Chapter Text
Father Nanami sat in the dark confessional booth and looked down at his hands, tracing the lines in his callouses absently. He often wondered how it was that he came to be here, but he always came to the same conclusion. The devil you know….
"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession."
Two. It'd been two weeks. But Nanami wasn't about to correct a school girl, so he said nothing.
"Last week, I tripped my brother on purpose and laughed when he got hurt," Kasumi murmured from the other side of the screen. Not really much of a sin, but still, Nanami wasn't about to interrupt.
"Also…at school…I cussed at my friends. I called them the B-word."
"Is that so?" Nanami hummed.
The trials of children were always more interesting than their parents. They had yet to learn how to navigate their worlds. How to know right from wrong beyond what they were told, but from what they'd experienced. To a point, it was almost enviable. It was much simpler to sympathize with a child trying out swears for the first time than a man who cheats on his wife week after week.
"They embarrassed me," Kasumi mumbled, "they locked me in the janitor's closet and refused to let me out until I told them who my crush is. So I did and when they let me out, I just got so mad I cussed at them."
Nanami's jaw clenched hard, all too familiar with the cruel pranks of childhood.
"Do your friends often do such things to you?" he asked, frowning down at his hands now.
"Well…sort of. They push me around a lot and make me tell them stuff or do stuff for them. But they hang out with me when no one else does…."
"Hm. I'm glad you've told me your sins," Nanami replied softly, trying to keep himself from saying what he really thought, "your tongue can be a powerful tool, but can also cause irreparable damage. If you are angry, I advise you take a moment or two before speaking to better consider your words."
"Thank you, Father," Kasumi replied slowly.
Nanami could sense her hesitation from the other side of the screen, like she wasn't fully satisfied.
"Is there something else you need to speak on?" he pressed gently.
"…Was I wrong to be angry, Father? They were just playing around, but I feel so hurt and I'm worried I won't be able to forgive them and that God will be mad at me because I'm supposed to forgive everyone."
Nanami ground his teeth as he considered how to answer. He mustn't let his own personal feelings get in the way. He was the objective confessor. In persona Christi. He would not let his own experiences into this.
"All emotions have purpose," he started slowly, turning his hands over to inspect his knuckles now in the poor light. "It is not a sin to feel anything. As for forgiveness…forgiveness does not mean we allow people to continue to hurt us, only that we process the hurt and then let it go. The human mind is designed to remember pain to protect us from future threats, but it is not meant to control you."
His own failure to forgive those who'd slighted him sent a disruptive shiver up his spine. Liar. Hypocrite. Sinner. But would God forgive him either for what they'd made him do back then? His own supposed friends and their prank had probably tarnished his soul so badly, no matter how many confessions he heard or masses he gave, he would likely be barred from entering the kingdom of heaven.
He wondered if Gojo and Geto ever confessed to what they'd done to him to their priest. He certainly never did. And it ate him up every day he sat in this booth. Hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite…
"Say three Hail Marys and work towards forgiving yourself for your actions before you begin to forgive your friends. While God absolves you of your sins through the act of confession, you must absolve yourself too. Don't hold on to this feeling. Experience it, learn from it, then let it go."
Then, because he couldn't hold it in any longer—
"And consider the value of the friendships you have. God would not want us to surround ourselves with people who will seek to harm us, but will grow with us in faith. While it is good to forgive, you don't have to be friends with people who have hurt you."
Kasumi sniffled in the booth next to him.
"Thank you, Father."
Nanami felt sick to his stomach as he listened to the girl recite her act of contrition, but he raised his hand all the same, absolved her, and sent her on her way.
"Nope, we're not letting you out!" Gojo cheered from the other side of the locked door. "If you want to be scientific so bad, then conduct the experiment! If you're right, nothing will happen!"
Nanami pounded his thin hands against the door, the cold sweat on his brow making his hair stick to his forehead.
"Let me out!" he cried. His voice cracked as he yelled, which just made Gojo and Geto laugh all the harder at him.
He glanced over his shoulder at the ring of salt on the floor, the only light to see by given off the candles dotting a crude pentagram drawn in chalk on the floor of his dorm room. They'd done this while he'd been in class, then locked him in his own room and refused to let him out until…until….
"Go on, Nanami," Geto crowed in his deceptively soothing voice, "if you don't believe in it, then there's nothing to fear. You can't actually summon a demon if they aren't real. Just read the passage we set out special for you."
Nanami swallowed hard, his whole body beginning to shake. Of course demons weren't real—none of it was. He only attended this school because it was supposed to be a good education, not because he actually believed in God. But Gojo and Geto both couldn't believe an atheist would attend such a prestigious Catholic school. They were determined to convince him that he was lying to himself. They'd hassled him a lot, but this?
"You have to let me out eventually!" he howled as he ground his forehead into the door, as if he could phase straight through the old wood. "Someone will come looking!"
"Oh yes, someone will come looking," Gojo purred back. "And when they do, we'll tell them all about how you locked yourself in your room to practice devil worship. You'll be expelled immediately. But if you just do what we told you to, we'll help you clean it all up and no one will ever be the wiser…."
A cold shiver ran down Nanami's spine.
"Y-you're lying," he huffed in tentative disbelief, "you wouldn't do that. I wouldn't…I wouldn't get expelled."
"Hmm I don't know, you are pretty brazen about not believing in God…wouldn't be the biggest leap of logic," Geto hummed.
"And that book is pret-ty genuine," Gojo laughed, "I stole it from my dad's collection of artifacts."
What little hope for escape Nanami had quickly drained out of him at that. He wasn't stupid. He knew Gojo's family was famous for producing some of the only exorcists officially recognized by the church. The book they'd left in the center of the pentagram might very well be a genuine article of black magic. He couldn't be caught with it, even if he'd been set up. No one would believe him over those two.
No, he wasn't stupid. He didn't believe in gods or demons or angels. Still, there was a difference between quietly keeping to your personal philosophy and blatantly spitting in the face of others. Even being in the same room as all this stuff made his skin crawl. But would anything really happen? Or was this all just a stupid scare tactic?
"Fine," he snapped. "Fine! What do you even want from me?"
"Just read the page we left open for you!"
"Nice and loud, so we can make sure you're not cheating."
"We'll let you out as soon as you're done…."
The flickering shadows cast by the dripping candles taunted Nanami as he turned to face the evil symbols painted on the floor of his room. He couldn't believe he was really going to do this. But he couldn't afford to be expelled, not after his parents had sunk so much money into this school to get him here. For them, he would commit this atrocity and hope that he was right and that nothing would truly happen.
"Okay," he breathed to himself before crossing the room. He stepped over the salt line, careful to keep from disturbing any of it, before picking up the book from the floor.
It was all Latin—words he didn't understand the meaning of and, frankly, would probably have butchered the pronunciation of if he hadn't studied the phonetics of that dead language this past summer. He was shivering hard now, but he reasoned it was just his irrational fear expressing itself as excess adrenaline in his system. He was fine. He could do this. It didn't matter at all.
Nanami was careful as always. He spoke slow and loud, enunciating each nonsensical word to ensure Gojo and Geto could hear him clearly, so they wouldn't be able to say a thing about how well he'd performed the onerous task they'd forced upon him. And for a beat, nothing really did happen. He breathed out a sigh of relief as the room remained occupied by only him. But when he turned with the book still in his hands to yell at the door, he stopped short.
There was no door. There was nothing at all. Outside the ring of salt and light, it was all blackness, like someone had strung a curtain all around him.
Panic began to rise in his throat. No, no, no… this had to be another trick! There was no way any of this was real—
"This is a first."
Nanami let out an involuntary gasp as he whipped around to see he wasn't alone after all. A tall man stood in the very center of the pentagram now—only, he wasn't really a man at all. Sure, he looked human enough—he wore a well-tailored black suit like any other salary man and had short, styled black hair that was slicked back from a pale, angular face—but he also had horns. Jet black horns that curled back from his head like carved ebony. And his eyes… irises that were too black against the stark whites of his sclera, like flecks of carbon in a sea of pearl.
No. No, none of it was real! It was a prank. Yes, a shockingly elaborate prank with a lot of fancy prosthetics, nothing more.
The other tilted his head like an owl at Nanami, his black eyes wide and unblinking as he studied the quivering student in front of him with his neck twisted at an impossible angle.
"You're frightened," he said softly, his low voice somehow gentle and like ice water at the same time.
Nanami swallowed hard and shook his head in denial, his unkempt hair falling forward in his face.
"How much did they pay you to do this?" he forced out.
No way. Not a demon. It was all a trick, designed to play on natural human fear and instincts. He was certain Gojo and Geto had just found some stranger and bribed him to do this—they had enough money from their families to do something like that. He had just been in hiding somewhere until Nanami had his back turned…yeah….
The other finally blinked before righting the angle of his head with a jerk. Nanami felt his heart pick up as he lifted a hand, the fingertips blackened as if dyed with ink. His nails were more like talons—no! Prosthetics! Obviously. Anyone could go to a cosmetics store or nail salon and get something that wicked looking. He wouldn't believe it. He wouldn't be fooled, no matter how much the hair on the back of his neck stood up and his muscles screamed at him to run as fast as he could from this place. Demons were not real.
"This is interesting," the other hummed, looking at his own fingers and flexing the too long digits carefully, "I've never been brought here like this by a child before."
"I'm not a child," Nanami snapped defensively.
The black eyes snapped to his again, and the feeling of ice slithering over his skin struck him even harder.
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
The other frowned.
"You're a child," he repeated more sternly.
Nanami hiccuped and took a step back as the other snapped his fingers and a sheaf of paper appeared in his hand in a flash of sparks. It was just sleight of hand, of course; plenty of magicians could pull tricks like that easily enough. He nearly stepped back into the salt when the other shot him a sharp look that gave him pause.
"Oh don't go now, doll," he said, his words commanding Nanami down to his sinew, "You got in the circle with me, you're going to stay there while I consider what to do with you."
"H-how…?" Nanami managed, trying and failing to sound annoyed rather than terrified.
The other didn't respond, licking those dreadful inky fingers with a forked tongue before beginning to flip through his papers with a furrow in his brow.
"This does put a wrinkle in things," the other sighed as his eyes flickered over the incomprehensible symbols on the pages. "But I suppose I could…well, hmm… let's see now…."
"What is that?" Nanami scoffed, pointing to the pages. "Some kind of stupid prop that's supposed to scare me?"
The other paused, his midnight eyes flickering back to Nanami's face. For a moment, they both just stared at each other, like neither could really believe what they were seeing. Then, the other straightened his back with a breath, which startled Nanami.
He flinched, then cursed himself for being afraid. He was surprised, however, when he found the stranger had stopped too when he balked, his eyes searching Nanami's posture as if trying to guess if he'd flee or not.
"Why did you bring me here?" he asked suddenly, the papers in his hands vanishing again in a wisp of smoke.
"I didn't do anything!" Nanami snapped back.
"Yes, you did," the other argued, taking a curious step closer to Nanami with his eyes narrowed. When Nanami remained where he was, he raised a finger again and tapped the book still clutched in his shaking hands.
"You asked for me. Here I am."
"I didn't!" Nanami insisted, sounding far braver than he felt, "so you can leave now! Goodbye!"
Again, the other tilted his head to a disturbing degree.
"Were you just playing around? That seems like a very silly thing to do," the other continued softly, taking another cautious step forward to slide the book out of Nanami's hands to study it himself.
"No! They made me do it," he bit out, even though he was mostly certain that the being in his room knew full well what was going on here. He let the book go easily, not particularly wanting to hold onto it any longer anyhow.
The other hummed, the low sound somehow paralyzing and soothing at the same time. While Nanami's muscles still refused to obey him and let him bolt for the door again, they no longer screamed with adrenaline. Instead, his shoulders eased from where they'd risen to his ears as he considered the stranger that stood only a foot away from him.
He was entirely too close, but there wasn't a lot of room in the salt circle. As much as Nanami hated to admit it, the stranger was handsome outside of the fake adornments to make him look scarier or otherworldly. He looked to be at least a few years older than Nanami was, with a sharp jaw and a strong Roman nose that looked spectacular in profile. He couldn't be sure where Gojo and Geto had found this man, nor why he'd agreed to pranking a teenager in such a malicious fashion, but at least he wasn't going out of his way to frighten or harm Nanami.
"When you say 'they'…?" the dark stranger murmured, running his fingers over the page in front of him delicately.
"Gojo. And Geto. They're on the other side of the door—wherever that is—probably laughing their asses off," Nanami huffed.
The stranger let out a deep sigh.
"So you were coerced, you didn't even know what you were doing, and you've somehow entered into one of the most complex bargains possible," he replied, shaking his head. "This is a wrinkle…."
"Who are you, anyway?" Nanami spat after a moment of silence.
The other looked up from the book then, as if surprised Nanami was still there with him.
"Me? You summoned me and you don't even know my name?" he asked, his brow furrowing.
"Obviously not," Nanami scoffed, folding his arms. "And I didn't summon you!"
The other stared at him with those dark eyes, the shadows cast by the candlelight making his irises dance like lit coals. For a brief, terrifying moment, he looked at Nanami as if he were a prey animal to be slaughtered, his eyes dragging over him with thoughtful consideration. But then, the moment passed and the other shook his head.
"Doll," he sighed eventually, closing the book with a snap. "You don't have a clue about what you've just done, do you?"
"Father?"
Nanami's eyes snapped open to see Ijichi, the church caretaker, giving him a worried look from the doorway of his office.
"Hm?" he breathed, sitting up in his chair.
"Father, it's so late! You should have gone back to the parsonage by now."
Nanami looked down at the book in his lap. He must have fallen asleep while studying and dreamed of that day…. The sacrament he'd performed earlier had clearly disturbed him more than he realized.
"You're right, of course, but it's raining cats and dogs now," he sighed, turning his head to the darkened window and listening to the drumming sound of the rain against the old glass panes. "And I don't have my umbrella."
"You can take mine, Father," Ijichi replied, holding up his own umbrella hastily.
Nanami shook his head.
"That's quite alright, Ijichi. You prepared properly for the day, you should benefit from doing so. I will wait out the storm in my office," he replied, settling back into his armchair.
"Are you certain?"
"Quite. Go home, I'll be alright."
Ijichi nodded, once then left Nanami alone with only his thoughts to keep him company again. Nanami listened to the sound of his retreating footsteps before he looked up at the crucifix hung above the door with a sigh.
"Forgive me, Father," he murmured to himself, "but I am thinking of him again. Does he think of me, I wonder? Of how foolish I was to listen to him?"
That haunted feeling crept up his spine again as Nanami lowered his head to his hands.
"Oh, my God... will my soul ever be free of that devil?"