#cloudedflowers

"Ah." he hums lamely. Something like a smile tugged at the corners of Dr. Robinavitch's mouth, making the younger man snap himself out of it. He clears his throat. "Yeah! Ye-yeah. Got it. Great. Good. I'm.. thank you again for.. Ah.. trusting me, I suppose, I'm-"

"Hey", the other sighs with amusement, his hand coming to clasp down on Dennis' shoulder. Squeezing, shaking him lightly. Dr. Robby's palm is hot, heat seeping through Whitaker's shirt. His nape prickles. "You're okay. I have my reasons. You're reliable and too polite to pull one over on me. I fear Abbot's gotten too comfortable with me."

"Okay", Dennis huffs breathlessly. That hand is still there. Still warm, still gripping, still.. "Uhm, Dr. Ro-"

"Oh-kay!", the man cheered a bit too loudly, making his freshly appointed MD flinch. He takes his hand off of him, subtly wiping his sweaty palm on his hip as he slowly starts stepping back. "I know you're gonna be fine. No complicated shower or appliances, you'll figure it out, oh and.."

The bike. He's walking to the bike. He's gonna climb on his motorcycle and leave and Dennis is going to go home to Trinity, pack some stuff, then head out to Dr. Robinavitch's place. For three months. He's gonna climb on his motorcycle and leave him alone there for three months, and if he doesn't come back-

"Dr. Robby?", Dennis couldn't bite his tongue. He couldn't, not with the nausea absolutely wrecking his gut. He's always been too feeling - the boy who couldn't kill the bug, who loved the farm animals and gave them names. Not knowing better when he'd find their stalls empty, again and again. He never asked.

He's going to ask.

"What d'you mean by.. by uhm. The.. 'if you don't come back'?", he mumbled under the rumble of the bike's motor. Dr. Robinavitch glances at him, not yet putting the glasses on. "Huh?"

He's going to ask.

Dennis swallows and steps closer. He couldn't raise his voice now even if he tried. He must've given him a look because the way the man hesitates, glasses mid air. His nape tingles.

Please come back. Whatever you do, come back. I'm not ready to see you go. I've just started getting along with you. I admire you. I'm worried about you. Please come back. For me.

".. Have a good trip!", Dennis calls over the motorcycle's rumbling. For a moment they just stared at each other. Like coals under his feet, he continues, "You've earned it. Drive safely. I-I hope.. you'll have more to teach once you're back. Or.. even learned something new yourself. I'm.. I.. look forward.. to that. I'll- we'll! M-miss you. Sir."

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

Dr. Robinavitch stared at him even longer. His hands still frozen mid motion. Dennis almost worried he overstepped when the man burst out in laughter. Putting his glasses on and shielding his gaze, he reaches out yet again. Landing a few heavy pats on Dennis' back, making him stumble.

"Don't miss me too much, Dr. Whitaker. You're capable on your own." Dr. Robinavitch snickers. ".. You have my number." he reminds him, his hand subtly pressed between Dennis' shoulder blades before pulling away.

Whitaker's rattled to say the least. The keys dig into his palm, hot and slick with sweat. The smell of copper. Or is it the blood from gnawing on his lip so much? He couldn't be sure anymore as he steps back, watching Dr. Robby roll out into the driveway before putting his feet up. The motor roars, and in an instant, he's gone.

The empty parking lot space.

The flames screamed around him, deafening and full of rage. He deserved this. This was his sin and his to endure.

He can't see - it's so bright and hot that his eyes remained shut. And still, despite it all he could feel it. Blood. On his hands, his face, as it cooked into his skin. Forever the tattoo of his soul. Guilty. Killer. False Preist. Devil Wolf.

There was no point in prayer. No one would hear him here. He was alone, not unlike he's always been. It's a promise, firm and final. "You were never meant to win."

There was something so simple about that truth that Jud felt almost relieved. Yes. He's fought his whole life trying to find his place, trying to do right by the one who was there for him, always. But he let Him down. Time and time again, the priest was reminded that he was weak and human. The worst kind.

And much like a dog, he'd never get up from the floor. He was to remain forever curled up at the foot of the bed, His warmth close but much too far. No, he was for the shadows and the monsters under that bed. Lurking and beckoning him. The mutt, dirty and lacking manners. Never trained and he flinched when He spoke.

For a moment, Jud had deluded himself into believing he would be granted a place on the mattress. Nuzzling His ankle, assured of His love.

God loved him alright. Enough to punish him for his faults.

Something like a breath. Then a dull thud. Jud's forehead cools over as he resigned himself to what he had known deep down would always happen. Cast out. Unwanted. Alone.

"Son?", a sudden voice rang out.

The darkness seemed to shrivel around its commanding presence.

No, not unwanted.

"Jud?", again, the dark spots washed away like ink in water, "You alright?.."

Not cast out.

"It's alright, son. Hey, hey, you're alright. 's probably.. You must've had a bad dream. Hey. Here, I'm here."

Not alone.

Jud's eyes fluttered, glassy and bleary against the low light as he noticed he wasn't holding his own head up. It was a pressure against his nape, and a sharp, pulsating ache gnawed at his shoulder.

He made out a shape with each dizzy blink, somewhere above him. A cool sensation on his forehead like a rag. So damp.

"Christ- ah, uhm, sorry Jud, you understand.. but you're positively soaked with sweat.."

The sensation left again and Jud couldn't help but whine. The fire still licked and bit at his limbs like a phantom and the chilling touch was like a balm to him. He was the selfish heart. He wanted out of the fire he deserved to burn in. A whimpering mutt that crawled into bed despite being cast out of the room.

".. Okay." the voice sighed. Jud knew it. Deep, masculine. Scratchy due to the low tone. Round. But one thing stood out most between those descriptions. Safe.

It was because of that why he ultimately sunk into their hold as the cold blanket returned to his forehead. His breath that he hadn't realized was stocky and sharp now started to relax. His limbs, tight and ready to spring into action grew loose again. His white knuckled fists met smooth, soft texture and he held onto it. Perhaps this could conceal his claws. A devil wolf. He, the devil wolf.

But those whispers stayed far now, so far he almost couldn't hear them anymore. The new voice had long drowned them out. Scratchy, low, safe.

Blanc let out a long, suffering sigh.

Jud had fallen right back asleep on the floor. In his arms no less.

He wasn't really sure what happened.

One moment, he had been watching Cy's videos that the man had posted on his YouTube. He'd analyzed Wicks' last service, gone back to the video of Jud threatening him. Basically every one he could find that featured Jud. But the consensus remained the same. None of the flock seemed to be all that keen on the new addition to the church. The only ones that really sprung out to him where the Monsignor himself and perhaps Martha. Cy was in the run, considering his was the perspective these videos were always taken in. The description, the titles, they were his work.

Then suddenly, a whimper. Blanc must've not heard right. He rewinded the video. Again, only at a different moment this time. Jud's leg suddenly extended out with a flinch, hitting Blanc's thigh.

The man clicked his tongue, about ready to gently but firmly swat his leg away.. But then he saw Jud's face.

The young priest looked utterly terrified. And with every following whimper and jolt it became obvious he was having some sort of nightmare.

At first, the detective contemplated waking him. But the decision had been done for him when his careful hand reached out. Without even touching Jud, the man wound and flinched again, and tumbled off of the bed. Having seen the trajectory, Blanc was able to at least catch him halfway, hold off his head from slamming into the nightstand.

Jud was much too sleepy to truly comprehend what happened. The fall didn't seem to faze him. Holding onto Blanc's vest, the man all but nuzzled his sweaty forehead into the palm offered to him and fell right back asleep. Huh.

Curious. Blanc would have to put his research on hold for the meantime to try and solve the mystery on how to get the lanky priest back into bed.

A middle-aged man, dapperly dressed, with a pep in his step. An atheist, the priest determined after just a few questions.

At first, Jud thought the man was simply a visitor, or even a tourist. Someone wanting to appreciate the architecture, judging by his offhanded comments about the rafters. But he could tell immediately - the measured, exaggerated steps, his shoulders drawn tight. The stiffness of the man's limbs that he tried to hide behind winding and swaying like a stage actor across the thin red carpet that stretched itself along the isle between pews.

This man would never set foot into a church if he could help it. And yet, here he was.

Something about him had intrigued Jud. A harmless little mystery. He was clearly neither a frequenter of this church, nor of this town, if his almost obnoxious accent was anything to go by. But with everything going on, the younger man was almost too eager to distract himself with an honest, heart to heart conversation, so he gave into the visitor's tangents and stabs at religion.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wanted to believe Jesus sent him - to remind Jud that he was a priest, he was a guide. That minds weren't rigid and could be changed, that his situation, as dire as it seemed, was fixable. The first conversation with him left Jud shaken with an euphoric warmth in his chest. A gentle, sizzling spark of hope. The sun shining on the back of his neck and head through Our Lady's windows like a soothing caress. Or a searing kiss.

Jud has had his faith tested many a times.

Killing a man does things to you. Sure, the guilt and self-loathing. The sickness you feel for the people that don't see your wrongdoings. The resigned shame for the ones that do and condemn you for it.

It changed Jud. In the agony of it all, both inside and out, he'd turned to Christ completely. Never quite stable anywhere, his relationship with faith had been blurry at least until he finally found his release in God's grace.

Yes, he was a sinner. Yes, he was guilty. But guilt and shame was never the end. He realized he could, and deserved to, grow from it and nurture his heart that had been rotten and broken for so long. Make it into something that could produce a rhythm. Love.

It also protected him. When he'd aimed to become a priest, Jud did it primarily out of love. To share his salvation with people who needed it just as badly as him. To catch the ones that were falling into the hole he'd clawed himself out from.

But he was also aware that by becoming a priest, he would deny himself intimacy. He'd grown wary of touch ever since that incident, every accidental brush or well meaning pat making him jump.

It was better that way, he told himself, lest the baser, human instinct in him threatened to take over again. No one wants to hold a murderer with affection and grace. It was not something meant for him.

And then came Benoit Blanc.

Weathered, theatrical and a man much too tactile man for comfort. Testing Jud's faith like nothing else had in a long time.

Before he knew it, the detective hired to solve this case - which clearly tried to frame the new, tattooed priest with a dark and bloody past - was dissecting Jud's old, overgrown walls, feeling at the bumpy stones for that secret entrance lever.

A single spark. Blanc's hand hovered his shoulder for a moment as the priest rubbed his tired, shaky hands down his face until vivid colors and spirals sprung out behind his eyelids. Then the firm and heavy weight came down, a gentle clap, one two times. Jud could feel the hesitation in the palpable distance between each pat. As though to linger was to admit. To acknowledge that Jud had neither flinched nor pulled away.

Finally, Blanc let his hand come down to rub the man's shoulder assuringly. Telling him to get some sleep. His hand seared into Jud's shoulder. The friction - a single spark.

Yeah. He needed sleep, desperately so.

He felt it still there, even in the car. In Jud's drowsy mind, along with the biting disappointment of the RF footage failing to absolve him, the detective's hand left a ghostly weight on his shoulder long after it was gone. He hadn't yet recovered when they reached the rectory and his hand opening the passenger door was hindered from escaping. Blanc's grip on his wrist pulled the door shut, the motion nudging their shoulders together. Two sparks. Jud's breath hitched as he stared at the detective, his rambling barely intelligible to the poor, sleep deprived priest. Get in his head? Get it?

Where he usually would've attempted a polite request for distance, Jud was unable to stop his mumbled retort - "You're freaking me out now". Blanc remained undeterred.

If anything, the priest's meek and guilty act only fanned the flame of his interest. Every second they spent together, friction. Jud felt like he was burning through all of it, subtly, curling at the edges of his soul like paper. The embers eating their way through until they would reach his heart.

He relied on that heat. When the world around him was so damp and cold, Jud was just about ready to leap into the detective's perimeter to keep warm. He was ashamed. He was slowly but surely catching on fire.

The police station. He's made up his mind, staggering through town in the rain. He would be cold, frozen. God had taught him this lesson - to be cold, clean, sterile. But the second he stepped inside, the heat nearly consumed him. Blanc's hand was steady on his arm, Jud stumbled along before he realized it happening. He protested, but all his justification died in his throat when the detective seized his nape. In an instance, silence. Another spark.

He'd resigned himself to this. Merely sparks, it was all he could have, and he knew that Blanc knew. The man was calculated not only in words and profession, but in feeling too. He fluctuated between closure and discipline, friction and distraction. He dangled his affection like matches in front of the nicotine withdrawaled addict that was Jud. He wanted to burn. To be seared.

Martha had been the true culprit. The poor woman - she knew her purpose in this world and had been terrified she'd lost it. Wicks would've killed her spirit, hadn't she gone after him first.

Jud understood. With all of his burning, frozen heart that curled at the edges, he understood. His one purpose, the thing that transcended his selfishness and guilt - to serve. He would live his whole life to serve.

So when he held the dying woman in his arms, absolved her of her sins of desperation, Blanc had delivered to him - not a spark. The flame. Like hot wax, eating into his shoulder, a brand of comfort. Assurance. He knew then, Blanc understood as well.

When the ambulances had come to take Martha, the reporters slowly filed out and the fractured flock dispersed in quiet devastation, only they remained.

Jud sat on the ledge of the entrance to the church. Blanc had stepped away to discuss with Geraldine. Once she had retreated to her car, he turned around. Jud could immediately feel it, his gaze like needles pricking his skin. It was itching to ignite. Promptly rising from the cold, stone step, he let his feet carry him back inside. The cold stone walls were like a sanctuary to him, a cool, airtight space to snuff out the sparks.

No luck. Jud could hear the echo of the detectives shoes coming to follow. His hands flexed at his sides as he walked down the isle. The priest had to recenter - go back to the familiar, the things he was good at. Perhaps hoping, if Jesus were to stand by him, he could resist the way his body ached to burn. But as he knelt on the steps leading up to the alter, he could barely get through the 'Our Father' prayer when he could feel Blanc standing right there behind him. And despite the man's firm disbelief, he'd taken the lesson he learned from Jud and he had grace for him.

Blanc waited for him to finish his prayer before reaching out to grasp his shoulder again. The priest had to bite back a weak sound as the spark shot out from Blanc's fingertips. Up his neck, down his arm, down his chest to seize his lungs. He watched as the man stepped around him, one of his cup toed dress shoes perching on the first step. The hand on his shoulder gripped, squeezed, then pulled away to gently hold out his knuckles against Jud's temple - where a manifestation of his stress jutted out, a vein, fluttering frantically.

"Jud?", he heard him rasp, the echo barely carried down the hall. "How.. are ya feeling, Father?"

Jud could only huff out of faint amusement at this graying man who seemed to come straight out of a murder mystery novel, calling him Father. And while he knew the reason and didn't mind it, he shamefully preffered his name on Blanc's tongue.

Oh, his tongue.

Jud, ever slow and careful, slowly reached up towards the detective's hand. It was like a thousand ants crawling over his skin. He itched to burn. Wrapping his long fingers around Blanc's wrist, it devastated him to feel the man tense up. But Jud needed this. He needed to burn.

"Father-", Blanc began, but the priest interrupted him with a croaky plea.

"Please, Blanc", he hiccuped, "I need this. Just- only my face. Please. Please t-", and he hesitated, lips trembling around the words. "Please.. touch.. Just.. touch my face. Please. Please. Blanc. Need-, n-need-"

He heard the other man utter some sort of quiet complaint, but it all faded away when he felt Blanc's wide, hot palm flatten against his cheek. Jud's breath hitched, then shallowed. His fingers shook around the man's wrist before tightening into a desperate hold, he turned his face to chase the heat, the friction. Across his forehead, his chin, his other cheek. Ignite, ignite, ignite.

He could hears Blanc's voice, low and distant, a vague silhouette of the man coming down to crouch at his level. A second hand tentatively reached for his jaw, cupping his head beneath his ear. The wall - old, crumbly. Jagged rocks with overgrown ivy. The detective has been skimming over it for a good two days, trying to find that secret entrance. The lever. A loose stone, perhaps. He found it.

With a weak and broken whimper, Jud ignites. A single spark, then two, then four. He burns.

He told himself, it had started with pure intent. But finding himself sobbing into the man's palms, the same palms that set him alight with the age-old human desire of affection... It was too much to ask, he knew.

But perhaps, if Blanc was so inclined.. Feeling the man's thumb rake through his locks above his ear, Jud dares to hope he might be.

Let God be merciful to him, just for today.. Jud could be human.

He's seated by the fireplace, nursing a glass of whiskey. It was fine, admittedly, for what it was. He hadn't expected anything fancy, then again he didn't expect any liquor in a holy place like this. But perhaps their God was merciful.

In the background, he's listening to the scratch of Jud's pen as he writes down the events of the past year. For all that insistence that he is definitely not a writer, the young priest seems to be having little issue. Benoit reaches across to the poker to nudge at the glowing coals a bit, lure some life out of them.

This was the perfect moment to ruminate, he thought. Yes, he should be going over the case in his mind, turn over every stone and look into every doorway. Yes, he should.

Why, then.. Is he still listening to Jud write?

The ckanky clunk. The red thread. The RF interference, if somewhat mistimed. Something about that old, hateful coot that allowed him to retain a dedicated and devoted flock of sheep even through his fear mongering doctrine. The dirt on Jud's knees. His perpetual hunch. The oppressive air of this whole place. The priest's squinty eyes.

This just won't do.

Another sip, a pleasant burn down his throat. He stares into the coals.

And frustratingly finds his mind entirely blank outside of that scribbling sound. He pretends not to notice when Jud's pen lifts and finally drops on the table. Having listened the whole time he knew the man would occasionally take a break for about five to seven seconds, not more, so he knew Jud was finished.

Only when the priest rises does Blanc react with a faint startle, clicking his tongue as he watches the younger man approach. "Ah! Thank you, thank you very much, Father. Now let's see..", he hums, taking the pages into his hands a little too urgently while flicking his glasses out of his pocket and putting them on. Anything to get his mind off of the sound of Jud's body weighing down the couch cushion.

Jud isn't sure what to expect.

Judging by the man's grave, focused expression, he wouldn't have to worry about Blanc reading out loud. That for sure would've put him to sleep.

Only when the papers are snatched from his fingers and he slouches back into the cushions does he realize it's already too late. He sinks into the couch, the quaint crackling fireplace casts a dim orange glow across the room. It makes him think of a distant memory of his even more distant childhood. The parts he hadn't fought to forget. The old Goldie that always slept by the fire. Jud couldn't recall how often he'd laid down beside him. He didn't like sleeping in beds. He laid with him when he eventually passed. He still remembered settling beside him that night on the carpet and waking up to the inexplicable feeling that he was gone and that the body of golden fur beside him was all that : a body. Flesh and blood.

Jud finds himself reclining. Shifting and sighing. Dozing off between staring at the coals and staring at Blanc's cup toed shoes. Recalling the sound of their echo as the detective struts around in the church. He stares at his silhouette, that one stubborn strand of hair that often struck out. It bounced with every thoughtful twitch or exaggerated flinch.

He wonders what the man thinks. Of his story. His writing. If he could spot the lie. Despite insisting he couldn't write, Jud did embellish some of it with sentences he feels rather proud of. He sheepishly hopes Blanc might enjoy it and chooses not to think of it further than that. It could wait. He could wait.

For just a short while, Jud could feel content in this pocket of homey peace between all the hectic and trouble of the day. He's tired. And he allows himself to rest.

Also he reminded me so much of Patrick (Challengers) here. Like yes it's Josh O'Connor so his smile is the same but even the body language and the way his grin slowly spread... Mr. O'Connor I want to join your relationship as a respectful spectator. Like a dog. Or something. Let me be your dog.......... PLEASE..........