Chapter Text
I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.
+++
Cardinal Lawrence can work miracles.
He always has.
His birth was an easy one. He was his mother’s second child and she had demanded an epidural for him. She raved afterwards about the ease of the process, how well she recovered afterward, and assured her friends that a second baby would be easier than the first, and sang the praises of pain medication. She held Thomas in her arms like a point of pride and smiled at him. “I swear,” she says, “it didn’t hurt at all.”
Thomas’s sister is rambunctious and wild. She sprints through the fields and forests around their house, tumbles down gravel bridleways, falls through rotting wooden fences, and tears her clothing on the loose nails. Thomas, four years younger and clumsy and shy and scared, follows after her, dogs her steps, and grasps her hand whenever she deigns to let him hold it. She comes home covered in dirt and with holes in her shirt and briars in her hair and smiles, without a scratch or a bruise or a cut.
“Aren’t you blessed?” her mother grumbles. “One of these days, you are going to fall down and split your head open, Good Lord.”
“I don’t care!” she exclaimed, happily and childishly defiant. “I don’t care! It never hurts for long.”
Thomas is a crybaby. His mother frets over him. He trails after his wild older sister and gains bruises and scratches while she goes unscathed, and he whimpers and cries in her arms and then still insists on following her out the back door the next day, if their mother lets him. Some days, she doesn’t.
“No,” she says at once. “You are not bringing Thomas to the creek. Under no circumstances.”
Her daughter stares up at her, one hand holding on to Thomas’s determinedly, her lower lip jutting out. “He wants to see!” she defends.
“Not without an adult, and I can’t today,” she sighs. “It’s dangerous, baby. Thomas doesn’t know how to swim. What would you do if he fell in? What would you do?”
Thomas is six. He’s too big for his sister to carry, but small enough to be swept away by a creek. His sister wavers. “But it’ll be fun, and he’ll miss out,” she wheedles with less passion. “What’ll he do all day around here?”
Their mother huffs good-naturedly. “I imagine he’ll keep me company,” she says, turning to her gentle son. “Grandmummy and Grandpa are visiting tonight, baby. Do you want to help Mummy cook dinner?”
Thomas doesn’t have many words. He nods.
His sister disappears out the back door with a goodbye, her mother’s words following her out to be careful, to be home before five. Thomas holds her hand and they stand together in the doorway, waving together until she is out of view.
“She’ll be okay, Mummy,” Thomas murmurs. “And I didn’t really want to go, anyway.”
She loves them. She loves them both so much. Her wild girl and her easy baby.
They dance together in the kitchen while she cooks and Thomas helps where he can, and entertains and keeps her company. Thomas tends to be solemn, too somber for a child, and she worries about him. Their priest has only good things to say about his behavior, and mostly bad things to say about his sister, comments that make her smart, but she worries for him. She worries that he will struggle to make friends in school, and that he is too serious, but he still giggles with her and toddles after her, and she prays to God that He will take care of her baby.
They are making soup. She is cutting onions. The radio is loud and they dance together on opposite sides of the kitchen, Thomas ferrying potatoes between the cabinet and the counters, two at a time, one in each of his small hands. The knife slips on the papery onion skin and she gasps before it touches her skin. Both of her hands fly into the air, pulling away from the knife so quickly that it spins off the counter and clatters between her feet. She notices two things first: Thomas on the other side of the kitchen, far out of reach, and then the blood pouring from her thumb down her wrist.
“Mummy!” Thomas screams.
She kicks the knife away before he gets close, but she feels woozy at the sight of the blood. Thomas races to her. She feels too weak to resist when he, tears already in his eyes, reaches up. He takes her hand in his, pulling with childish concern. His brow, already more deeply furrowed than most children’s, lowers in fear and concentration as he brings the wound into his view. His mother tries to pull back, murmuring soothing nonsense, but her words tremble and her breath comes quickly.
(And Thomas is scared, he is often scared, but this is the first time Thomas sees fear in an adult. He holds her hand in front of his face and sees where the skins split and the blood pools forth. He doesn’t have to think about it.)
She watches dazedly as Thomas suddenly yanks her closer and kisses her bloody palm.
She snatches her hand away with a shocked gasp, emotions caught between disturbed at the sight of blood on her son’s lips and wavering affection for his attempts to comfort her, mostly startled, but Thomas lets go easily this time. He gasps as well, his free hand flying up as his eyes overflow with tears.
“Mummy,” he says, and the tears pour down his cheeks. He thrusts his own hand into the air between them. “Mummy, it hurts!”
“Oh, oh no, did you- Tommy-” Her head swings around as she searches for the cause of his pain. But the knife is across the kitchen, lying innocently under a cabinet. She sinks to her knees and takes his hand, parental instincts kicking in as she checks the hand he is waving through the air and peers at it, searching for injury. Thoughtlessly, she raises her other hand, bloody, to his face and goes to wipe away his tears before she freezes. Thomas sobs, throwing his arms around her and pressing his bloodied face into the curve of her neck, and over his shoulder, she stares at her hand, raised in the air, not returning the embrace.
It is still covered in blood. She feels dizzy. It runs down her arm, has stained the frilly cuff of her elbow-length sleeve, and drips onto the floor. And then, the blood stops dripping. Stops gathering. Stops seeping from her skin, because her skin is unbroken. As it should be. The cut that had run from the tip of her thumb down to the meat of her palm has disappeared. Slowly, shaking, she raises both arms around Thomas, who clutches her front innocently, desperately. She uses her right hand to press tentatively on the bloodiest part of her hand. No pain. No pain at all. She searches with her fingers around her crying toddler but finds nothing. She wipes away the blood as best she can and sees nothing. She lowers her hand to her jeans and scrubs down, hard, wiping away the imprint of her son’s kiss, but there is no pain. No cut. Nothing.
Thomas sniffles, squeezing her tighter when she stops responding to him. “It hurts,” he repeats.
It takes her a long time to find anything to say. “What hurts?” she finally asks, sitting in front of him as stiff as a stone pillar.
Thomas wiggles and then pulls back. He raises his left hand between them and spreads his fingers out. “It hurts,” he insists, and she feels ill looking at her bloody baby, but it is her blood. There is no wound on his palm either.
Slowly, almost as though she thinks he might disappear or explode, she wraps her arms around him again and pulls him to her neck.
+++
Thomas joins the church as soon as he can. He asks specifically for placement in Italy. His mother begs him not to go. He tells her he must. He feels, in his heart, that it is true.
Thomas’s parents are Catholic, but neither were particularly devout, and his sister easily left the church behind when she became an adult, without guilt or wonder or even concern. She just left. Thomas, consumed by riotous, relentless guilt since his earliest memories, doesn’t understand her. He envies her, of course, in quiet, sinful moments of reflection, and during prayer, when prayer is difficult and hard and unrewarding. She, likewise, doesn't understand him. She is confident, strong, steadfast. She believes the world is as it is, and God is as it is, and she can move forward on her own path. Thomas relies on, requires, something more.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding,” he reminds himself, kneeling before his bed, although his parents stopped reminding them to say their prayers years ago. “In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.” He breathes deeply. Lets his breath fill the room. It becomes part of the prayer. “It will be healing to your flesh… and refreshment to your bones.”
He feels God. He feels the presence of God in his life. In his body. In his hands. In his mother’s body and her hands, and his sister’s, both of their bodies, which are entirely devoid of scar tissue and free of all wounds - the greatest blessing, miracle, he will ever perform. A hundred blessings, over and again. Thomas joins the church because he feels guided to it. And because he is afraid.
His gift is strange to him. He does not need to pray to call healing from his hands. He healed his mother and sister as a child before he truly held a concept of God in his head, much less in his heart. Thomas’s faith grows, but it wavers, and he sins, but the gift remains. It is easy. As easy as breathing. Only it never stops hurting.
He hides. His mother and his sister are his only allies in his lie, their participation unavoidable. They fear for him. He fears for himself. What might happen to him if anyone finds out? Who would take him - a church, a government, a laboratory? So they hide him, and although it tears Thomas apart, for the first many years of his life, he tries not to use his gift. For their sakes. But, sometimes, he cannot resist.
Perhaps this is why his mother keeps his father’s illness from him until it is very late. His father, who never knew, anyway. Who, Thomas thinks, would have brought his only son to the Vatican the second he learned, no matter how much his mother screamed and clawed and fought to hold on to him. His father’s faith was steady in that way. He believed in a right and a wrong, and in the immutable power of the church. His mother protected Thomas and his sister from the unquestioning, uninterested strength of that kind of faith.
Thomas is not sure what he believes. But he does.
His faith feels separate from his gift. That is the truth. But he can find no other answer, and in his fear, he desires stability, he desires doctrine, and he desires guidance. He does not believe that these are bad things to desire.
He clutches his mother’s hands. “I will be careful,” he says, “but I have to go.”
Sarah Lawrence clutches him, and when he is gone, she prays for him.
+++
His mother dies while Thomas is in Italy, and perhaps he should have expected that. His sister folds her arms around him at the funeral, both of them orphaned, but she does not say the obvious - that if Thomas had stayed, this might never have happened. They both must think it. It is impossible to avoid such a thought. It haunts him. She forgives him, and forgives herself for thinking it, and asks him to stay, but he tells her that he must return.
“I believe it is my calling,” he says earnestly. “I believe that. I feel God - I feel God everywhere. I see Him in everything.”
Thomas visits three hospitals while he is in England, with his sister and without. He goes to A&Es. He tries to surreptitiously watch patients to find easy cases to treat, but he does not know how to identify people he can help without revealing his gift, and nothing terrifies him more than revealing his gift. But for his mother, for her memory, and the memory of all that she gave to keep him safe, he tries. He is responsible for three known miracles in the counties surrounding Birmingham - a young girl who broke her leg can suddenly walk and jump and skip again, a veteran with chronic pain from his limping posture can suddenly walk upright, a screaming baby who cannot tell anyone what is wrong (whooping cough, Thomas deduces before the nurses arrive, because he had made the wise choice to study medicine in school alongside theology) is suddenly quiet and happy again.
He will leave these miracles behind. He wants to be reckless about it. He thinks of his mother and prays, hoping to hear her, for the entire flight back to Rome.
His Bishop welcomes him back with a careful, “Deacon Lawrence,” and prays for his mother with him. Thomas has great affection for the man. He considers telling him his secret. Something in him calls out that it is time, or near enough to it, anyway. He cannot hide in the shadows forever, and he doesn’t wish to. He wants to help. He believes it is his purpose.
A sign comes in the form of a woman, who should not be reduced to the status of an omen. She comes to their church late at night, screaming in a foreign language that is nonetheless universally recognizable as a call for help, and Thomas and the Bishop arrive shortly after a Sister and guide her inside and sit her down. She is hysterical, and Thomas and the Bishop know enough to keep their distance, but the Bishop sends the Sister away for a first aid kit because the woman, a refugee most likely, has been attacked in the streets and is bleeding profusely from a knife wound on her arm. The Bishop murmurs prayers and comforts and instructs Thomas on how to contact someone who can translate for the woman, but Thomas’s eyes stay fixed on her.
His mother is dead, has been dead for a month now. But Thomas still sees her every day. He sees her in his sister. He sees her in this woman. In every woman. He sees her in everything.
He reaches out, already praying for forgiveness for the way the woman flinches, and sets his hand on her shoulder. He has enough experience schooling his pain that when the profusely bleeding wound on her arm seals itself in less than a second, none of what he feels reaches his face. The burn of it. He smiles at her, gently, as her mouth snaps shut.
He forces himself to watch as her eyes fill with awe.
+++
The Bishop brings him to the Vatican. He seems dazed. He can barely look at Thomas, the young man he has sheltered under his wing for months now. Thomas leans his forehead - a high forehead, already balding, his sister teases him - against the cool glass of the car window and feels every tremble and dip of the road in his skull.
This is, actually, how he has always imagined meeting the Pope, although it takes several days, and several other meetings, before he finds himself sitting in the office of the leader of the Universal Church, head bowed as low as he can force it, exhausted and terrified beyond belief.
“You claim to hold the power of God and Our Lord Jesus Christ,” the Pope says.
Thomas shakes his head fervently, eyes fixed on his hands folded tightly in his lap. “No,” he croaks. “No, I have never claimed that.”
His Holy Father, Pope Paul, asks Thomas why he revealed himself and why he kept himself secret before. He tries to explain. The Holy Father tells him that fear itself is not a sin, but fear that prevents correct action is one. He tells Thomas he should not fear the church if he has nothing to hide, and Thomas agrees. He asks Thomas if he is willing to prove his gifts before the discerning eyes of the Vatican, and again, Thomas agrees. He tells the Holy Father that he wants to live a life of service, but he does not know how.
The Holy Father promises to help him.
The trials commence. The bishop leaves. Others are brought in. Testimonies are given. Proof is required. Thomas is left in a room beneath the apostolic palace, and he spends upwards of eight hours a day in desperate prayer. The tests occupy the rest of his time.
They learn a lot. Thomas’s gift is not limited to humans, although somehow it feels more outside the natural order to heal the hind leg of a dog struck by a car than to do the same for a person. He cannot regrow limbs or organs. He comes to think, and the others agree, that Thomas can restore a body to its natural state, however vague and unsatisfying that explanation sounds; he can expel invasions such as viruses and bacteria and bring bones, skin, and muscle together. He can disappear scars and cleanse the lungs of smokers. In some cases, he can restore sight to the blind and the Deaf, but not in all.
A blind man, blind from birth with undeveloped ocular nerves, receives Thomas’s prayer without knowing why he has been granted an audience with the Pope and those closest to the Pope, but he is a fervently devout Italian Catholic and is reverent in the opportunity. Thomas can do nothing for him, but this man - it makes his stomach churn that he was brought here under false circumstances, but also he has no wish to raise false hopes for his faulty gift - is all gratitude. “For we walk by faith, not by sight,” he says earnestly, blinking rapidly and squeezing Thomas’s hand so tightly that his fingertips start to tingle. Thomas imagines that it is something he has said - or been told - many times.
A young woman, equally devout, and Deaf from a young age but not birth, is brought in. She is all cheer and brightness, but she is equally uninformed. Thomas tours the Museums in the morning with her and her interpreter, and in the evening brings her to meet the Pope and together they say a prayer with her (the Pope insists that he must be present for any potential miracle; perhaps, Thomas thinks uncharitably and asks forgiveness, he wants to be able to claim credit. He dismisses the thought. It is sacrilegious, and besides, is that not why he came to the Vatican in the first place?)
Thomas takes her hand, but he finds nothing to heal within her other than sore feet from a day of walking, and he is relieved that he is not forced to change her request. He soothes her soles, doubling the ache in his own feet, although he is now very used to being on his feet for long days, and it does not bother him. He is becoming very used to pain, although it never dulls; he wonders if he feels the pain in proportion to how it is experienced by others. The Dean of the College and the Pope’s Secretary of State, the chief parties in charge of these ongoing tests, argue about why Thomas was not able to heal her, they say, and eye him suspiciously, because she was born hearing and in others cases it seems that Thomas’s gift was to restore what once was. A perfect state. Like Rapture. Thomas, who had watched the woman greet her family in sign language in St. Peter’s Basilica, all of them chatting at once, happy and thrilled and fulfilled, has his own suspicions, but he cannot put them into words, and he does not voice them.
The trials go on.
Cardinal Lawrence cannot resurrect the dead. “Some miracles are reserved for the Lord,” the Dean says. Thomas thinks they are relieved when the dead man stays dead. Or, he might be projecting. He feels unclean and unworthy. That night, he takes a shower so hot that his skin stays a bright, angry red for hours afterwards, and the delicate sheets on his bed feel like sandpaper.
One of the few people they bring in with foreknowledge of his true purpose there is a young priest from Venice. Tedesco, they tell him, suffers from recurring stomach ulcers. They want to see if Thomas’s abilities will cure only his current affliction, or solve whatever underlying problems cause them to continuously rupture.
Tedesco smokes like a chimney and keeps his small eyes locked onto Thomas whenever they are in a room together. Thomas tries to avoid his gaze when he can. Tedesco is not the kind of man he would have preferred to reveal his gift to, if he had a say in the matter, but of course, he doesn’t. If Thomas were allowed to pick the candidate or know anything about them in advance, it would affect the validity of the results. That makes perfect sense, he reminds himself.
Tedesco arrives on the morning of the test. He reports that he has been up all night vomiting blood. Thomas, dressed in plain clothes, is supervised by a dozen men older than him, all of them ordained, many of them highly positioned in the church. They watch as he reaches out and presses a hand to Tedesco’s shoulder. Tedesco watches closest of all.
Thomas’s gift does not give him knowledge, exactly. It does not tell him what precisely is wrong - which specific bone of the twenty-seven in the hand is broken, which muscle in the leg has been strained or torn, what the scientific name of any given bacteria is. But there are broad strokes. Tedesco’s stomach is bleeding. Thomas heals the wound. Tedesco inhales. There is a foreign entity in Tedesco’s body. Thomas’s brow furrows slightly. He keeps his eyes closed so that he does not have to see Tedesco’s narrowed eyes. Foreign invasions - infections, he translates for himself, from the innate awareness that he has been given of what has been changed about this body from its natural state - are more difficult for Thomas than mending bones and sealing wounds, even more difficult than replenishing lost blood and healing scars, but it is still the work of seconds to eradicate the infection. Thomas coughs, once but loudly, as his stomach suddenly roars without complaint, but it will pass. He lets go of Tedesco before he opens his eyes. There was a blister on the heel of the priest’s right foot, but Thomas had left it alone.
They ask questions. Endless questions. He answers honestly. He has to. This is his purpose on this Earth, he is certain of it, to do this duty for mankind through the guidance of the church. But he is exhausted.
He understands their diligence. At night, and at other times, Thomas is locked into a well-appointed apartment with two bookshelves and a television, without a phone, or windows. He is left alone for long periods. They do not allow him to contact anyone outside of the Vatican for obvious reasons. It is their responsibility to understand these miracles. It is Thomas’s responsibility to subject himself to their diligence.
He is lonely. He is bored. The boredom exhausts him while driving him to distraction. The refugee entered their church in mid-spring, just after Easter, and so the days literally grow longer around Thomas, although he does not see the sky most days. He prays. He weeps. He gives confession every opportunity he is given and admits to his weakness, his longing, his doubt. He recites his Hail Marys in penance and prays that he will be stronger. He reminds himself over and over again that he understands.
The Sisters who deliver his meals and clean his room, sometimes while he stands awkwardly in a corner and watches them, not wanting to be in the way, are occasionally his only company for days on end. Sister Agnes, in particular. She makes it a point to speak to him, to hold a conversation over something - anything - even though the only things Thomas can ever contribute are tidbits from the books he has read or the films he has listlessly watched. She gives him news of the outside world, and he hungers for it. She begins to seek out news of English affairs in particular, for his sake, and he thanks her on bent knees.
She forces him up and leaves him, always.
He does not know what the Sisters have been told. He imagines that from an outsider’s perspective, it must seem like he is a prisoner, if a voluntary one. He reassures himself that he is nothing of the sort. But he also keeps company with the Pope, the Dean, and the Secretary of State. Sometimes, they dress him in fine, white clothing.
His Holy Father, Pope Paul, is stern. He warns Thomas of the sin of lying, of perjury and dishonesty, and prays over him, already asking for God’s forgiveness of Thomas’s sins should he be found out as a fraud. He does not touch him. But he is also, at random and bizarre moments, kind. He gives the directive to have Thomas’s favorite meals prepared for him during the second month of observation. He permits Thomas to write letters to his sister, and later to Aldo, his closest friend from seminary school, and warns him in advance that his letters and the replies will be read. He tells Thomas that if he is true, then he is the most miraculous thing he has ever witnessed.
Thomas craves the company of the Pope, who is straightforward and not cruel. He dreads the doubtful, sneering mouth of the Dean, the hungry, eager expression of the Holy Father’s doctor, and the growing awe and adoration of the Secretary. He misses his Bishop, whom he has not seen since he was brought in. He is told that he is also under watch to see if he is colluding with Thomas.
He tells them the Bishop knew nothing. But his words have proven to mean nothing.
+++
During the fourth month, they prepare Thomas for an exorcism.
“It’s possible you wouldn’t even know,” the Dean says. He seems amused. Exorcisms are increasingly rare. Thomas wonders if he even believes such a thing is possible anymore. “You’ve been granted many freedoms and close contact with high-ranking church officials. It would be a good ruse, you have to admit.”
Thomas doesn’t admit anything. He is always being watched. By now, they know that he can do what he claims to do. They have all witnessed it, although none amongst the Curia have yet experienced it themselves. The trick now, they tell him, is to determine where his gift - his ability - comes from. If it is good. If it is holy.
“If it can be replicated,” the Dean admits once.
Thomas is given a strict regimen of prayer. He adheres very closely to it. There is little else to do. They bring in theologically trained psychiatrists and therapists whom he speaks to often, whom he must tell his entire life story to. He detests it more than anything else. But he is honest. Honesty. It is what is required of him. Sister Agnes brings him tea in the evening, and he takes it with shaking hands and still does not sleep. He has begun to have terrible nightmares. He begins to worry that he may be possessed - the Dean is right, after all, how would he know? - and so he submits as lowly as he can, but he cannot go much lower.
The exorcism occurs at the beginning of the fifth month. They will perform three versions on him, on three different days. He is dressed in robes blessed by the Pope. He is sprinkled with Holy Water. He is brought into the center of St. Peter’s Basilica, a building which he visited when he first came to Rome and which was so beautiful that it brought tears to his eyes, and he is tied down firmly to a table placed under the dome, in the center of a church built in the shape of a cross.
They pray over him for hours from the many suggestions in De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam. Thomas lies, restrained, holding his muscles as still as he can so they will not mistake any accidental twitch or shuffle as a sign of a devil within his body rebelling. He aches - he never knew it was possible to feel such pain from lying still - but he commits himself to not showing or mentioning his suffering, lest they think it is demonic. He is given the Eucharist on his back. He is careful not to let it choke him.
They look him in the eyes, bent over his supine figure, and address him, “Vade retro, Satana.” He keeps his eyes open, watches the clerestory windows overhead, and prays with them.
At the end of the three days, he is untied for the last time and helped to his feet by the deferential Secretary. A nun is led into the church. Sister Agnes. She has had the fortuitous unluckiness to have cut herself slightly in the kitchen. Without explaining why she has been brought here, the Pope calmly asks Thomas to demonstrate if he still retains his power, or if it has silently fled from him along with the presumed Satanic presence.
“May I see your hand, Sister?” Thomas asks her, his throat dry and cracked from disuse and little water.
Silently, she offers her hand. Again, his fingers tremble. The cut, at least, has stopped bleeding, but no one has bandaged the wound.
Thomas feels unprecedented relief when it closes. His knees nearly give out on him. “Thank you, Sister,” he murmurs.
Slowly, she takes her hand back. Around them, the Cardinals bustle and discuss like clucking hens - next steps, always next steps. Sister Agnes looks at her hand, and looks at Thomas, and the men around them, and the table with its restraints and his bare feet and bruised ankles.
She folds her hands against her stomach and prays under her breath. She does protest when Thomas sidles forward and joins her.
Still, that night, Thomas is locked in his room again.
He is not released until the end of the sixth month, when he is reunited with the Bishop and ordained so fast it makes his head spin. He takes his Holy Orders without complaint. He is assigned within the Vatican and is suddenly free, holding the key to his own apartment, which he can barely stand to lock the doors of at night, but eyes follow him wherever he goes. He calls his sister and she screams at him over the phone for five minutes before he bursts into tears and thanks God, thanks God, thanks God to hear her voice for even five minutes more.
He reunites with Aldo.
“But what happened?” Aldo insists despite Thomas’s poor attempts to rebuff the questions. They sit together in a cafe, outside, al fresco. Thomas had insisted on it, and when he hesitated at the doorway, like he often does now, foolishly, Aldo had gone inside without a word and ordered for both of them. Now he grips Thomas’s wrists tightly across the table, leaned forward, eyes desperate and scared. “Thomas, what on Earth? Your letters - I was so worried.”
“And I’m sorry for that.” He holds Aldo just as tightly. “I am. But there was nothing to be worried about, it was only - only - I cannot say much, for it was in the service of the Holy Father, but-”
“And did the Holy Father hold you prisoner?” Aldo hisses, but quietly, and both of them glance around. They are in Rome, a block away from the Vatican, and they have both dedicated their lives to this. “Because - because, Thomas - because even if he is the - there are still laws, still-”
“No, Aldo,” Thomas says. “No, nothing like that. I was only sequestered for my education, for my position - training. I spent most of my days praying and was allowed few distractions. That is all.”
“Position,” Aldo repeats dumbly, and Thomas winces, because even when lying on behalf of the Pope, he does a poor job of it. “Position.”
Aldo never accepts his lies, but he accepts Thomas. One day, Thomas thinks, he will know, but the Holy Father controls that. He has pledged his life to the Throne of the Holy See and the Curia, and Thomas is twenty-three, but he imagines he will die here, or at least at the Pope’s side.
He starts as personal secretary to the Secretary of State but they promote him quickly, first to Monsignor. Aldo, without help from God or a personal relationship with the Pope, rises just as fast, and Thomas watches him with awe and guilt and gratitude, and asks for forgiveness for all three.
Thomas spends most of his time in the heart of the Curia. The Holy Father commands his ability. On his weekends off, Thomas leaves the Vatican without asking permission. He visits hospitals, like he did after his mother’s funeral. He learns how to be subtle and discerning. His soul calls out for him to help whomever he can, and he fights against his fear to do so.
He attends to the Holy Father’s every need. Some people talk of the vivaciousness of the man, how he moves without pain or limping despite his age. Some people speak of Thomas, young but hunched on alternating days. He lives to serve. He travels with the Holy Father often and sees the world on these tours, more than he ever hoped to see. During one of their trips, the papal doctor who had overseen Thomas’s testing and trials falls ill and dies in the span of forty-eight hours. Thomas was sent home by the Holy Father but did not make it in time. He cannot resurrect the dead. He kneels over the doctor’s body and feels guilt for the dislike he felt for the man while he was alive. He prays for him, and not for himself. He will have time later to confess. This man will not.
When he opens his eyes, Sister Agnes is watching him from the other side of the deathbed.
“The doctor,” Sister Agnes tells him, her shrewd eyes watching him closely, “he begged and begged. Lawrence, bring me Lawrence, but he would not say why. Day and night, he insisted that you be brought to him. He became violent in his delirium. He was desperate to see you.”
“Why would you tell me this?” Thomas croaks.
“So you remember,” she says, and bows, and leaves.
+++
Decades of service.
His ability never wanes. Never falters. There is no space, no room in his life for anything but the church, and what it demands of him. Perhaps it is better that way. He does not have enough space as it is.
Thomas knows that he is not doing enough, and yet he fears, more than anything, being known. Now more than ever. Now, he knows what comes from being known. By the Holy Father’s grace, he can keep his anonymity. When he begs and pleads for the privilege, he is allowed to go out on his own and work by his own discretion - a miracle in itself.
He is careful in the hospitals. Though it pains him more than taking on any injury, Thomas has to be so delicate and so particular about who he chooses to help that in his worst nightmares - when he can manage to sleep, which is not every night - he pictures himself burning in Hell for eternity. Penance, for all those he walked by.
But he must help, and he does. He cannot intervene in criminal cases, lest he destroy necessary evidence, so frequently he cannot help victims of abuse or violence - he does not even know what would happen if he healed someone with a bullet wound. Would it be expelled like an infection or destroyed like a virus? Or would the body heal around it? Would his healing abilities extend to any side effects of this, or not? Thomas cannot, ever, subject unknowing people to uninformed experiments of those trials, and none of his Brother Cardinals have been shot, and so he does not know. He might never know. Another concern is treating people who have already been diagnosed - too many miracles, even in the Holy See, and someone will notice.
It is difficult to manage, but manage he does.
He finds women in ERs crying from pain and asks to pray with or for them. If they allow it, he takes their hands and soothes their stomach cramps, or eases a miscarriage, or cures a case of endometriosis before it can be diagnosed (if it ever would be - unfortunately, many of the people that Thomas can help are people whose doctors are failing them). He offers a handshake to those suffering from migraines and watches them blink in confusion first, and then relief. He favors babies and young children, those who cry and weep and scream but cannot communicate what is wrong to their frantic and desperate parents, who very often accept Thomas’s offers of prayer or comfort. Infants are the easiest, because even their more severe diseases can be explained - a fever was just a fever and it broke, and perhaps it was nothing more serious than that. The baby sneezed and coughed, but Thomas fixed their tonsillitis or rid them of diphtheria before a doctor ever saw them. A colic or teething baby may be soothed for a few days, if not forever.
Sometimes, all Thomas can do is ease the pain for a time. Kidney stones that pass with surprising ease, a non-smoker’s hacking cough that relaxes for several days, a respite from illness associated with chemotherapy that will return the next time the drugs are administered. He cannot reverse aging. He has never tried to cure cancer, and he has not attempted to restore sight or hearing to any person since the Holy Father first asked him to.
Thomas meditates on how his Catholicism, visible in his dress and foreign voice, affects these proceedings. Many times, people deny his offer of prayer, and he has to respect that, although he searches for other reasons to lay his hands upon them with their consent - a handshake of understanding, a high five or fist bump to a shy child when a nervous parent would rather not have a stranger grasp them. He understands. He attempts to administer his ability equally to all, regardless of faith. The work soothes him as much as it pains him.
It is painful.
The pain never goes away. It hurts him every time. But the pain is internal, completely. And he learns how to feel it internally without showing any sign of it otherwise. The nurses at the nearby hospitals come to recognize him, although the doctors don’t. Some of them, he thinks, might suspect that his prayers are a more powerful tool for clearing out emergency rooms than those of other priests. Not one of them says anything to him, but in the Ospedale Cristo Re and in the Clinica Samo, a few of the nurses - only one of whom wears a cross - quietly direct him to specific patients. He helps where he can.
Often, following his days at the hospitals, he is indisposed. Exhausted and ill. He thinks that if he spread out his work over more days, then the effects would hit him less brutally, that the pain would not be so entirely debilitating for upwards of twelve hours after his longer tours, but he simply does not have the time. The Holy Father and the Curia demand his attention, and he can only manage to spare two weekends a month for most of the year - one day for healing, and the second for pitiful, lonely recovery, yet again locked away in his room, with the lights off and a trashcan near his bed.
In some ways, knowing that he has become wanted, not just wanted but instrumental within the Curia for more than just his preternatural ability, is comforting. He has become well-known for his managerial prowess and his stamina. He is one of many young men in the Vatican who sprint between buildings, assisting the more elderly members of the Curia. Monsignor Lawrence officially works for the Secretary of State but is known to be a close associate of the Holy Father and several Cardinals. More than one hundred of them, and fewer than twelve know his secret, but many more know his name. Know that he is capable, efficient, and pious. A holy man trusted by His Holiness.
And that is a comfort.
Thomas is tired. He has nightmares. Sometimes, in these nightmares, he dreams that he never left the locked, windowless room where he waited for six months. Sometimes he dreams about his mother bleeding out on the kitchen floor from a knife wound while Thomas stands, pressed against the counter far away from her, too scared of the blood to come nearer.
The papacy employs a robust staff of doctors and nurses, most of them devoutly religious themselves. It is a necessity; it takes many, many years to become a member of the Curia, and they do not retire at the same age as other men. As holy figures, God’s representatives, it is important that they receive optimal healthcare. Optics are very important. The sanctimonious men and women of the church often pray for refugees and immigrants, the impoverished and the addicted, those who receive no care at all from their government, which subsidizes their own bimonthly check-ups.
Thomas works closely with the papal doctors and frequently deals with the matter of optics. The Holy Father does not want to reveal Thomas’s abilities (which is a rare relief to him; he is a tool to be used by the blessed hand of the Pope, but he is grateful not to be used bluntly, or for popularity). The Holy Father understands that. He thinks it does not matter. That the majority of the world would dismiss any claims of Thomas’s miracles as a hoax, no matter how often they were shown proof, and the rest would believe him, but call him unnatural, ungodly.
Thomas wonders if there have been others like him. Five hundred years ago, he would have been a saint. He is glad that he was born in this era.
Thomas reckons daily with the reality of serving at one man’s behest while an entire world stretches out, suffering. He prays for guidance, and sometimes feels compelled to stay on this path he has chosen, one where he can use his unique abilities to maintain the well-being of important people, who do important, necessary work on the planet. The Holy Father is a complicated man, but Thomas likes his politics. He negotiates on behalf of occupied countries, decries segregation and apartheid in the Middle East and Africa, preaches tolerance, and listens when women address him; this is the bar that is set in the Curia. But there have been worse, and likely there will be worse. When the Holy Father steps onto the global stage, he does it with firm, good intentions that speak for mercy and the advancement of all peoples. When Thomas kneels beside him and reverses his liver failure (and vomits into his mouth, and swallows), he enables these actions. This work.
When the Holy Father brings him to suffering Cardinals, or sometimes doubting Cardinals, and uses his command over Thomas to heal them, or restore their faith through demonstration, he enables them also to do the work of God in the world. To heal the sick and wounded. To build hospitals. To shelter abused women and children. To take in those who are lost, and teach, and guide towards a happier path.
Thomas struggles with his faith. He struggles with the Bible, and the church most of all. But he believes, ultimately, that in its current iteration, which is vastly different from iterations of the past, that it does good. Individuals within the system do good. Thomas lays his hands on these individuals.
Like Cardinal Angelés’s beloved niece, who falls fatally ill with pneumonia on her first visit to the Vatican, which Angelés had publicized broadly to his diocese. Thomas is woken in the dead of night and chauffeured to the Domus Sanctae Marthae. The crying Cardinal opens the door, shocked by the midnight arrival of Monsignor Lawrence when he was expecting a medical evacuation team, and does not understand when Thomas insists he be let into the room. The Holy Father arrives shortly thereafter, and Cardinal Angelés acquiesces. Thomas is let in and swiftly finds the girl’s bed and kneels beside it.
She is close to death. Sometimes, Thomas imagines that part of his ability grants him the power to sense when death is near. Sometimes he thinks this, other times he is not sure. The Holy Father is growing old. Thomas suspects that something is being kept from him. Something small and distant that he wondered if he sensed when he healed His Holiness’s liver. But God’s will be done: if His Holy Father chooses not to tell Thomas, then it is not his place to take action, not over another person’s body. Everybody dies.
But this girl is young. New to the world. She is sweating, and crying, and in pain, and she calls out in Spanish for her mother. Thomas, takes her hand and prays over it, although he doesn’t need to.
The Holy Father’s reasoning for sanctioning this visit, this use of his powers, does not matter to Thomas. What matters is the brown eyed girl who sleepily, confusedly (always, they are confused) blinks up at a stranger with sudden clarity as Thomas falls back heavily on his heels and struggles to breathe.
+++
The Holy Father dies.
The Holy Father is elected, and dies, and is elected.
On it goes. Thomas becomes a Bishop, and when the Holy Father dies again, the Holy Father is elected again, but this time, the Conclave elects a man that Thomas does not know.
The new Holy Father is from Brazil and has served his entire life in South America. Thomas has met him on occasion during his duties, both in the Vatican and in the broader world, especially when he has traveled with his preceding Popes. Aldo knows him better, which Thomas is grateful for, because by now Aldo is a Cardinal, and also knows Thomas’s secret.
Thomas was not given permission to heal Aldo after his friend’s first heart attack. He did not ask for permission, either. He simply did it. He explained through tears the secret he had held all his life. He begged for forgiveness.
Aldo has not had a second heart attack. He tells Thomas that he voted for the new Holy Father from the very first round, and admits that he is being considered for Secretary of State, but promises that if Thomas wishes to keep his ability from the papacy - the first time he has ever had the choice to do so - he will be at his side.
Thomas knows that it is not really a choice. The Dean of the College is still alive, although he cannot hold his position for longer than a year or two at most, if that. The papal doctors, the men who have led the Vatican’s and the Pope’s personal healthcare teams, have always been let in on this impossible secret, and will certainly feel morally compelled to tell the Holy Father the moment he experiences any ailment. Aldo knows as well. And there are others. Some Cardinals were still present from the time of Thomas’s trials, who prayed over him or saw his ability firsthand. Others, like Angelés, who Thomas had been directed to assist in times of injury to them or their families, a blessing, a reward for service, a moment of God’s mercy, doled out by his representative on Earth. Others still were promoted after the fact. Tedesco. Patriarch of Venice. His eyes still follow Thomas around the room whenever he sees him, always smirking, always smoking. He makes sure to tell Thomas, every time they meet, that he has never had another ulcer. He also comes to Thomas with every nick and scratch and bump and insists on receiving his care. His abilities. Thomas, though he dislikes the man, cannot deny any who ask for his help. His guilt, which already eats him alive, does not allow him to.
He tells Aldo, “We cannot allow a man like Tedesco to have access to a secret that the Holy Father does not,” and, “I was placed on this Earth to serve the Throne of St. Peter. I believe that, Aldo.”
“I know you do,” Aldo says, serious and even. They are beginning to be old men, the two of them, but Thomas feels much older. “Of course you do.”
Aldo and Thomas share the pain of a self-inflicted wound against a forearm, kneeling before the Holy Father. Thomas confesses the full and unaltered history of his services to the church - things which he has never admitted before, and feels Aldo growing tense and furious at his side. He tells the Holy Father how he has pledged himself to the Holy See, how he has always asked for guidance on how best to administer his rare ability to the flock of the world without revealing himself. He tells him that some of the papal doctors are aware of his abilities, and that he has contributed to the longevity of the Popes before him and hopes to extend this pontificate as long as is natural.
The Holy Father takes his hand and holds it. His palm is warm and dry, and strong. He is a quieter man than those who came before him. “My child,” he says, “we are all blessed.”
+++
Thomas becomes a Cardinal. He is relieved to find that he is certain of the belief that he is elevated because of his dedication to the church, and not because of an ability he was born with that he has gone more than fifty years without understanding.
He works closely with this Holy Father, but it is different from before. This Holy Father encourages and facilitates Thomas’s quiet visits to places that desperately need him. When they travel, Thomas often accompanies him as he has before, but instead of nervously keeping Thomas within arm’s reach, the Holy Father sends him out into cities. To shelters. Camps. More hospitals. Schools and nurseries. The Holy Father makes these arrangements, and then makes sure that Thomas is cared for the day after when he recovers from all the pain, all the suffering and illness and disease that he has subjected himself to feel. Dissolved from the world.
It is good work.
Thomas does not feel God in it.
He feels God in the Holy Father, who he grows to love, and to adore, perhaps more than is appropriate. But the Holy Father is good, gentle, and kind. All of the Popes that Thomas has served have been moderate or liberal-leaning, all of them working in small but crucial ways to push the church forward into a new era, but the Holy Father is beyond all of them. He is radical, they say, because he believes in the faith and worthiness of women and queer people, and lobbies for environmental reform, and enforces true consequences against those who use the church’s power for evil means. He appoints princes of the church across the globe, believing all places deserve and require people from their communities to lead them and provide them with divine guidance. He crusades vehemently against corruption within the Curia. He preaches tolerance. He loves all people. He tries to believe that Hell is empty.
Thomas sees him as a man of God, and he feels his connection to the Holy Father, but now he doubts that he has any connection at all to God himself. It is foolish. Hard to admit, even to himself, and for a long time he does not. When he touches someone, he can heal them. It is an indisputable, unexplainable miracle. How can there be space for doubt in the face of evidence like that?
Because God does not lie in evidence. Faith is not built on what he can see. For Thomas, unlike most, this is a harder truth than the reverse.
Thomas begins to feel adrift. The Holy Father begins to feel ill.
Finally, under the strict instruction of the head of the Pope’s medical team, the Holy Father submits himself to Thomas’s powers for the first time in his entire pontificate. Thomas finds himself grateful to serve in this way, a dedication that has never wavered. He has known since he was a young man, since before seminary, that his faith might fluctuate. He thinks of sin and swallows guilt and self-loathing. His life, his body, his hands have been dedicated to the church, but his mind has wandered. But this is something he can do. There is faith enough in this.
He kneels before the Holy Father, who grumbles that it is unnecessary, and takes his hand, intent. Though he does not need to, Thomas prays as he reaches out with his amorphous, untested sixth sense, looking for things he can make right, ways to help the Holy Father, this representative of God, the successor of St. Peter. He murmurs the Lord’s Prayer, hoping to find meaning in the words he has recited a million times, as he soothes every ache and every joint, every sore muscle, both tired eyes, as he reaches deeper and deeper and finds something unfamiliar and wrong within the Holy Father’s body. For a moment, Thomas’s words falter. He comes up against something that resists him - no, that is the wrong word. Like how it felt to try and heal the Deaf woman who did not need his services, or the blind man who was made how he is meant to be. There was simply nothing there to touch. But this time it is different, and Thomas knows it intuitively. Instead of pushing, he pulls, and feels it give way and surge outwards.
The Holy Father sighs, and then laughs, as if startled by the sensation of relief.
Thomas coughs.
The cough is sudden. Loud. It comes with a wave of pain, another awful cramping of his gut. It comes with a wad of blood spluttering up at the back of his throat, spraying over the white garments of the Pope in a fine mist, and a clot, heavy and thick like dehydrated drool dripping down Lawrence’s chin, which hangs open in horror. Not because of the pain. He cannot tear his eyes away from the blood on the Pope’s Cassock.
The room is silent. Then, “Thomas,” from the Pope, more shaky and uncertain than he has ever heard it. His hand comes, shaking, to cup his cheek, but Thomas resists the pressure that attempts to tilt his head upwards.
“That has never happened before,” the papal doctor murmurs.
Thomas pulls away from the holy hand touching the side of his face with fear and concern, so reminiscent of the way his mother held him once, and curls over his body, which suddenly aches down to his very bones. He is afraid.
Cardinal Lawrence can cure cancer. He can cure a person of cancer, at least. His greatest miracle yet.
Aldo is a comfort to him during his treatment, during a time when the Holy Father is both incredibly busy and when their relationship is understandably strained. They pray together often, but for months, they hardly exchange a word. Thomas has forgiven him, and absolved him of needing forgiveness. But it must still stand between them.
If Aldo suspects why Thomas, who had not been experiencing any symptoms prior, suddenly decided to get a cancer screening in the middle of the year, two months ahead of his usual doctor’s visit, he does not voice it. He gives the same quiet platitudes as everyone else - It’s good it was caught early. It will be okay. You will be okay. I will pray for you. Thomas visits his sister before he begins chemotherapy, and tells her the truth, and thinks for a second that she might strike him when her eyes well with tears. Instead, she takes his hands in hers.
“It’s good to feel pain,” she says. “It’s good to be injured, and sick, and still have to force yourself to think about other people. I didn’t learn that lesson at the same age as everyone else - because of you, Thomas - but I think I learned it more powerfully.” They have lived apart for most of their lives now. She has scars that she doesn’t want Thomas to take away. She is a mother, and submits to having him look over her children - to ease an anxiety of anything truly sinister which might linger, hidden - but demands that he leave the scratches and bruises and runny noses alone. “We’re human,” she says. “All of us. We have to feel it, sometimes.”
Being sick, abnormally, reminds Thomas of his months spent in isolation, locked away indoors and out of sight. Knowledge of the cancer spreads throughout the Curia - how could it not, when the College runs so poorly without the Dean there to oversee every action? During this period, Thomas finds and promotes Raymond O’Malley, who becomes his trusted right-hand and a phenomenal agent, but who is only a man. And that is good, as well.
During the worst months, Thomas’s illness makes him so sick that he is not strong enough to do his usual rounds throughout Rome’s hospitals. He prays for forgiveness. He hears nothing.
He has not heard anything in so long.
He goes into remission through the work of medical professionals and decades of research and dedication by people around the world, some of faith, any number of faiths, some of none at all. He begins to heal. He returns to the hospitals. Prayer does not return to him, and he cannot find forgiveness.
On bended knees, he asks the Holy Father to accept his resignation.
“I want to return to England,” he says, eyes already watery. Did he cry so often and so easily when he was young? He’s not sure. “I feel I cannot serve the church any longer.”
“Thomas,” the Holy Father sighs, “all you have ever done is serve.”
It is all you know.
“I cannot pray,” Thomas admits, shame rising above all other emotions. “I cannot - I cannot hear God. I cannot see Him. Please, I - I would like to leave. To reconnect. I feel I cannot do so within the church.” He struggles with his words but says, “It is killing me, to lose faith. It will kill me.”
A hand settled on the apex of his skull, in place of the absent zucchetto he clutches between his fingers. The Holy Father exhales, and he sounds tired too. “As Jesus said to Thomas, you know - ‘Be not faithless, but believing.’” And he bends down and takes Thomas’s hand and places it on his chest, as Jesus instructed the first Thomas to do after the resurrection, to feel his wound with his hands and see that he was really dead, and really alive. The Holy Father knows his liturgy well. But it brings Thomas no comfort.
“Please,” he said. “I - I am tired. I do not belong here anymore. I can help no one when I am in such a crisis.”
“My child,” the Holy Father says, neither gentle nor cold, “you can help anyone you wish to.”
Thomas begs. Pleads. The Holy Father denies and denies and sends him away.
He has pledged himself to this man, and the seat he holds. The Holy Father may refuse his resignation, but Thomas is an English citizen, and his sister would never turn him away - she would scream and shout for joy if he turned up on her doorstep with nothing but a rosary. She would storm the Vatican herself if she ever thought he was being held against his will again. She has warned him of this many times. He makes sure to stay in regular contact.
He could leave. But he cannot. He cannot defy the Holy Father. He cannot. Prayer, faith, God, the church, his abilities; they are entwined and diverging and Thomas feels caught in the riptide, drowning. He reaches out a hand to the Holy Father, begging him to pull him to shore, but the Holy Father only says, “Swim.”
The Holy Father dies. He must be elected again.
Thomas’s eyes won’t stop watering, but he cannot cry. He folds himself as small as he can and scratches his hands with how hard he clutches them. He utters endless, meaningless words to himself, regurgitating and vomiting beautiful words, but he has known what real prayer feels like, and it is not this. There is no comfort in this. He tries anyway. “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”
+++
Thomas puts his hand on Vincent Benítez’s shoulder. He wakes this secret Cardinal gently, feeling guilty because he recognizes the exhaustion on the man’s face, although he envies his ability to fall asleep where he is. Thomas struggles to fall asleep even when he has been awake for days, on a comfortable mattress in a dark room. Benítez had fallen asleep on an uncomfortable chair, slumped against a wall, in dust-covered clothing in an unfamiliar building in the twenty minutes it took for someone to find Thomas, his fingers still wrapped around a rosary. Thomas regrets that it took twenty minutes. He regrets that he cannot be everywhere at once.
What a foolish old man he has become.
Benítez wakes gently. He finds Thomas’s eye and smiles, automatic, and kind. Thomas believes, as he said to Aldo, that although the circumstances are bizarre, this man has a legal right to partake in the conclave, which is why he is here. As soon as his eyes find Benítez’s, sees the calm and gentleness in them, he is glad. He would have welcomed another conservative member of the Curia if they had the right to be there, but he is relieved to recognize something of the late Holy Father in Vincent Benítez with that first glance. He feels familiar.
Thomas returns his smile.
+++
Conclave.
The windows shut. The doors click closed. Cardinal Angelés seizes his hand and prays his thanks over Thomas outside the buses that will shuttle them between the Sistine Chapel and the Domus Sanctae Marthae. Tedesco smirks at him knowingly, but Tedesco would never reveal Thomas’s secret. He knows what outcome that would lead to. He corners Thomas in an elevator, makes paltry, joyous chit-chat, and when he departs first from the elevator on his floor, leaves his hand in the frame to keep the door open and cheerfully says, “Oh, and Thomas, perhaps now is the time to give a little reminder, eh? ‘Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands, and do not share in the sins of others.’” He grins, wide and sharp, finishing: “‘Keep yourself pure.’” He walks away whistling. Thomas’s hands curl into fists, and he forces his breaths to stay even.
But it is Adeyemi’s words beforehand - the claim that he should “offend no one” - that sparks life into Thomas’s tired fingers. Perhaps it was a mistake, and this is why he is punished with five votes cast for his name. It feels punishing to hear his name called out each time. He expected only one: Angelés. No other member of the current voting Curia is as devoted to Thomas’s abilities as Angelés, and Thomas had internally expected and accepted his wasted vote as it was due.
Five is a disaster. If those five had gone to Aldo instead, he would have been in the lead in the first round. Sabbadin, who doesn’t know his secret but would likely still cast his vote for Aldo anyway, looks betrayed. Villanueva, who knew the previous Holy Father before he ascended and was inducted into their secrets, avoids Thomas’s questioning gaze.
Ray tells him that the only information he could find about Benítez was medical concerns that almost caused him to resign. Thomas feels a surge of desire to reveal himself - something he has not done purposefully in years. He has no Holy Father now to direct his abilities. He could do it. He considers it. But Ray tells him that the late Holy Father was the one who convinced Benítez to continue his important mission and ministry. The Holy Father had made less use of Thomas’s abilities than those who came before him, but he was not a man who would completely deny a tool given to him by God. Thomas senses that he cared for Benítez. If it had been serious, he would have requested Thomas’s assistance.
Nevertheless, Thomas asks. That night, finding Benítez amongst the turtles feels kismet. How often has he knelt next to the pond? He asks, “And your health, how are you bearing up?”
“My health is perfect. Thank you,” Benítez says. His answer is prompt and firm, refuting further inquiry, but Thomas doesn’t sense dishonesty in it. He also does not sense that occasional feeling he has had. The reason the late Holy Father sent him away so often in his last days.
He accepts the answer easily, but is then shocked into stillness when Vincent - he asks permission to call him Vincent - tells him that he cast his vote for him. “I am not a serious candidate,” he stutters, but mostly his shock is this: he had not imagined that anyone who did not know of his abilities - his purported miracles - would ever think to cast a vote his way. The further truth, that he feels he has lost his connection to God, lost it long before the passing of his representative on Earth, that he struggles with prayer, if not specifically with faith, is easier to explain, though even under Vincent’s understanding eyes, still humiliating.
Vincent accepts his statement, but makes no claim that he will change his vote.
+++
Aldo has criticized him - unjustly, Thomas feels, deeply unjustly, because they both know that if Thomas had any desire to be Pope, he had an easy enough way of securing at least half the Curia’s full devotion. Tremblay is up to no good, and a poor actor to boot. Tedesco, though it is not a virtue, at least is open about his hostilities. And Adeyemi….
Thomas sits in Sister Agnes’s office with Shanumi, who is quietly crying into her cupped hands. He stares at the bird Sister Agnes keeps in a cage. In the bird, and in Shanumi’s muffled sobs, he hears his mother. Singing.
Only rarely has Thomas healed wounds of a sexually violent nature. In hospitals, evidence must be left behind so those people have the option of documenting and seeking legal justice for what was done to them. Often, there are no physical wounds to heal, and he can do nothing for the mind - not his own, certainly, and not even others. Shanumi has not seen Adeyemi in thirty years. There is nothing left to heal that he can help with.
He asks for her hand. She gives it to him. He prays with her, and says that he does not need to forgive her, for there is nothing to forgive.
Then he prays with Adeyemi also. Tells him he is a good man, not because he believes it, but because he hopes that if Adeyemi believes it, he might believe hard enough to make it true. He puts his hand on Adeyemi’s as the Cardinal sobs brokenly, so much louder than Shanumi in all things. There is nothing to heal here, either.
He dreams of the Holy Father that night.
+++
Each day, they pray that the Lord will guide their hands and their minds and enact His will through them. On Earth, Thomas steers this ship and fervently attempts, with every spare thought, to pray for forgiveness for his interference.
And, for the first time in his life, a miracle comes from beyond his hands.
Birdsong and light in the Sistine Chapel.
After the explosion, Aldo helped him to his feet. Cradled his shoulders. Feared for him, and ran to him. And later, when they found time alone, Aldo reaches out and touches the cut on Thomas’s forehead, among the worst of the injuries, although they are as a collective very fortunate that no larger debris struck any members of the College, and murmurs, “If you could only heal yourself.”
“That would be against the point,” Thomas says.
Aldo meets his eyes. His glasses, unlike Tremblay’s, are intact. Thomas, as he has viewed the entire event, sees nothing but symbolism in this. Though he and Aldo were wrong to cast their votes for Thomas, Aldo is paying attention, now, to what is in front of him. Benítez has spoken, broken his silence and made himself heard, and healed something wounded inside Thomas that no one else had been able to reach. What we do next. The next vote, only hours away, will determine everything. “Does it?”
“Yes,” Thomas says, firmly. “One cannot share a burden with oneself. Alone.”
“No,” Aldo says, “I suppose not.” He glances away, shaking his head, and then snorts, amused. “A Hell of a burden, though. You know, if you went out there right now, walked straight up to Benítez and all our injured brothers, held out your hand-”
“No,” Thomas says firmly.
“-you would be Pope before noon.” Aldo snaps his fingers, acknowledging what he had blinded himself to only the night before. “It would be yours. Like that. And maybe it should be.”
“We’ve already learned this lesson, I should think,” Thomas responds, voice cooling.
Aldo laughs again. “I suppose we have. Maybe I’m wrong, anyway - wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe they would accuse you of witchcraft or possession and throw you in the catacombs.” Idly, his hand drifts to the small table separating their chairs, and the familiar chessboard set up there. He fiddles with the Queen. “I’ve been wrong before.”
“We are none of us omniscient,” Thomas murmurs. “I’ve had my share of secrets. I want no more of them, if I can help it.”
“You have secrets of your own,” Aldo pointed out.
“And…” Thomas falters. Aldo’s eyes return to him, the Queen lifted. He clears his throat. “And, when I reveal my secrets to His Holiness, whomever it will be - if it is as I hope… will you - I would ask-”
Aldo grabs his hand so suddenly that he forgets to drop the chess piece. They hold the piece between themselves and indent its shape into the soft flesh of their lined palms. “Of course I will be there,” Aldo says. “Of course, my friend, my brother. And I promise to defend you from any accusations that are lobbied against you, witchy or otherwise.” He grins. “We can’t have you getting exorcised again, can we?”
It has been thirty-five years since he was exorcised, but Thomas still cannot smile about it.
+++
“Innocentius.”
God guides their hands. Or human men, making a difficult decision, somehow make the right one.
Nothing is left, in this moment, which needs healing.