ashurashadow - Tumblr blog

ashurashadow · 2 years ago

Text

Further On Up the Road, a drabble in the Temptation Acknowledged AU, usukus, Rated M

first | master list | previous

Further On Up the Road - Bruce Springsteen (the song doesn't have much to do with the fic, it's just a banger)

I did kinda think I was done with this AU, but I also left the last part open-ended on purpose, so here we are. I think this part kinda represents a bit of a shift in it ... although to what, I have no idea. We'll see.

Warnings: non-explicit descriptions of past prostitution, violence, and drug use; Alfred Has A Tragic Backstory Summary: After his dream, Alfred drives to a church, intending to give confession, though not intending to give it to Arthur. Word count: ~2100

-----

“Are you going to go in, perhaps?”

“Shut up.” Alfred sighs heavily. He holds his black clergy shirt with white collar in his lap, while sweat trickles down the back of his neck, getting caught in his white undershirt, which is all he wears while driving in the desert. It’s sweltering hot in the afternoon sun and his 4Runner is turned off, so he and Arthur are just baking inside the car.

Arthur performatively examines his black finger nails as his black tail twitches this way and that. The priest’s energy is frustratingly tense, it has been since he woke up from whatever delicious dream he’d had yesterday and they’ve only been driving to the closest parish since then with Alfred hardly speaking a word. “Well,” Arthur tries to say casually, though he feels quite bristly himself, “if you do go in, will you at least be a dear and crack open a window for me?”

“Shut up!” Alfred shouts. “Just shut the hell up for once, will you!?” He can’t hear Arthur’s voice without hearing it the way it sounded in his dream and it’s driving him crazy. He needs to go inside and give confession, but he can’t bring himself to do it. What could he even confess? Many priests believe demons are only real in the metaphysical sense, not that they can exist in a corporeal fashion and the Vatican would prefer to let that be the case unless otherwise necessary. Secrecy very much counts among the vows Alfred has taken.

Arthur is mildly taken aback by and then mildly pleased with and then very interested in that outburst. “My my, aren’t we tense?”

Alfred’s fists tighten in the stiff fabric of his cleric’s shirt. “The supernatural intuition of a demon is truly unparalleled,” he retorts sarcastically.

Arthur hums pensively. He has never been so affected by a human’s energy as Father Alfred’s; it surrounds him in ways that even the most potent of his human victims never have and when the good Father’s mood takes a turn for the stormy like this, it is rather oppressive. “What is it that you feel you need to confess?” he asks. Perhaps if he can settle the matter for the priest, the storm will subside.

Alfred throws a glare back at him. “Well gee, I’ve only been traveling around the desert for three months with a hungry sex demon who refuses to be exorcised in my backseat. What do you think?”

Arthur blinks bright green eyes at him. “That’s not your fault,” he says. “Well… it is your fault that I’m hungry since you could quite easily remedy that, but, I suppose if you want to look at it in the church’s moral terms, you saved a young boy from a demon and now, all on your own, you are bearing the responsibility of keeping said demon from breaking free and preying on much weaker souls.”

Alfred’s whirling mind stops in its tracks, having not thought of it that way before and Arthur’s seemingly sincere attempts to console him are confusing, but strangely touching.

“I daresay for how well you’re playing the martyr, you’ll like be canonized when you die.”

And there it is, Alfred sighs internally.

“I suppose if I were a different sort of being, I might find your sacrifice commendable. It’s not an easy thing, exorcising demons. We deliberately make it as difficult as we possibly can for any who dare to try it and I know that your church demands that it be a very solitary path. Solitude isn’t your preferred state though is it, Father? You ought to become Wiccan, at least they have covens. Sometimes they even have orgies under the moonlight.”

“Seriously, just shut up.”

Arthur slinks up into the front passenger seat reclines with his clawed feet on the dash. “There’s no shame in surrendering to me, you know. I’m far more powerful than you by design.”

“Not right now, you’re not,” Alfred reminds him, and reminds himself. He’s not more powerful than Arthur, true, but God is. That’s the point: to rely on the Father, the love of Christ and the strength of the Holy Spirit… and of course, the Virgin Mary. Alfred silently calls upon her, but the reply is only an echo. He’ll lose his way again if he doesn’t go inside and confess his sins and he knows it. “And there would be shame in it,” he says more quietly.

“Why?” Arthur asks, perturbed, “because your church says so?”

“No,” Alfred says firmly. “There’s shame in giving one’s body to another when there is no love.”

Those sound like someone else’s words in Arthur opinion, but the conviction in Alfred’s voice is palpable. “Is that so?”

“Yes. I felt that shame every fucking day. For years. Say whatever you want, but it’s not like I was born into a religious family, definitely not a Catholic one. It’s not something I was taught.”

“Then what do you owe them, really?”

Alfred clasps one hand around his rosary. “Everything. You don’t get it. I guess there’s no way you could.”

Noticing how very unguarded Alfred is, Arthur can’t help but try to pry, it would go against his nature. “Try me. Humans are all quite simple creatures, I doubt it’s as mysterious as you think.”

It’s a trap. What Alfred really needs to do is go inside and speak to the priest of this church and confess his impure thoughts and gain absolution, but he makes the mistake of glancing over at Arthur and seeing the demon’s intense curiosity. “As you have… previously not so subtle hinted at, before I joined the Church, I was a… a whore. I lived in Las Vegas. I was broke. I slept with anyone and everyone, usually for money, sometimes for other things, sometimes because it felt good, and sometimes because it didn’t. Sometimes just because… I dunno, because I was bored.

“But it ate at me. I was either giving something away or having something taken from me all the time. And I felt it. I wouldn’t have said I felt ashamed at the time, but my life contradicted that. I didn’t have real friends. I never had a steady job. There was no one in my life who wasn’t using me for one thing or another. It wasn’t even the actual, you know, sex… that bothered me… I liked—” Alfred blushes, “well anyway, it was everything around it.”

Arthur nods. “Indeed. I will never understand that part I suppose—the part where you humans insist on making sex into something so transactional. It’s quite demonic, really. Of course, it makes the job of an incubus much easier that you decide to play our games.”

“Haha. You’re hilarious.”

“I am. However, you’ve not explained why the Catholic church now deserves your body instead.”

“What?” Alfred asks. “What the hell does that mean?”

Arthur shrugs with feigned nonchalance. “Well. You do not give it to anyone you desire anymore and you do Church’s bidding, go where they tell you to go, live how they tell you to live. I just don’t see how that’s any different, exactly, so I’m very curious why you think it is.”

Alfred sighs, looking out the window at the church without seeing it. “I don’t… know exactly how it happened,” he murmurs, “but I ended up in the desert, alone, pretty far from anywhere as far as I knew. Didn’t have clothes. Didn’t have water. I was beat up pretty bad. I don’t remember what happened or… or who did it. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

Arthur is certain Alfred knows exactly what happened and who did it, but he stays silent. It really doesn’t matter anyway.

“So I just started walking. I figured I was probably gonna die out there, but… well, I dunno I kinda… I kinda wanted to, but I started walking anyway. After a few hours I collapsed. And then… this shadow appeared and there was a woman standing over me. She was wearing a pink dress with a white apron and a blue shawl covering her head. She knelt down and… she brushed my hair back,” Alfred unconsciously mimics the action over his own forehead, “her hand felt so cool. She gave me water and helped me up. She tied her apron around my waist and draped her shawl over my shoulders. I don’t really remember her face, but she had dark red hair, almost black. We walked for awhile and she let me lean on her a lot. We stopped at a church in a small town and she was right next to me until the priest came out and then she was gone.

“No one else saw her but me, but I still had her apron and shawl. They took me to the closest hospital, in this truck actually, and after I got better, the priest of that parish took me in and now here we are.”

Arthur nods. “Quite a tale,” he says softly. He thinks it’s rather distasteful for any of the gods or divine deities to manipulate humans like that. Sending them visions or saving their lives by assuming the forms of miraculous strangers at their lowest moments seems far more insidious to him than the straightforward deals made by demons: ‘give me your soul and I’ll give you what you desire’, but in the interest of not pushing Alfred into putting up all his walls again, he keeps this opinion to himself. “Go inside. At least you won’t broil in there.”

Alfred raises his eyebrow. “You’re telling me to go inside a church?”

“Your energy is out of balance. It’s very off-putting. If going inside and telling some other man all of the filthy, wicked things you’ve thought about doing with a demon” with me, Arthur thinks, “will put you to rights, then just get it over with, if you please,” he says with a nonchalant tone that doesn’t quite match his feelings.

Alfred sighs and nods. He hops out of the truck and puts his shirt on, checking himself in the sideview mirror as he tucks it into his jeans. “Thank you,” he says, pulling his rosary out so it lays over the shirt.

“Yes, yes. I would ask that you remember this magnanimous gesture in the future,” Arthur says, waving him away. Father Alfred looks more tempting than usual when in any of his clerics garments. The effect is bolstered by the scent of vague memories of Alfred’s past swirling inside the truck.

Alfred had revealed quite a lot, most of it unintentionally: the tragically common tale of a beautiful young fool full of desire to please and be admired ending up in the dens of monsters far worse than Arthur. Alfred has always had an intense craving for touch, for pleasure and it had put him at the mercy of those who had taken violent advantage of him, who had quieted his pain with the poisonous balms humans often favor, leaving him desperate and dependent and, yes, full of shame.

Arthur glances toward the church doors. Despite all of it, Alfred’s soul, his life force is much, much stronger than any average human and superior in dimension and he survived it all. Even Arthur cannot deny that the Church has played a large role in that, though he disagrees with the method with which they drew Alfred in.

Arthur believes that, in comparison to the brutal hands of humans and the cloying grasp of the Church, there is a kind of purity in what incubi and succubi do with humans and he wishes one of his own kind had met Alfred a long time ago. Had he met Alfred then, he would have given him everything he wanted—all the affection and sex and praise he so obviously needs—in exchange for far, far less than what anyone else has demanded of him.

Arthur’s tail flicks about and he bites his own lip. He slinks into the back seat and nuzzles into the bag Alfred uses for laundry. The clothes are suffused with lust, Alfred’s natural vice of which he can never be fully ‘cleansed;’ his soul produces it as his bones produce marrow. Arthur wants badly to feed from both; he absolutely aches to lose himself in the priest’s gorgeous body and is increasingly certain that no other human would satisfy him at this point.

Inside the church, Alfred speaks with the priest, Father Luis, shows him his identification and Father Luis agrees to take Alfred’s confession.

The confession booth has never felt like a relief to Alfred, but rather, it is a grounding weight. The scent of burning candles, incense, and the lingering of penitent partitioners—even the lumpy, worn-out cushion—are familiar and welcome for that reason.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”

27 notes · View notes