Chapter Text
“I thought you were resigning?”
It’s not what level-headed Cardinal Aldo Bellini intended to say to his colleague, Dean Thomas Lawrence, at five-past-seven in the morning. It’s certainly not what he’d intended to say to his best friend. Gathered at the Casa Santa Marta for morning mass, something quite unlike the peaceful serenity he’s used to unfurls in his chest.
It’s nonsensical. He should be content. Winter’s sunlight pours through the windows of the chapel, bathing cold marble in warm, dulcet tones. Gentle chatter filters through the air, a sense of anticipation threading through every word. Today, His Holiness Pope Innocent XIV will give his first mass to the Papal Household. Aldo should be as pleased as the rest of them to have been asked to attend. Surely, some of them whisper, this means the new pope favours them. To be invited to a mass so intimate, usually reserved for His Holiness’ inner circle, must mean something. That none of them knew who Vincent Benítez was before he’d stood up – covered in dust and blood, and spoken in the softest voice Aldo had ever heard – is apparently immaterial. All gathered here look forward to the years ahead.
But Aldo spent yesterday evening tossing and turning in bed, and that restlessness slithers around in his chest still. Its cold venom poisons his tone. He’d meant to be friendly, when addressing Thomas, not accusatory.
Thomas, at least, doesn’t even flinch. He simply wishes Aldo a good morning with a genial smile, and shrugs. “I still might.” It has the hollow ring of a lie. Aldo grinds his teeth. Thomas, oblivious, continues, “But His Holiness needs time to settle in, and he’s asked that I stay awhile to assist with the transition.”
Of course, Aldo thinks, caustic. Already, Thomas is wrapped around Innocent’s lithe, well-manicured finger.
“A year,” Thomas says, as if he’s weighing it in his mind. “I suppose that will be enough.”
“A year,” Aldo echoes. A whole year, when this time last week, Thomas had practically been clawing at the walls to be free of the Vatican. “And you’ll stay as Dean, I suppose?”
Another shrug. Thomas glances around the room a moment, as if searching for something. Coming up empty, his too-blue eyes turn back to Aldo. He shifts from one foot to the other. “I haven’t spoken to him about it.”
Another lie. Thomas has hardly been away from Innocent’s side in the scant twenty or so hours since Benítez’s ascension. They must have spoken of Thomas’ place in the Curia, and how he could best serve His Holiness’ needs. If Benítez asked him to stay a year, then he must have a role in mind for Thomas. It follows, then, that Benítez must also have a role in mind for Aldo.
Perhaps this is the source of his unrest. He’d been Secretary of State for several years before the death of the late Holy Father. He’d even betrayed his own ideals to keep that position when Tremblay cornered him on the second day of voting. His job is as integral to his identity as his position as a cardinal. Aldo hardly knows who he is without his work. The idea that Benítez, of all people, can strip such a fundamental part of him away with a soft-spoken word is disquieting.
So it is not, he reassures himself, any lingering bitterness over his loss of the papacy that makes his skin crawl when he thinks of Benítez. After all, he knows what the media always says. Enter a Pope, leave a Cardinal.
“Sit with me?” he asks Thomas, pushing all thought of Benítez from his mind. He’ll need to lay eyes on the man in all his papal regalia in a moment. Aldo’ll take whatever freedom from reality he can carve out for himself. Even a second without Benítez’s spectre is a win, at this point.
Thomas nods and allows Aldo to guide him to the front of the chapel with a hand high on his back. Aldo knows, somewhere deep in his soul, that he takes too many liberties with his friend. He’s an affectionate person at heart, tactile where Thomas is not. Over forty years under the crushing weight of his vows have weakened his defences. A hand on Thomas’ forearm, a thumb pushing up under the sleeve of his cassock to feel warm skin beneath; his fingers splayed over the broad, strong space between Thomas’ shoulder blades, skimming lower and lower, though not where Aldo wants to touch him most. Innocent touches. Platonic touches.
Thomas lets Aldo’s hands wander with grace, always. Sometimes, at the beginning of their friendship, he’d flush prettily when Aldo’s fingers alighted on his shoulder, shiver when they brushed bare skin. Now, he’s somewhat more immune to it. They bump shoulders and thighs when they sit close together. They hold hands, though their fingers never intertwine.
All, fraternal gestures of affection. All, Aldo stresses to himself when he’s alone and aching, he is content with. Thomas, high-strung and skirting the edges of being prudish, does not allow any others to touch him as Aldo touches him. That alone is victory enough. To know he is the only one, alive or dead, who can enjoy the warmth of Thomas’ body beneath his hands… It satisfies something old and primal deep in his chest.
Today, when Aldo dares to let his fingers dance along the notches of Thomas’ spine to settle at the dip of his pelvis, low on his back, that old beast rears its head again. It purrs in his abdomen, curled up around the warmth he can feel stirring in his gut.
The feeling buoys him through Benítez’s appearance. He looks frustratingly angelic in his papal whites. The darkness of his hair, long and falling down his back like water, does nothing to dispel the illusion of his grace. He’d kept it tied in a neat bun during the conclave, and Aldo wishes he kept it so now, so that it would not catch the early morning sunlight like threads of spun obsidian. Perhaps then, it wouldn’t draw Thomas’ gaze so.
Mass passes in a blur of Benítez’s lilting cadence and the practiced voices of the choir. His first, televised mass will be later, at midday. Every cardinal who’d attended the conclave will once again pile into the Sistine Chapel, and the world will finally see Pope Innocent XIV in his full, holy glory. This morning’s mass in the small, half-full chapel of the Casa Santa Marta is obviously a dry run, as Benítez begins in Latin. Aldo, at least, knows his lines by now. Over six decades of repetition has engrained them into his soul.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa.
The Kyrie and Gloria fall from his lips by rote, words too well-worn to need any conscious thought behind them. His palm burns from where he’d touched Thomas, the same he used to beat his breast. The air in the chapel is already thick with incense, and it stings somewhere high up in his nose.
“Oremus,” Benítez says. Let us pray.
They all kneel. Aldo searches in his mind for something to offer up to God. Thanksgiving, perhaps, for delivering them a Pope in good time. Nothing comes forward. He kneels in silence, slanting his gaze to Thomas to his left in the hope of finding kinship in his doubting friend. But Thomas’ lips are moving, his head bowed as he prays.
He, it seems, is having no issue connecting with God.
Aldo swallows and turns back to his own clasped hands, and waits with unsteady breaths until Benítez finally, finally, says the Collect, and he can end this farce.
“Amen,” he whispers, as if he’d prayed at all, and he levers himself up to sit on the pew.
One of the sisters whose name Aldo does not know stands and gives a rousing rendition of the first reading.
“Wisdom has built her house, she has set up her seven columns; she has dressed her meat, mixed her wine, yes, she has spread her table. She has sent out her maidens; she calls from the heights out over the city: "Let whoever is simple turn in here; To the one who lacks understanding, she says, Come, eat of my food, and drink of the wine I have mixed! Forsake foolishness that you may live; advance in the way of understanding”."
“Verbum Dómini.” The word of the Lord.
“Deo gratias.” Thanks be to God.
Aldo’s knees are beginning to ache. For a while, the silence is filled only by someone coughing in the back of the church and the rhythmic clanking of the thurible. One, two. One, two. One, two.
When he sings the gospel, Benítez’s voice is as annoyingly perfect as the rest of him. Soft and serene, he’s certainly aided by the rise and fall of his accent. Aldo hates him, and then immediately asks for forgiveness. Benítez has done nothing to promote his ire. Only by existing does he stir something bitter in Aldo.
At last, they arrive at the homily. Benítez is much briefer than his predecessor. And yet, his speech feels fuller, somehow. He pins them all under the darkness of his gaze. When his eyes land on Aldo, he feels as if Benítez has stripped him bare, that he can see the horrible, green monster that writhes beneath his breast. He speaks of love and light, a desire to move them forward into the future while paying homage to the past. Aldo feels trapped in that damned vote, watching the world crumble under his feet.
“He speaks well, don’t you think?” Thomas says when it’s over, as they climb down to their knees again.
Christ, Aldo thinks. The bell rings. They all bow their heads. I’m getting too old for this.
“He does,” he whispers back, instead of complaining about how his knees creak almost as loudly as the wooden pews they’re perched upon. Up in the sanctuary, Benítez is preparing the eucharist. He moves with graceful economy, no ounce of energy wasted, every movement deliberate. “It’s what swayed so many to his side, after all.”
Thomas makes a small noise somewhere in his throat. It’s almost offence. Not all the way there, but it's certainly edging toward a scoff. Aldo bites the inside of his cheek, suppressing a reciprocal, unimpressed noise of his own. No doubt, Thomas would argue it was the Holy Spirit at work. Half the conclave claimed to have been moved thus.
But Aldo had voted for Thomas, in that final ballot. If God interceded to place His precious lamb on the Throne of St Peter, He’d missed Aldo by entirely.
That gentle breeze was just a breeze, Aldo reminds himself as they go up for communion. It was Benítez’s rousing speech that had swayed the cardinals-elect. No more, no less. If they’d felt overcome with anything, it was shame. Tedesco’s bloc especially. That Tedesco had even thought to use the death and suffering of those caught up in the attack to advance his own cause still makes Aldo’s blood boil.
It's that anger that makes his hands shake as he kneels down before the new Holy Father to accept the eucharist. It’s not the soft curve of Benítez’s smile. And it’s definitely not the way Benítez hesitates a moment too long after raising the chalice to Thomas’ lips, after him.
“Sanguis Christi.”
Thomas whispers, “Amen.” He does not immediately get up. Benítez does not move on. They linger, gazes locked.
Aldo clears his throat and Thomas startles. He flushes to the tips of his ears. Benítez blinks once, twice, then moves to the next, entirely unruffled save for the dusting of deep rose at his cheeks.
“Corpus Christi," he says.
“Amen.”
“Sanguis Christi.”
Thomas finally remembers to cross himself.
“Amen.”
Aldo takes him by the elbow the moment he's touched his left shoulder, and he drags him back to their pew. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
Thomas isn’t looking at him. He’s not looking anywhere, thumbing his rosary absentmindedly as his eyes settle somewhere in the middle distance. That shock of red still covers his nose and ears, creeping down his neck. Aldo has seen less chastised children, many of whom were caught with their fingers in the proverbial cookie jar. Usually, it was the non-consecrated communion wine and a pack of twelve-year-olds eager to rebel on a Sunday morning. This time, it's chaste Thomas Lawrence staring too long into the abyss of Benítez's dark eyes.
Abyssus abyssum invocat.
They settle back onto the benches, Thomas’s back ramrod straight. Aldo decides he doesn’t want to know. The absolute last thing he wants is to insert himself into whatever the fuck is going on between Thomas and the new Holy Father. And anyway, he reminds himself with great force, there are none so violently chaste as Thomas Lawrence. Nor as straight and repressed. Only once Aldo had made the mistake of admitting to his friend that he found men attractive, and Thomas had gone as crimson as his cassock.
If he’d pressed him, all those years ago, Aldo might’ve learned that Thomas, too, found men pleasing. He would have learned that Thomas blushed so readily not because of shame or disgust, but because the young American sat beside him prompted more scalding showers every morning than any other.
But Aldo hadn’t pressed him. Just as he doesn’t press now. He simply picks a spot on the altar cloth to stare at and fixes his gaze upon it. He tries hard not to feel the warmth of Thomas’ body beside him. He fails just as miserably.
When everything is cleared away and Benítez finally puts them all out of their misery with a soft, “Ite, missa est,” Aldo nearly leaps from his seat before he can reply. Only sheer force of will keeps him in his pew long enough to say, "Deo gratias.”
He doesn't linger. He stays just long enough to be sure he won't look like he's running away. Long enough, in any case, for Benítez to return to the congregation, for when he beelines for the door, he makes it perhaps all of five paces before Benítez’s voice arrests him.
“Cardinal Bellini?” Dear God, how can someone so soft-spoken root him to the floor like this? Aldo turns on his heel. The sight of Benítez’s smile is like being hit by a truck. It almost brings him to his knees. Almost. “I’ll see you at our meeting this afternoon?”
He will?
“Yes,” Aldo agrees, because he hasn’t looked at his email since emerging from seclusion yesterday, and he doesn’t intend to until at least tomorrow.
And Benítez, ever perceptive, offers, “At two. In my office.”
His assumption that Aldo has forgotten their meeting chafes. It’s worse that he’s right.
“Yes, of course,” Aldo says. “I’ll see you then.”
He’ll need to determine where, exactly, Benítez’s new office is. He doubts the man will move into the Apostolic Palace; from what he’s gathered, Benítez is more austere than his predecessor ever was. He supposes the papal apartments aren’t ready, either. Unfortunately, Aldo cannot snag Thomas to ask him where Benítez has lodged himself, because the two of them are already engaged in conversation.
“Your homily was very inspiring,” Aldo hears Thomas say. He’s bowing towards Benítez, the branches of an old oak reaching up to the sunlight. Or, Aldo supposes, gnarled roots reaching down to fresh water, as Benítez is a head shorter than Lawrence on a good day. “I couldn’t even tell you were nervous.”
Benítez laughs, a delicate thing. Like wind chimes. Or birdsong. “You’re too kind to me. I hardly remember what I said.”
Benítez said something similar yesterday when he’d stepped down off the balcony, the cries and adoration of the crowd ringing in their ears. Thomas had taken his elbow, a bulwark in a storm of emotion.
“I have no idea what I just said,” he’d admitted, clinging to Thomas for dear life. “Was it good?”
Everyone laughed and agreed that it was. Very good, in fact. His speech was heartfelt and moving, a plea for unity and a promise of progress. The glassy tears in Benítez’s eyes had done nothing but inspire the masses. Aldo remembers how the crowd gasped as he stepped out. There’d been at least a full three seconds of dead silence while people frantically googled him. An unknown man, relatively young and twice as handsome. In the hours following the proclamation, #HotPope blew up Aldo’s phone.
Would they have reacted thus, had Aldo stepped out?
No.
Envy is a horrible emotion, and it eats him from the inside out as he watches Thomas and Benítez together. They clasp hands, briefly, before Benítez says, “I’ll see you later?”
“Of course, dear Vincent.”
Acid burns through Aldo’s veins.
Dear Vincent.
Bile rises in this throat. He flees to the Piazza Santa Marta, heart pounding. He collapses onto the first bench he lays eyes on, tucked behind a high hedge. A fountain gurgles in the distance. Reaching for the peace the gardens usually bring him, Aldo crosses one leg over the other and tips his head back. The sun beats down on his face, and he closes his eyes against the glare. Despite his efforts, his body rebels against the stillness, unrest urging him to move.
It’s a useless thing. He has nowhere to be until they’re all gathered up at eleven for mass. Benítez has yet to appoint anyone to any role, save perhaps Thomas, who seems likely to stay on as Dean. Aldo has no work to occupy himself with. There is no way for him to outrun these last few days. He cannot escape the widening chasm he feels lingering between himself and Thomas. There is nowhere for him to hide from the crushing disappointment he still feels.
He cannot lose something that was never his. He was never Pope. The late Holy Father had never, not once, made any suggestion that he thought Aldo might be his successor. It was the media who’d touted him as such, putting out article after article, clip after clip.
Cardinal Bellini is his natural successor, they all said. He’s liberal. He’s open to considering LBGT issues. He takes a common-sense approach to divorce. They’re small steps, cautious steps, but necessary ones.
He made overtures of humility, of course. He told all that he did not want to be Pope. That he was not worthy of it. But deep in his heart, he knew that he wanted it. Losing so many votes, one after the other – and to Thomas, of all people – stung. His homily about doubting, and he, the famous doubter, had inspired many to vote for him. To Bellini, who’d begun to set his heart on the Throne of St Peter almost without his own permission, it was a betrayal.
His treatment of Thomas in the final days of the conclave will shame him for the rest of his days. Thomas had run himself into the ground managing everything, unspooling the tightly woven threads the Holy Father had needed him to follow. Thomas and Aldo, Adeyemi, Tremblay, Tedesco, even Benítez; all pieces on a chess board the Holy Father had set up long before his death. All they’d needed to do was roll down the path he’d laid before them.
The Holy Father… he'd wanted Benítez to succeed him. That, Aldo cannot deny even now. Especially now. Everything he’d done in the months before he died had been contrived to get them to where they were now. All along, Aldo agonised over whether the Holy Father thought him worthy, if he’d wanted Aldo as Pope. Surely, he had. Surely, the media were correct. Aldo was his natural successor.
And all the while, an Archbishop in Kabul waited in the wings to usurp him.
An uncharitable thought. But he can’t help it. For a moment, he indulges in the catharsis of his hatred. Vincent Benítez, God’s gift to the Catholic Church. How brave he is. How bold. How handsome. Exactly what they needed, when they needed it.
No one yet knows what kind of pope Benítez will be. Aldo, at least, should be reassured that he seems to be progressive. But he’s not. He can't scrape together the emotion. Not right now, anyway, when the wound of his loss still smarts. Benítez has the courage to stand up for what he believes in, far more than Aldo can ever hope to possess. He wishes he could say he would have done the same, but he’d sat in silence as much as the rest of them. When his own intersession failed, he’d let Tedesco continue his ravings. Only Benítez cowed him in the end, silencing the pack of them with hardly a word, without even raising his voice.
“What do you know of war?”
Aldo thinks of a white cassock in the sunlight, the cheers of the masses, and the crystalline tears in Thomas Lawrence's eyes as he reaches for Benítez's hands and holds them tight. The answer is clear.
Nothing.