Chapter Text
The man in Father Jud's face is screaming. He has been for several minutes. That screaming face may as well be the only thing that's ever happened with the way the parishioners, who all know Jud in part as a killer, an abstract yet guttural threat, start to fuzz out of his vision. The very base of his spine struggles to hold him back from the edge before going numb completely.
Father Jud's own hands put the man there, in the ring, tugged him away from the kid he'd been screaming at louder and louder. Now his opponent is leaning in of his own accord, still screaming, narrowing the whole world down to claustrophobia and the taste of pure metallic hate.
Jud swings and hears the ghost of a bell ringing over the feeling of a crunch. He winds up again and feels a million hands pulling them apart, grabbing wildly.
He thinks they must look briefly like The Creation of Adam, reaching towards each other and surrounded by angels. He knows, as he always does, that this is being recorded.
He whispers "Forgive me, father" as soon as he sees the familiar tiles of the church floor at the end of his tunnel vision.
He confesses to Geraldine before she can even tell him he has a right to remain silent. She sighs, and instead of asking any questions, she squeezes his shoulder.
He doesn't use his one phone call. He doesn't do anything but breathe in and then out, on the drive. Even prayer feels distant and inaccessible, after how fast the love in his heart curdled and landed him right back inside a familiarly-stale cell.
He must sleep, at some point, because he wakes up, on aching knees, to the sound of a key scraping a lock.
Somehow, he's being discharged.
Somehow, Benoit Blanc is waiting for him in the lobby.
Jud's hackles rise, narrowing his world to the self-assured devil in a pale pink suit. "There's no mystery, Blanc," he says before the detective can get a word in edgewise. "I did it. I punched him."
Benoit's smug yet genteel smile sours into an immediate, pinched fury. Now they match. "I have never, in all my decades of detecting, met-"
"No fighting in the lobby," Geraldine clips, shoving gently at Blanc's shoulder. She turns to Jud, not daring to touch, eyes near-desperate. "Will you please just go?"
"I did it," Jud repeats. He holds her eyes while Benoit makes a strangled scoff to his side.
"I know," Geraldine replies. "I've got your statement, I've got the video. You're out on bail."
"Blanc-" Jud starts, spinning towards the man, but this time Geraldine does put a hand on his shoulder.
"Outside," she repeats. "That's an order."
Jud marches into the parking lot, and Benoit follows.
"I could have you declared insane," Benoit challenges. "Get your admission thrown out in court!"
"You've got a lot of nerve, Mr. Blanc, swanning in here and telling me how to live my life." Jud glares at the ground and picks up his pace. Benoit has to jog to follow.
"I must admit, son, I was expecting you'd be a smidge, mayhap an iota more grateful-"
"For what, a chance to hide from the consequences of my own actions?"
"For a chance to sleep in your own bed, Father!" Blanc stumbles over a curb and curses, falling far enough behind that he has to shout. "Where are we going?"
"Back to my own bed!"
"I have an automobile!"
"Then go get in it!"
After a moment of affronted silence, Benoit dashes to put himself in front of Father Jud. Jud stops just short of barreling him over, tense enough to nearly break. He huffs in Blanc's face, feeling wild and reckless against a mirror only out of breath from exertion.
Practiced, he keeps himself from closing the gap.
"Your suffering is not going to set any broken noses. You are one of the most upstanding, patient, stubbornly righteous men I've ever met, and you've done nothing all these months but wear out your hands and knees building something beautiful from the ashes of wicked misery, and-"
"No."
With the element of surprise, Jud manages to walk past Benoit without actually having to touch him.
"Father- Jud!"
"Detective," Jud hisses back, still refusing to turn around. "This isn't a murder case. There's nothing here to solve. This is just normal, human sin. This is about forgiveness. Will you please just leave me alone to face my parish, and my God?"
"Do your parish and your God want you to walk the twenty miles back to the church to- what, to show your penitence?"
Jud stops again, counting his breaths like the rosary. Benoit slams into his back, rebounding without Jud having to so much as move his feet. He half-turns, to speak his next words at a careful volume. He fears how far his voice would carry if he let himself shout. "I haven't pushed you to come to Mass. I haven't pushed you to convert. The least you could do is return the same courtesy."
He stomps off, relieved that no other footfalls echo his own.
Jud walks along the side of the road for at least half an hour, dressed in yesterday's vestments, underprepared for the slowly-thawing October morning, before a familiar Mercedes pulls alongside him.
He's been praying the whole time, which is the only reason he doesn't immediately chuck a rock at one of the doubtless-expensive windows. He wonders if Blanc deduced the perfect moment to arrive somehow, through some calculus of emotion or some sort of fantastical hearing aid trained on his breath.
Maybe Jud is just that predictable. Just that mechanical. Just that controlled by the obvious tendencies of his human flesh.
Blanc drives alongside him for a few hundred steps before calling out, with an unnatural and put-upon sheepishness, "I was wondering if you might perhaps be in need of a ride back to your parish, or if you're still working on the god part of your forgiveness."
"God forgives." Jud sighs. "It's not up to us to work for it."
He reaches for the door handle, and carefully doesn't look at Blanc who doesn't quite hide his satisfaction.
They sit in silence. The car speeds up to a leisurely country stroll once Jud buckles his seat.
"Am I allowed to ask why it was important for you to walk, then?"
Jud closes his eyes and tries to open his heart. It's hard with the man beside him continuing to push, crowding into his head even when he thinks he's leaving breathing room. He almost growls, and scrubs at his face. "Forgive me father," he tells his hands, "for I have committed the sin of Pride."
Blanc clearly bites something back, and Jud knows it's an olive branch, and it boils his blood.
"I know... that you're trying to help. I'm sorry to rob you of that chance at connection. You've picked the most annoying possible time to do it."
"Guilty as charged," Blanc jokes with the easy air of a man back in familiar territory.
The twisting miles vanish beneath four wheels. Jud knows they don't have long. He wants to find his way back to forgiveness, nearly as much as he wants to wrestle Benoit into the mud. "Why do you care so much?"
Blanc thinks for longer than Jud would like. He wants a real answer, one he knows he'll never get, to a question Benoit probably doesn't realize he's asked. "I believe in second chances, same as you."
"You believe in the innocent," Jud corrects.
"I believe in you," Blanc replies, immediately. When Jud looks over, he can't find any indication the man is withholding the truth.
"You should visit some other time, then. When nothing is happening."
"I- of course."
Jud watches him lie, and has no way to begin to discern why.
The charges get dropped. Geraldine doesn't quite congratulate him when she breaks the news and tells him to watch his temper.
Richard Danbow formally confesses that he shouldn't have been yelling at his kid, and he shouldn't have been drinking, and after a dozen prayers, Father Jud gets to forgive him at the same time God does. They hug it out.
The next few services are smaller nonetheless, and tense. Most people don't forgive at holy speeds. Certainly not with the video of the ex-boxer Killer Priest breaking his own parishioner's nose going viral, getting remixed, dragging every gory detail of his life back onto the local news.
Postcards from Benoit Blanc start coming in, strange and sporadic things from all over the world, overflowing with meandering updates to cases Jud otherwise never would've heard about and absolutely no questions or personal updates. Los Angeles, Dubai, St. Petersburg, Belize. Each one drives home that he doesn't even know where Blanc lives, that he'll only ever be interesting to the man when he's a problem, that he owes nothing but gratitude to one of the most insufferable and tempting men he's ever known.
He leaves a drunk voicemail, the next time he almost punches an angry man and takes his shaky ass to get shithoused in his collar instead, and then he tries to forget about it. Forgetting the hazy half-memories of ill-advised drunk decisions is a hopeless errand, but he tries anyways, because God loves him and he has a job to do and there is no other option.
He calls up Bishop Langstrom to give a routine confession. He writes a homily about the fish and the loaves over breakfast. The unerringly judgy Shannon Myrick comments with a sniff on the shock of seeing a priest drinking at the devil's pub.
He lays awake trying to stop circling around the blanks in his memory of the drunk dial. The days crawl on.
He holds service, administers the sacrament of communion. During confession, Richard Danbow talks pointedly about drinking, inviting Jud to the twelve-step program that's meeting in the rectory building on Tuesdays. Jud tells Richard that he's never been an angry drunk too quickly, means he'd like to be a little less angry-sober, and then he has to find it in his heart to apologize to Richard. Again.
A bit more than a week after Jud called, with no warning, Benoit Blanc shows up at the dollar store. Dressed to the nines, sticking out like a sore thumb, thoughtfully inspecting the novelty sunglasses.
Jud sighs, but can't quite help the smile that creeps onto his face while he waits for Blanc to set a pair of flamingo-shaped spectacles on his nose, inspect himself in the mirror, and pretend to be surprised who's behind him.
"Well, look at who providence has put in my path today! Father Jud, shopping for sundries!"
Jud pulls the man into a hug before he can protest. Like always, after one stiff moment, Benoit melts.
"How on earth did you know I'd be here?"
"I'm merely perusing your township's fine selection of eyewear. They don't have these in the big city, you know."
Father Jud pushes Blanc back by the shoulders so he can look him in the eye. "Five Hail Marys," he pronounces.
"I- beg pardon?"
"For lying."
Benoit successfully reads the glint in Father Jud's eyes and claps him on the shoulder as he returns the absurd glasses. "I shan't be doing that, even in jest."
"Has your pilgrimage left you hungry, then?"
"Now that is a most excellent idea, Father. Whereabouts might we be able to break bread? Have ourselves a little communion?"
They catch up over diner sandwiches, sort of. Jud tells Blanc about the congregation, and Blanc tells Jud about his cases. They take pot shots at Cy and joke dangerously about all the things they could have done--but didn't--with Eve's Apple.
Jud starts to talk about a wedding he's been invited to, of some old friends from seminary who were called down a different path, and Blanc responds with yet another story of daring mystery.
"Do you ever take any time off?" Jud asks, once there's been an appropriate pause.
Benoit busies his hands straightening his teacup. "Ah, the work keeps me busy. I have rather a hard time putting it down, I suppose."
It's at least half admission, but Jud clocks it for the deflection it's truly acting as. A nod to a deeper level of intimacy, from a man who's steadfastly refusing to go there.
Of course this was nothing but a check-up. Not urgent, merely obligation and curiosity. Jud realizes all at once that he misses having friends.
Blanc leaves town after lunch, never mentioning the drunken invitation, never setting foot so much as on the church grounds, and Father Jud supposes that's a pretty clear answer as to why Benoit isn't going to be his.