If she experiences guilt, what are the signs that she feels guilty? Does she avoid eye contact, goes quiet, tries to avoid what she feels guilty about? Does she feel guilty for the action and how it affected others, or for being caught? Can she ignore her guilt? How easily is Lucia's judgement or perception generally swayed by her emotions and state of mind? Is she most always cool and level-headed, or is she prone to rashness or switching stances quickly?
// lucia’s catholic inspiration doesn’t stop at aesthetics: though her faith is far more delineated by compassion and equity rather than the fear of punishment, for your soul or otherwise, there are in fact ways to err as a mourner, or to find yourself in strange moral positions, or to downright sin. and though it might be correct to already say that guilt isn’t something strictly tied to what you believe in religiously, lucia is pretty much a nun, and her life experience first and foremost dominated by it.
that being said, guilt does terrible things to lucia. is eye contact avoided? certainly. it does hurt to be seen when she feels guilty. does she go quiet? yes and yes. she might pray, her voice low enough that only she may hear it. she cannot and will not refrain from thinking about her actions, because the awfulness of the feeling needs to submerge her to drowning. she might grab her hair, tug at her locks. being caught is just. if she isn’t on the moment the event happens, she might simply be the one to announce what she’s done. the knowledge of the repercussions flowing from her choices is what wounds her the most, where the knot of regret truly lies, but- but!- she is not so saintly to not consider, as well, the matter of what all of this makes of her. if she sins, or if she commits something that is guilt-creating, then she has done something wrong, and if she has done something wrong chances are she had to truly consider it, and then choose it regardless. so what does this mean for her? if she could cross that line, what is she? how easily can she do it again? how easily will she forget? everyone is worthy, every single one, the praeficae say, and this includes you, and this includes her. mistakes will never deprive you of compassion. this does not make the impact of her own guilt easier. she thinks: I most of all should be clean. and to make herself clean again she cannot ignore the stain.
guilt is nothing she can shrug off or catacomb somewhere inside herself, and for this she fears it. it’s far too alive and burning. it manacles and anchors her. at least there is comfort, to her, in knowing that there are ways to absolve herself: mortification of the flesh through flogging, ablutions from the hands of her sisters. she can purge her mistakes, and she can hemorrhage her weights away. there are ways to return herself to how things were before her actions, formally. but that’s not quite how expiation works, is it? when are you truly free from remorse? when are you truly, sincerely allowed to let go again? do you deserve it? what did you do to deserve that freedom?
right and wrong are matters of utmost importance to lucia. by personal temperament and professional choice she is a woman who tends towards control and coolness, which means that generally speaking emotions do not have any claim on her judgement. but there are times that threaten this, and those times are the most likely to turn into something she’ll feel guilt for. and here’s another thing: she’s, at least not yet, not done any action that she would consider damning in that way. lucia would tell you that though it might be hard and painful at times she has always remained true to what she believed just. when she left her family to join the mourners she did not feel guilt, when she wept over the dead bodies of people who in life were monstrous she didn’t. so far nothing has stained her in that way. she has done right things. which is a way to say: she is utterly terrified of the day she might do the wrong thing that will make her feel guilty, especially when so far from her monastery. who will absolve her? what will she do with it?
