Chapter Text
Confession begins with the (1) Sign of the Cross
Sam stumbles his way into a church, eyes blurry and confused, and then he sees the empty confession booth. He’s never done this before. Sam isn’t even sure if he’s baptized considering the trajectory of his life. What would have happened if they’d put him in the baptismal font? Sam looks at the font next to him, hesitates, and then firmly pushes his fingers into it taking the water before making the sign of the cross. Then he walks to the confessional booth and takes a seat.
Palo Alto’s got some Catholic options, but this is the one he wanted the most. This is the one that he knew he had to go to. It looks like one where he and Dean-
It’s so quiet in here. With all the traveling they’ve done, with all the things they saw in those travels, Sam has experienced every type of church the country has to offer. Once, when he was young, he did it to find the right one. The religion that would free him of this disgusting feeling. The sense of being always one hot shower away from being clean again.
He wishes there was some kind of music playing. Something soothing or uplifting. Granted, Catholicism is the second unhappiest of religions, but that doesn’t change the fact that they have some moving hymns. Sam rubs his tired eyes and leans his head back against the wood of the booth. He waits, and in the waiting he remembers. He remembers the look Jess gave him today. The look that said Sam was on his last chance. They’re going out tonight and he still hasn’t bought a fucking costume.
The penitent greeting the priest with the words, (2) “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was ….” (weeks, months, years).
He sits on the hard seat and waits for the little gate to open. When the priest speaks it startles Sam even though he is staring at the mesh waiting for it. He jumps, long-tailed cat in a room of rocking chairs, and the priest gently shushes him before becoming a solid shadow behind the privacy screen. “Are you alright, my son?”
“Yeah.” It doesn’t sound it, so Sam tries again. “Yes, sir.”
The priest’s shadow disappears again as he sits back. “Then let us begin.” It sounds ominous in the dark wood of the booth. Then again, Sam is ominous right now.
“Bless me father for I have sinned. It’s been years since my last confession.” Sam looks up to see if the priest reacts to that but there’s nothing. It’s true though.
Sam knows, logically, that he is not allowed to do this. That this is perhaps another sin he is adding to his ledger. But considering what the other ones are this can’t be that bad of one, right? The last time he was in one of these booths was almost four years ago, when he walked out on his father and brother. When he walked out on home.
And does he regret it? No. Because whether he was there with Dean or here in Palo Alto or up on the fucking moon Sam would still be Sam. The base problem would still exist. He looks at the healing cuts on his knuckles and then back up at the screen.
The penitent (3) confesses sins to the priest, who stands in the name of Christ and the Church. The priest will help you make a good confession. If you are unsure or uneasy, ask the priest to help. Place your trust in God, a merciful Father who wants to forgive you.
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“Because your sins are so numerous or because it’s been so long since you did this?” Sam is honestly amazed that the priest manages to ask him that question without sounding judgmental.
“Because the sin is so complicated.” Sam presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and tries to breathe. He’s starting to shake again. Vibrating right out of his fucking skin, until the thing that boils and breaks inside him comes out again. Until he is the monster Jess stares at in horror.
“Then let us start with not the sin, but the part that hurts you the most. Tell me, my son, what is hurting you?”
“Why the fuck would that matter?” Sam growls it, wishes he hadn’t, immediately apologizes and receives an affirmative hum from the other side of the mesh.
“I’m not sure if it’s that I betrayed someone I love, or that I scared someone else that I love.” Sam looks up at the screen almost hoping to see the outline of the priest and feel the weight of his judgement, but there is only screen there. “It’s one of those.”
“Who did you scare?” So calm, so composed. Sam envies this man.
“My girlfriend. Yesterday we were.” Sam takes a second, runs through his mind what the priest is allowed to repeat to police and what he is not, and then moves forward. “Yesterday we were at this corn maze thing that she wanted to go to. You know, one of those family friendly things? We were about halfway through the maze and something just…hit me wrong. Have you ever had that? A feeling like something is wrong all around you and it’s only getting worse every second you don’t look it in the eye?” He’s almost breathless at the end of this, so it’s a relief to stop and suck in air while he waits for the priest to answer what is a wholly rhetorical question.
“Yes, of course. I have felt that way many times. But you shouldn’t be punishing yourself for feelings. I assume that something happened because of that concern?”
Sam nods, realizes the priest can’t see it. “Yes, sir. It did. An actor jumped out of the corn dressed like a werewolf. He grabbed Jess, pulled her towards him, and she screamed.” Sam looks up at the screen again in case the priest is peeking. “In that moment I really believed that was what he was, and that he was going to hurt her. And I took him down.”
“Do you mean you tackled him or you seriously harmed him?” Still no judgement.
“I was raised by a very proactive father who believed in offense being the best self-defense. I swept his legs out and then started punching.” Sam’s hands start to shake again and he modulates his breathing, four seconds in, four seconds hold, six seconds out. He keeps it up in the deafening silence from the priest before moving on. “After a minute it became mutual combat, but that doesn’t make it any better.”
“Were the police called?” A flash of the shadow again.
“No. The owners of the corn maze said since it was a no-touch event and their actor grabbed her they were going to let it go and send him home for good. Which only made me feel worse.”
“It sounds like it shouldn’t.”
Sam lifts his head. The outline is now right there. “What?”
“Son, I am a very big fan of Halloween. I have been to many of the local attractions. The no-touch policy for actors is ironclad for a reason, and if the young man in the werewolf costume was willing to break it just to touch a female guest he should not be at that haunt anymore.” Even when comforting him the priest sounds neutral.
“Oh. I didn’t. I didn’t think of that.” Sam picks at one of the scabs on his knuckles idly and then catches himself and stops. Dean used to slap his hands when he did that.
“It’s good to feel guilty for hurting someone else, but it’s important to remember that sometimes hurt is justified.”
Sam nods. He is intimately familiar with the concept that hurt is justified. Hasn’t he been doing just that for four years? Hurting because he is, at his very core, the wrong in the world.
Following the confession of sins, say, (4) “This is all I can remember. I am sorry for these and all my sins.”
“But was that all?”
Sam looks up at the outline. He stares at it for a long time. And then, silently, in the seconds that it takes for him to put together the actual sentence he composes the entire thing he can’t say.
You see, father, I abandoned my family. I have spent my entire life disappointing my father and knowing that there is a little sliver of him that knows I am to blame for my mother’s death. I betrayed my mother’s memory by refusing to gain vengeance for her. I killed her too, although I don’t know how. I am certain, beyond a doubt, that I am the reason everyone that is supposed to love me is miserable. I have moved in with a good woman, a strong woman, but I didn’t choose her for the right reasons. And most of all, father, you see I have the most impure thoughts you can imagine. Probably a few you can’t too depending on your exposure to the secular world. I have thoughts of my brother naked, spread out below and above me. I have thoughts of him loving me, loving me the most, loving me so much he’ll abandon his principles and his duties and his family to be with me and just me. I love him in a way that is hungry and angry and I can’t stop it. I can’t even try to slow the poisonous and dark spread of my love for him. I want to, I want to be happy, I want to be a good child of God, but I don’t think I can be. It’s driving me mad, father. This hunger inside me has made me unsure of myself, jumpy, angry, possibly insane. It is driving away the woman I want to love instead, it is driving away my few friends, and it is driving me back towards the bus station I came in on. How do I stop just being naturally evil?
“This is all I can remember. I am sorry for these and all my sins.” Sam looks up again and sees the shape of the priest’s head nod in the mesh.
The priest will assign you a (5) penance. The penance takes into account your personal situation and supports your spiritual good. It may be a prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service, or sacrifice; whatever the penance, the individual is joined in some way to Christ and the cross.
“Considering your act was accidental, reflexive really, I don’t believe that you should do much penance. I have a greater punishment for you, I think. One in line with what Christ would want for you.”
Death? Sam clears his throat. “What is it, father?”
“Forgive yourself.”
The penitent will then pray an (6) Act of Contrition. This prayer expresses true sorrow for the sins confessed. This prayer may be expressed in one’s own words or one may use one of the formal prayers of sorrow.
“My God.” Sam’s voice cracks and it sounds less like an address and more like a cry for mercy. “I am sorry with all my heart for my multitudes of sins. I have failed to do good time and time again. I ask for your forgiveness, and that you receive my sincere atonement and recognize my penance paid. Please. Please help me to sin no more. Please help me to move on with my life. My God, have mercy on me.”
The priest, acting in the person of Christ, will absolve you from your sins by saying the prayer of (7) Absolution. As the prayer is ending, the penitent makes the (8) Sign of the Cross and responds, “Amen.”
“May our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, through the grace and mercies of his love for humankind, forgive you all your transgressions. And I, an unworthy priest, by his power given me, forgive and absolve you from all your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Sam makes the sign of the cross. Thanks the priest quietly. Starts to get up and then stops when the throat on the other side of the mesh clears. He turns slowly, suddenly full of dread, certain that this is some kind of terrible trap.
The priest will express some (9) words of praise and blessing.
“My son, I understand that you are penitent, and faithful. I see in you a yearning to be holy. God is a powerful force for helping us to be stronger in our faith and stronger in our spirit. But God can only do so much. We live in a secular world that is no longer a safe place for the faithful. Sometimes, to deal with that disparity, we should look also to secular solutions.”
Sam stares at the mesh, confused, panic sweat already cooling on the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” And he is, and he doesn’t.
“Everyone could benefit from a little therapy.” The priest sounds like he is handling a Faberge egg. Sam sees red. He nods, once, tight, and then turns and storms out of the church. Not because the priest is wrong, fuck Sam has shopped around for something affordable to a scholarship student with no family backing and no health insurance, but because it’s exactly what he would have told Dean.
The penitent leaves, completing the (10) assigned penance.
Sam gets back in time to clean up, wash the dried sweat feeling off in the shower while thinking of how Dean used to stand outside the bathroom asking Sam if he’d lathered every inch of his too long hair. When he’s done he gets dressed, hands shaking, and then comes out of the bathroom only to see Jess in an intensely sexy little costume. She looks so good. She looks like Dean.
They go out, see friends, Jess only visibly embarrassed once or twice as she cringes at Sam’s lack of social skills and he continues to tumble down the black hole that is his own insides. They drink, they laugh, he tries to pretend but Jess can see it and he can see that she sees it.
He goes to bed, aching, on the side by the door because that’s the one he was never allowed. Sam certainly cut his nose off with this one. All the self-righteous justifications of it are gone at this point. Left completely alone to argue with himself Sam is capable of finding solutions to his problems that don’t include never speaking to his only remaining family. But it’s too late to take that back now.
Sometimes, when he’s sleepless like this, Sam will start to go over every town and hunt he can remember. He will catalog the thing he hated the most so that he can remember Dean without the accompanying ache. He’s just started this, beginning with the hunt where Sam learned monsters really existed, and then he hears it and his eyes fly open. Just a little sound, tiny, out in the living room. Nothing that would bother anyone sane, but Sam hasn’t been sane since he turned fourteen.
Jess sleeps through Sam rolling out of the bed and moving slowly through his home advantage darkness. He spots the window open, just enough, breeze blowing the shade. Sam stops, waits, a predatory animal in its lair. This is it. This is the terrible thing that’s been coming. The penance Sam really should be paying.
A shadow darts across the doorway and Sam is now certain. He moves forward quickly, stepping to the side of the door he knows the shape will come out of. He strikes first, surging up behind the shape and grabbing it, turning it around, and the fight is on. They go back and forth, trading blows, mostly blocking one another, and Sam settles into the fight. Was he always this comfortable in violence? Was this all he ever was?
The shadow gets him, takes him down to the floor, and just before he is about to strike its throat a familiar voice says, “Whoa, easy, Tiger.”