild and missing.
Thomas sighed.
It was one of those unspoken rules of the world that you do not allow the delegations from Greece and Turkiye to occupy the same geographical location, and that had held throughout the many long years of the previous papacy.
But, obviously – the conclave.
Thomas lifted his hands in plea for supplication from the heavens. “I wasn’t watching for trouble from that angle.”
“You had other things on your mind,” Vincent allowed.
For a moment, they both admired the sheer size of that understatement.
Then Vincent said, “So. What are they doing?”
“Right now? They’re publishing papers at each other.”
Vincent paused, piece of bread half-way to his mouth. “Ah?”
Sighing again, Thomas pinched the bridge of his nose. “If you could publish a paper with the same energy as pistols at dawn, that’s what they’re doing. I suppose it’s an adequate stand-in for what they can’t do, which is break historical clay tablets over each other’s heads.”
Vincent blinked some more.
“What’s worse,” Thomas went on, animatedly, “is they’re both right. Of course they are. You can’t argue against our Greek origins – all our gospels were first recorded in Greek, as you know – and you can’t argue that Istanbul remained the heart of Christian empire long after Rome started claiming to be the head. If anyone has the right to make these arguments, it’s Greece and Turkiye.” He gestured expansively. “And all of our first-century texts contradict each other. You can publish papers citing completely different arguments and have both be right. This is not new. I cannot expound to them how much what they’re doing is not new.”
“Mmhmm.”
Vincent wasn’t trying hard to suppress his smile.
Thomas’s eyes thinned. “You don’t care much for academia, do you?”
“I know the gospels,” Vincent allowed, humbly. “I know them very well. Also – Josephus? But he was –”
“ – a Jewish historian, yes. Only became fundamental to Christian history by virtue of being the first to make note of us.” Thomas drew in a deep breath through his nose, let it out slowly, and Vincent saw his ears had reddened in anger. “And if I never have another scrap of his text shoved under my nose again, I shall die happy.”
That was strong language, coming from Thomas. “Noted.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t understand, exactly. Vincent knew too well that for every one hundred people to whom celibate scholastic Catholicism was completely unfathomable, there was someoneone for whom it was perfectly suited, and those people needed homes and fulfillment just like everyone else. And it was always satisfying to see the competent excel in their chosen fields.
In his heart of hearts, though – and he would never tell Thomas this – Vincent thought, what did it matter.
What did it matter, who was right and who they used to justify it?
People still needed feeding. That was work that could be done, right now.
He used his last piece of bread to mop up the remnants of his stew and thought about what he could contribute. He was pope. He could delegate.
“Is this not something that –”
He paused, closed his eyes, hunted through his memory for the name. It was the kind of name that didn’t match the appearance, which was a terribly old-fashioned thing to think, except it produced –
“ – Mendelev can help you with?” Then, immediately, “Wait. No. I see the problem.”
Mendelev was in his eighties, and thus had been exempt from participating in the conclave, but had returned to Rome anyway to canvas his fellows for support. His mission was currently in Syria, behind the high protective walls offered by the Patriarch of Damascus, but his diocese had once, before exile, included Jerusalem.
Thomas was shaking his head. “I wouldn’t want to bother him with this. Last we spoke was in the language labs, and he seemed … stressed,” he finished, diplomatically.
“Yes, I imagine so.” Vincent nearly asked what Thomas had been studying in the language labs – the most wonderful addition to the Vatican libraries, in his opinion – but realization, coiled waiting at his feet, lifted its head and bit him. When they’d met, Thomas’s Spanish hadn’t been strong enough to let him comfortably discuss academic nuance at length, and now it was. In fact, he hadn't had to revert down to English with Thomas in ... hm.
He sat back a little in surprise.
Thomas made another gesture, oblivious to the surge of fondness currently making Vincent feel wobbly. “Please – don’t concern yourself. I will sort Greece and Turkiye – well, the cardinals, not the countries. And yes, before you remind me, I will ask their sisterhoods too.”
He placed his hands on the table and rocked himself to his feet, brushing breadcrumbs from his floor-length blacks.
“Are you done with your plate?” he asked.
Vincent rose, too. He scolded, “Don’t you dare take my dirty dishes from me in my own household, Thomas Lawrence.”
Thomas laughed, and did just that.
After they’d cleaned up their dishes and laid them on a towel to dry, portioning the leftover stew into the single-serving takeaway containers that the staff pointedly kept stocked in his cabinets, they went for coffee.
The kitchenette had a small espresso machine, true – like the crucifix, it had come with the apartment, because this was Italy – but there was a much better one downstairs in the cafeteria that was accessible even after-hours. It could dispense a number of teas, too, which Vincent much preferred.
They returned to the papal apartments carrying their paper cups. When Vincent stopped to hear the update from the guard coming on the night shift, Thomas went ahead.
Following him inside, Vincent found him standing in the middle of the main room, the lines around his eyes gone soft.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” said Thomas. “Just – have I told you how much I love these rooms? I – you know I try not to draw comparisons to your predecessor, but he was austere to the point of severity. Your rooms have personality.” He shook his head and offered a quirk of a smile, as if to acknowledge it was an inadequate thing to say. “I would know they were yours even if I’d never seen them before.”
And, like his homily, Vincent heard in it the echo of something he hadn’t even known he’d been wishing to hear.
Suddenly overwhelmed and overflowing with it, the kind of overlarge feeling that could erase the very pencil lines of a person, he went straight to Thomas’s side, set his cup down on the table without looking and took his face between his hands and kissed him.
Then did it again for good measure.
He did try a third time, but Thomas pulled back from it and smiled in polite confusion, as if to say it wasn’t so great a compliment as all that.
This was his only reaction.
Thinking that was that, Vincent gave a mental shrug and sat down.
His mouth tingled with residual stimulus, but the heat of the tea soon banished it. Then Thomas sat down with him, and that was even better.
He put it from his mind, admiring instead the rich teal of his lovely painted table and the taste of his tea and the fact at least one other person in the world admired these things too.
So he was surprised when, after maybe ten minutes of what he’d thought was companionable silence, Thomas put his cup down and laid his hands flat on his knees and demanded, “Do you desire me?”
Vincent blinked and swallowed his first pulse of hysterical amusement – yes, thank you for noticing, that’s what all that was about! – and managed, with trademark calm, “Yes, I do.”
Then, because it seemed polite: “Do you desire me?”
Thomas’s throat moved.
“That’s … not a fair question. Your Holiness.”
“Ah. Hm. I suppose it isn’t.”
Thomas was openly staring at him now, and so Vincent saw it when it hit, the whiplash of vicious anger – I don’t want to deal with this, whatever this is – and then, just as quickly, its banishment. He took a deep breath and tried to deal with it.
“How does that work, then?” he asked, fingers drumming agitatedly. “You are the pope.”
“That is my day job, yes,” Vincent agreed. “But I cannot be, as they say, on the clock all the time.”
“That is sophistry! That doesn’t work. Have you – when was the last time you sat down with the canon? At all?” protested the former professor of canon law. “There’s no point in taking a vow if you can just take it off like a hat.”
Vincent lifted one shoulder, dropped it.
“Of all the vows we take by necessity and by inclination,” he said, “chastity seemed like the least important one. A relic from our earliest days as an apocalyptic cult.”
“You say that,” Thomas muttered, “like our whole ethos isn’t maintaining relics from our earliest days.”
Vincent smiled at that.
“Perhaps. But I’d rather leave their upkeep to other men.”
He hadn’t thought he’d given anything away by saying it, but Thomas stopped, and frowned.
“You’ve – ? I thought you said. A modest life, you said.”
“Yes,” Vincent acknowledged. “This wasn’t until after I decided not to go through with the hysterectomy,” and this time, Thomas didn’t even flinch. Amazing. Maybe within the year, Vincent could get him to say “uterus” or “ovaries” without looking like he’d faint. Honestly, they really were crippling the Curia – how could you hope to lead half the world’s Catholic population when you were too scared of them to speak?
“You’ll forgive me,” he said, “for the lengths I went to to learn to accept myself.”
Thomas answered, automatically, “It is not my place to condemn or absolve you, Your Holiness,” to which Vincent said, “good, because I was not confessing,” and could tell that his continued unruffled tone was really starting to irritate. It was always hard, when you were flustered and combative and no one else rose to meet you.
After a moment, Thomas smoothed his hands down his thighs, took aim, and fired again.
“Really, if we’re going to decide that it’s not a sin, then we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble and elected Adeyami on the first go.”
And for a second, Vincent actually saw red.
He inhaled through it, then exhaled just as deliberately. “Now who is being unfair?”
Thomas sighed. So did Vincent.
“Ah, Thomas. My dear Thomas. I’m afraid you’ve put a halo on me. Why did you do that? They puncture so easily. Like a bicycle tire.”
Thomas turned away from him sharply and stared, blind, in the direction of the window, the darkened rooftops beyond. You couldn’t see St. Peter’s from this angle, only the shadows cast by its floodlights.
Then his brow furrowed and he jerked his chin in sudden negation.
“No,” he said, very firmly. “No. I wasn’t wrong about you. So something else is wrong, and the only other denominator here is me. So,” he faced Vincent again, his back straight. “All right. All right. I suppose you’d argue the difference in Adeyami’s case is that he knew he was doing wrong and indulged anyway, where you never saw it as a wrong.”
“I certainly have never viewed celibacy as a point of superiority.”
“I don’t – !” Thomas started, stung.
And stopped, because of course he did. He’d never given in and, oh, he was proud of it.
Visibly unsettled, he rocked himself to his feet and paced from the table to the partition and back. Vincent folded his hands, then unfolded them and strived to remain relaxed.
“What if we sicced him on the early graduates?” Thomas muttered to nobody in particular. “They’d have a field day with him. There’d been fainting in the aisles.” He tossed over his shoulder, “You know who you should talk to? Willie – that’s Mandorf – he made clerical celibacy the focus of all twelve years of study.”
“I just spent the last three weeks with Mandorf,” Vincent pointed out; he’d been master of liturgical celebrations and Vincent couldn’t recall if he’d seen the jowly German amaranthine without a clipboard the whole trip. Surely he must have. “And mostly all we spoke of was where I needed to stand and when my mic was hot.”
Thomas didn’t seem to be listening. He paced again. “ – and they’ll argue we’ll go full Protestant in our lifetimes.”
Vincent firmed his voice. “It is not that important. I would much rather use my papacy for other things. Each man and woman’s journey with celibacy should be their own to make.”
“But –”
Vincent moved.
“Thomas,” and he caught him with a hand to his waist, the red silk sash, and held him still. Thomas’s hand went to his wrist, and for a split second, Vincent braced for it to be thrown off, but Thomas just gripped it, hard, like a railing. “My stoutest of hearts. You do not have to convince me. You just have to tell me no.”
And Thomas said, not quite plaintive but getting there, “I just want to understand.”
“Which part?”
“That you desire … me.”
Ah, thought Vincent.
Thomas grimaced in mortification, but at least did him the courtesy of not abandoning it there.
“I am, perhaps, if I’m being generous, a dreadfully dull person and I’m aware your preference for my company has to do with my being your secret-keeper, but …” he trailed off helplessly, then rallied again. “If it’s recreation you’re after, I know – perhaps not for a fact, but at least by rumor – that there are others here inclined towards both discretion and men. Assuming that’s your preference. I don’t see you seducing one of the sisters, they have a lot more to lose and you’re not cruel.”
This, he realized, was Thomas’s version of rambling, and so he stepped incrementally closer and cut him off before he could dig himself a hole there’d be no climbing out of.
“Thomas. You think I did not see your face when I told you that I’d heard your homily and connected to it?”
Because he had. He’d seen how it had dawned first in his eyes and then lifted into his smile and it went right inside the altar of Vincent’s heart and took it apart and rebuilt it a few inches to the left, stone by holy stone, and he had to live with that, that there was now a space inside of him so indelibly Thomas-shaped.
He murmured, “I think it must have been a very long time since anyone told you that. You are not unlovable. You’re not undesirable. You’re just out of practice.”
“And you want to have sex with me anyway.”
They were holding on to each other’s elbows now, as if for balance. Vincent heard the drop in his own voice when he said, “Yes, very much.”
And Thomas, overwhelmed, shut his eyes tight.
“My preference for you,” Vincent continued, “is not because you are my secret-keeper. You are my secret-keeper because of my preference for you.” Then, “Look at it this way. If you decide it’s a terrible mistake and something vital’s been taken from you,” he wriggled the seal of the papacy off his finger and set it down next to their cups. “I can absolve you when I’m back on the clock. I am the pope.”
“That’s not funny,” Thomas said, his fingers twitching – like he wanted to find a coaster and put it under the ring, God bless him – but the corner of his mouth pulled toward him as if hooked.
Encouraged, Vincent continued, “You’re the one who went right to the top. I wanted you here in this position, remember?”
“What would you have done then?”
“Said nothing. Knelt and kissed your ring, like everyone else.” He shrugged. “I would have missed.”
Unconsciously, Thomas knuckled the backs of his fingers against his mouth, and Vincent said, “Yes, precisely. And if you are worried that God will forsake you afterwards, I haven’t found that to be the case.”
“Clearly not,” Thomas said faintly, absorbing this – that Vincent Benítez had not been a chaste man and God called him to the papacy anyway.
Well. God, Thomas Lawrence, and Jamil Abubakr, anyway.
“I think you’d like it, you know. Sex. It’s hard not to feel the presence of God in the room with you.”
“That’s … not as appealing as you think it is.”
“Liar,” Vincent murmured.
Through his lashes, he saw Thomas’s throat work, hard.
He tipped his head and asked again, soft, “Do you desire me?”
And Thomas said, “you have no idea,” and took him by the jaw with both hands and kissed him.
Vincent caught himself by throwing an arm around his neck and going up onto the balls of his feet and then, for a little while, the only thing he had to do was hold on. Thomas Lawrence had at least fifty years of imagining what kissing was and then not doing any of it to make up for. Vincent was a noble man and willing to shoulder that burden.
It took exactly forty seconds for his spine to begin to protest – Thomas was leaning, center of balance completely shot in Vincent’s direction, and Vincent could only bend so far. Carefully, he turned them, backing himself along the table and pulling Thomas along with him, until his back hit the wall and he could brace against it. Better.
One of Thomas’s hands found his hair, slipping through it, then fisted tight at the back of his skull and released just as quickly, like he couldn’t quite decide if he liked it. Vincent wasn’t sure, either.
They would probably have to try it again. What a hardship.
Thomas kept kissing him. He made judicious use of the wall to pin him in place, restless, and it took Vincent a moment to recognize the behavior as seeking. He sought better purchase, hands climbing Thomas’s back and shoulders, but there was so much fabric.
More fine Italian nonsense, he thought. Where did you even start.
Then, with a deftness that surprised even him – it was not his strong suit – he got his fingers underneath Thomas’s red sash and pulled the tail loose. The rest unraveled.
“Hey!”
Thomas reacted instinctively, hands grabbing for the fabric as it slipped away. Vincent stepped out of his reach, grinning.
He was panting, he realized. Sucked in through his teeth, his breaths sounded wet, obscene to his own ears, but he fought the embarrassment down and lifted his chin. Let the sash slide from his hand.
“Oh. Well,” Thomas remarked, and lifted one shoulder, dropped it – a perfect copy of Vincent’s usual shrug – as if to say, if you must.
Then it was his turn to catch as Vincent surged against him.
They bumped into a dining chair, making it squeak in alarm. Somewhere, far down on the street, a lifetime away, a nun shrieked with laughter, too joyful for decorum.
The cassock took longer. There were thirty-three buttons – symbolism, supposedly – going from throat to knees. Rather than bend to reach the bottommost ones, Thomas grabbed handfuls of black fabric and hiked it up his thighs, then adopted a long-suffering expression when Vincent immediately began to laugh. Giggle, really.
No, he’d be humble – it was definitely a giggle.
“I feel like this is one of my nightmare scenarios,” Thomas said to the ceiling, conversationally. “I’m undressing and the pope is laughing at me.”
Biting his lip, Vincent snagged the hem and helped with the last buttons. “Is it really?”
“It is. But this, somehow, isn’t nearly so bad.”
He shrugged out of the cassock and folded it over the chair that had rudely gotten in their way. Underneath, he had on the same set of blacks Vincent was currently wearing, and seeing them made Vincent sigh.
“Oh. More buttons. I forgot about them.”
“You got to skip the build-up, I think, being made in pectore.” Thomas showed a sliver of teeth. “But clerical elevation is just about adding more and more layers with more fiddly buttons.”
Vincent, with empathy, responded, “Some previous pope decided if he had to suffer it, so did you.”
“Yes, probably. So glad that’s you and not me.”
“Thank you ever so much, my dear,” Vincent said, then tucked his elbow like a chicken wing, pulled it through his sleeve, and then his shirt was over his head and he discarded it without having to unbutton it.
“Hm,” said Thomas, watching. “Don’t think I can do that.”
“You have me,” Vincent told him gamely, stepping close. The headiness swamped him under almost instantly; Thomas’s proximity, the contact; his nose along his cheek, his teeth at his jawline, the breathing, together. It took concentration, reminding his hands to operate. He pulled Thomas’s shirt from his trousers and worked the buttons free.
He stopped short of the clerical collar.
“I think,” he breathed out, tapping it with a nail. “You’re the only one who can do that.”
“No need to make it a scene,” Thomas complained, but Vincent only smiled patiently and after a moment he conceded the point.
He hesitated, as Vincent knew he would, and then, deliberately, slid his thumb under the collar and flicked it free, pulling it loose in one motion and setting it aside without sparing it another glance. Off came the unbuttoned shirt, and the undershirt beneath that, a black cotton washed to gray across the shoulders with age.
Vincent didn’t let him grow self-conscious even in this small nudity, merely took him by the hips and pulled them flush together.
Thomas inhaled sharply at the contact, chest to chest, skin on skin, and chased his mouth when Vincent offered it.
“Will you –” Vincent croaked, not quite letting him have it. He allowed their mouths to catch, drag together only barely, pulled away. “Will you come to bed with me?”
Thomas’s eyes closed. He put his forehead against Vincent’s.
“Will you … give me a moment?”
Vincent studied him through his lashes. Replied, “If you are trying to talk yourself out of arousal, that is habit. That is the opposite of the point.”
Thomas’s mouth curved. “No, I – “ and shifted back to take in Vincent’s expression. His voice fractured. “God –”
It was the first they’d called Him into this, and the effect was immediate, electric. Thomas grabbed him by the back of the neck, a grip fierce enough to whiten the skin, and Vincent went onto the balls of his feet to meet him. He could actually hear their teeth click. He felt wild, savage as a saint, like if asked, he could part seas or quench a wildfire or reach inside Thomas Lawrence’s rib cage to find his own heart beating there instead.
When they parted – with almost surgical difficulty – Thomas spoke again.
“No,” and his voice, somehow, was level. “I promise you. It’s not that.”
“I believe you. Bedroom’s that way.”
Vincent went ahead.
For one vague, discombobulated moment, he was convinced he’d left something incriminating or embarrassing out, like a pair of underwear on the rug, but of course he hadn’t. He’d never been that kind of person – it just seemed like if it was ever going to happen, it’d be now, when it actually mattered.
Shaking it off, he turned on the lamp – the familiar markered lines of the childrens’ drawings leapt onto the wall through the lampshade – and lit his usual array of nighttime candles.
When he turned around, Thomas was in the doorway.
His mouth was wrecked – Vincent hadn’t known until this moment that you could take the color of a mouth and spread it like that, but that’s what he looked like, like he’d been colored outside the lines. His chest, too, was painfully, unevenly flushed.
Vincent swallowed the expletive that caught his throat in a stranglehold, but the noise he made was telling nonetheless. Thomas’s eyes darkened.
“Are you – ?” he tried, voice constricted. “Still?”
And, briskly, Vincent said, “very much so,” and perched at the foot of the bed, gesturing Thomas to him. He came, and Vincent snagged him by the pocket of his trousers as soon as he was within reach and tugged him to stand close, then took hold of his belt and pulled the first loop free.
Again – that rush of an inhale, and Vincent flicked his eyes up.
Thomas could only bear it a moment, and covered his face.
Said, in a rush, “Do you remember – that last vote, in the chapel?”
“I was there, yes,” Vincent said mildly.
The cardinal from Lhasa had touched his elbow and shown him his own name, Benítez, blocky and painstakingly written in the hand of someone to whom the alphabet didn’t come naturally, and Vincent had said, “ah,” and, “my bad luck, then?” and he’d answered, “to you and me, eh, that is how the Holy Spirit speaks,” with such sympathy it hurt.
(Vincent had, half-joking, half-not, offered him Secretary of State. He'd laughed and said, "And be forced to find my hearing aids? No, thank you.")
“Do you remember,” Thomas was saying, “the way God sent fresh air through those broken windows and it was like we’d never felt it before? How that sensation moved us so?”
Vincent wondered if that’s how the Holy Spirit felt to him – gentle – and felt a wistful pang.
“I do.”
“I thought that was the most sensation I would ever feel at once. But that was –” and he dropped his hands and showed Vincent – all the hairs on his arms standing on end. “That was nothing compared to this.”
“I did tell you,” Vincent murmured.
The belt slithered to the floor.
Then Thomas missed his cue completely and dropped to his knees between Vincent’s legs, crowding into his space. Vincent caught his shoulder, protesting, “No, come up here and sit beside me. If you’re anything like me, it will take time to wrestle our socks off and we better start.”
“Euphemistically?” Thomas asked, dubious, and Vincent choked on a laugh.
“No!”
He did as bid, though, and for a moment, there in the candlelight, they were interchangeable with anyone else in the world, two creaky men with discolored skin who found that everything now took steps, sitting side-by-side on a bed and deliberately nudging their shoulders together to throw the other off.
They traded smiles like fools, as playful now as they’d been wild only moments ago. Vincent could still feel the weight of Thomas on his mouth, in the bones of his teeth, and knew at once this, too, would go into his sense memory, a phantom sensation he’d carry with him all the days he had left.
He turned his head, kissed Thomas’s shoulder. “Well? Shall we?”
“I’m with you.”
“My dearest Thomas,” he said, and leaned in. “I know you are.”
*
When the candle on the bedside table guttered out at last, they rose in silence and dressed in the rising pink light of dawn.
Vincent had the luxury of clean clothes, and out of respect did not laugh at the expression on Thomas’s face at putting on yesterday’s underwear. For a brief moment, he contemplated letting him keep a spare set of clothes here, but no, he couldn’t – this might be a secret, but the contents of his closet certainly weren’t and there was no way he could pass anything of Thomas’s off as his.
After buttoning all thirty-three buttons of his cassock and wrapping his waist with the red silk of his office, Thomas stood still for a long moment, staring at nothing.
Then he turned to Vincent and asked, “Will this make us stupid?”
And, sharp as the crack of a gunshot in still air, Vincent knew at once that they’d come to the crux of it at last –
– that Thomas Lawrence had wanted so badly to remain aloof and as untouchable as Roman statuary, thinking reasoning and intelligence was what lofted him closer to God. He held up his vows like a bulwark; love will make you stupid, women will make you stupid, desire will make you stupid, as if it was a bad thing to be instead of merely another state of existence. Turned his heart over and over thinking to make it metallic, incorruptible, and instead left it so bruised and pulped and viciously uncomfortable with itself that Vincent only had to touch it to rivet the entirety of Thomas’s attention to him. He would gorge on this devotion if you let him.
“Yes,” he said, honest. “Probably. But only for a little while. And then, I think, like everyone else we will fall in step with one another. We are old enough to know ourselves and I don’t think we’ll lose that, do you?”
Thomas’s eyes followed him throughout, unblinking. “Do you believe that?”
And Vincent put a hand to his pectoral cross, mock offended. “Are you asking me if I’m certain? Isn’t certainty the enemy –”
“Oh, stop,” Thomas interrupted, rolling his eyes. Then, softer: “You better come and kiss me again, while we can, so we don’t do something irrepressible and silly later since we’re idiots with a secret.”
And Vincent, the pontificate Innocent XIV, man and Holy See both, came obediently to his cardinal’s side and said, even as he tilted his face up, “It won’t stop me from foolish smiling, you know, but I have always done that with you and no one will notice.”
Thomas said, “wait, what?” but it was against Vincent’s mouth.
With his hands around Thomas’s ribs, Vincent again had the incomparable experience of feeling the second he registered the truth of it, squared it against his perception of himself, and reconciled the two, because his hands came up to cradle Vincent’s face and his kiss turned frighteningly earnest.
Then, behind them and muffled by its confines in the bedside drawer, Vincent’s phone started up with the morning alarm.
Groaning, he tore himself away and went to silence it.
When he returned, having also taken the opportunity to finally apply some blasted chapstick, Thomas was in order again, adjusting the zucchetto atop his head. Passing the dining table, Vincent picked up his signet ring from where it’d spent the night and slipped it on over his knuckle. He quieted his mind for absolution and lifted his hand to start the sign of the cross –
Except Thomas, anticipating him, snagged his hand and held it still. Vincent looked at him.
For a long moment, neither of them said anything.
In the end, Thomas managed only, “it’s not necessary,” and turned Vincent’s hand over, kissing his palm. Then he released it, and looked up long enough to see the full radiance of Vincent’s answering smile.
He turned away, content, and went to go manage with all his usual deftness the surprise of the guards on this brand new day.
-
fin