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iceminkTitle: The Guardian
Pairing: Spike/Angel and flashbacks to Angel/Darla
Rating: NC-17 (please read the warnings)
Summary: All human AU. It was eight years ago that Liam promised to protect Darla and be her angel. It's a promise he's done his best to keep, even if these days she can barely stand to be around him. Then one night he finds a young prostitute, William, getting beat up in an alley. But will helping William destroy the delicate balance of Angel's life, or will it be William who saves Angel from his own dark past?
Disclaimer: The characters belong to all sorts of other people like Joss, ME, and Fox. I just do strange things to them for free.
Previous chapters are here.
Chapter 20
Darla wanted to run. Everything inside her was screaming that this had been a horrible mistake and that she should get out now. But there was no way to do that without looking like a fool.
Without another choice, she took a step forward and entered the church. She could feel the curious eyes on her, and she made a mental note that next time she searched for a Baptist church on MapQuest she would pay more attention to what neighborhood it was in, and not simply which was easiest to get to. For if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was the only white person in the room, she could have slipped out without anyone noticing. But, everyone who had seen her would think she was afraid to be around so many black people.
So, trying to pretend that she hadn’t noticed that she stuck out like a sore thumb, Darla made her way into the church and took a seat about half way in.
As she sat down, she told herself she was being ridiculous. It didn’t matter what these people thought. But each moment that she didn’t get up and leave made it harder to leave the next. She felt enough like idiot without looking like one too.
It was her idiocy that had brought her here.
It hadn’t taken long after she had finished her anonymous call to the police for Darla to realize what a stupid thing to do that had been. No matter how mad she was at Angel, how hurt, bringing him to the attention of the police was bad for both of them. It frightened her that she had been so reckless; that she had let her emotions get the best of her. She had kept her emotions locked down in a safe place since she was fourteen, knowing it was more important to survive than to cry.
But last night something had taken ahold of her and she might have destroyed everything she and Angel had worked so hard to build. Darla’s eyes suddenly came to rest on the cross above the altar, and she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. They had built their little empire for one reason only, to have the money to find Connor. But that hadn’t worked out, and after almost five years, all the trails had gone cold.
What was worse, she didn’t yet know if she had ruined everything or not. By the time she had gotten home there were no lights on in Angel’s condo. Whether that was because the police had taken him away, or because he’d gone to bed, she didn’t know. She could hardly knock on his door and ask without letting him know that it she was the one who had called the police
Her thoughts were interrupted by the start of the service. She wasn’t sure exactly what her desperation had thought it would find here. Hope? Forgiveness? A second chance? If she had wanted something familiar, something that reminded her of home, she had come to the wrong place. The sermon wasn’t the sort of harsh call for repentance she remembered from her childhood. Instead the Reverend talked of love, of each soul finding its own path to Jesus, however long and uneven the road was.
The music was more lively, more passionate than the hymns she had sung as a child. A part of her longed to join in, but she didn’t know the tune or the words.
Until they came to the Hallelujah. She still wasn’t familiar with the music, but after the first chorus, she found herself joining in, relying on the fact that the words wouldn’t trip her up. And there was a moment when she lifted her voice and all her worries flew free. When she was nothing but the sound and exultation of the word.
But it was only a moment.
And when it passed it left behind an empty sorrow. Her voice began to crack, and she could feel the tears beginning to form behind her eyes. She refused to break down right there, but she could feel something giving way inside of her, and before she’d really made up her mind, she was moving to the end of the pew and the edge of the church. She tried to hurry out of the building, but the music outpaced her. It swept over her in its glory and she only made it outside of the main room, into the entry hall before the tears burst out of her. Stumbling with the force of her grief, she made it only to a side chamber where she sank down into a chair and let the pain poor out of her.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had really allowed herself to cry. She had learned to lock all of that down deep inside her. She had never allowed herself the luxury of crying for Connor, and it was her fourteenth birthday when she had last cried for herself. Whatever moments of weakness she’d had since, she’d been able to stop, to pull herself back before she let the sorrow overcome her. But as the music rose and fell behind her, she couldn’t control it anymore.
And so she gave herself into it, letting the grief wrack her body and come out in ugly choking sobs.
She was so consumed that she didn’t notice when someone came into the room with her.
“Here you go,” a kind voice said, and she could see the trailing end of a handkerchief hovering in front of her nose.
She took it, mostly to clear the tears and runny nose before she showed her face to the stranger. When she felt at least minorly presentable she looked up to see the Minister pulling a chair next to hers.
“Aren’t you supposed to be out there?” she asked. It had only been a few minutes and she could still hear the sounds of the service coming from the main room.
He shrugged, “We've got a new minister who could use the chance to get his feet wet. Besides, I read something once about leaving the flock to find the one lost lamb.”
“I’m not a lamb, Reverend” she said defensively. As soon as the words left her mouth she felt foolish. She knew the parable he was referring to, and felt silly for arguing about a metaphor.
“But you don’t deny being lost,” he pointed out. “And you can call me Lorne,” he said hold out his hand. “Never really got a hang of the formalities.”
“I shouldn’t be here,” Darla said, ignoring his hand and starting to rise.
“Clearly you should, sweetie” he disagreed. “They say music reveals the soul, and yours is clearly hurting.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, but she settled back into her seat, too exhausted at the moment to escape.
“Nothing matters more,” he said softly. “You came here alone. No one dragged you here. So something inside you wanted to be here.”
She let out a heavy breath. “It doesn’t matter, because I don’t belong. God doesn’t want me here,” she told him.
“Shouldn’t you let him decide about that?” Lorne asked.
“He decided that a long time ago. You don’t want whores like me in your church,” she said hoping to shock him into leaving her be.
“Well,” he said, without any trace of shock or disgust. “If Jesus thought prostitutes were worth saving, far be it from me to second guess. Besides, it’s not the people with good and happy lives that really need the Lord. It’s easy to have faith when life is easy. It’s the people who’ve fallen away who really need this place.” He gestured for her to sit back down.
It angered her. She could easily imagine his fantasies of saving her from her life of sin. But he didn’t know her, didn’t understand her. She sat back down, but only so she could let him know that God had left her long ago.
“I’m not some runaway,” she said proudly. “I’m not some poor girl whose daddy was mean to her, or touched her the wrong way. I loved my daddy. He was a preacher too. And I never wanted to be wicked. I didn’t fall away,” she said coldly. “I was taken. Just taken.” She paused, the memory suddenly cutting into her. When she spoke again her voice was almost a whisper. “No more school, no more church on Sunday, just a man who liked young girls and had the power to take them and make them his.”
As the words left her mouth she regretted speaking them. She had never spoken them before to anyone, even Angel. She had always let him think she had come to this life the usual way. Worse she hadn’t put all her walls back up after her earlier breakdown. The pain was still too close, and she could remember all too vividly the terror when the Master first had her kidnapped. Those first few horrible nights that turned into weeks, months and finally years, when she had to learn to give up her body to others, or else risk giving them her sanity.
Lorne could see her distress, and he slowly, obviously, reached out a hand which he carefully placed on her shoulder, ready for her to pull back from him.
“Are you in danger now?” he asked, his voice becoming more serious than it had been.
“No, he’s dead. A long time now.” The words helped pull her back together. The memory of the Master’s dead body brought its familiar and dark comfort. “And God had nothing to do with that.” Thinking of Angel and the blood on his hands, and mix of horror and relief on his face snapped her out of her reverie and made her strong again. “You can’t save me Reverend. I’m not one of the elect. God has no place for me.”
“You seem awfully sure of that, sweetie. God doesn’t turn away from his children, even when it seems like he’s not there. He still loves you.”
He still didn’t get it, Darla could see. But then he couldn’t know how clearly God had rejected her. That she had tried to come back to him, and he had turned her away.
“If he loved me,” she told him, looking him in the eyes, daring him to disagree. “He wouldn’t have taken my child.” She paused letting the words sink in. “I tried to be good, I tried to be better. We were changing our lives. We were gonna go straight. I would have done anything for my darling boy, but God took him. He didn’t want me back, and he didn’t want me to have my child,” she finished bitterly.
“Oh, honey,” Lorne gripped her shoulder comfortingly. “I can’t imagine losing a child, and I can’t tell you why you lost him, but it wasn’t because God didn’t want you to have him.”
She laughed, bitterly at the minister’s misunderstanding. Connor wasn’t dead. At least that’s what she told herself for years.
He had been born premature, they had had to do an emergency c-section, and it had all happened during Angel’s trial. Connor had had to spend the first weeks of his life in the hospital, and only Darla had been there to visit him.
The day the nurses said he could go home, was also the day the jury was likely to deliver their verdict. Darla had struggled with the decision of when to get Connor. She had thought of getting him first and taking him to the court house so Angel could see him just in case. . .
But that had seemed too pessimistic. Angel had already missed his son’s birth, Darla wanted him to be part of taking him home, so she had decided to go to the court house first. Hoping that her confidence that they would release Angel would make it so and that she wasn’t robbing him of his last chance to see his son before a life in prison.
She would spend the next five years regretting that decision.
The jury had come down on Angel’s side, and happier than they had ever been Angel and Darla drove to the hospital convinced they were free, that they really had a chance at starting the better life they had planned in whispers for months.
But when they got to the hospital, Connor wasn’t there. His tiny bed was empty. At first the nurses told them that he was probably just being given one last check up by the doctor before he left the hospital. But no one seemed to know which doctor had taken him.
It was a slow horror that crept over Darla that day as it became clearer and clearer that her son had somehow been lost, had simply disappeared. The cops were little help. There didn’t seem to be any leads, and they knew Angel and Darla’s past so clearly, that she often suspected they thought Connor was better off anywhere but with his parents. The cops only asked Angel about enemies he might have made in jail, gangs he might have crossed, or people angered.
Darla on the other hand suspected the nursing staff, which had always seemed to look down on her. It would have been so easy, she thought, for one of them to decide she wasn’t fit to be a mother to her beautiful boy, and to give him to a more ‘deserving’ family.
She never found out if she was right or not. After Connor’s disappearance, they tried to hire a private investigator to help them, but they didn’t have the money. So all their dreams of leading an honest life evaporated, as they turned back to prostitution to get the money they needed to find their son. And there was always a better P.I. out there, who was also always more expensive. They always needed more money, and they never found anything.
“If God wanted us to have him, he wouldn’t have been taken,” Darla said simply. “And if God couldn’t stop that, he’s not much good, is he?”
“Even if he could ease your pain,” Lorne said softly, simply. “That would be something, wouldn’t it? Even just a little peace? You’ve carried this for a long time haven’t you?” he asked.
His words scared her. She didn’t know who she would be without her pain.
“Five years,” she finally admitted. “And it doesn’t get better.”
“Because you hold your pain,” he told her. “You let it shape and become you. But that’s exhausting isn’t it? You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t want some small part of it taken away.”
“God won’t have me,” she whispered, his words starting to find a way inside her.
“Will you have him?” Lorne asked simply.
Those words broke her a little. She could remember so clearly her fourteenth birthday. The day, which if the Master hadn’t kidnapped her, her father would have baptized her. Instead it was just another day spent locked away in the Master’s brothel.
Except that was the day she finally knew her father wasn’t coming. That the FBI wasn’t going to knock down the doors, kill the Master and rescue her. That was the day she knew she wasn’t one of the elect and that the rest of her life was going to be spent in that hell.
And she also remembered how she had thought that her pregnancy had been a sign from God. That he was telling her she could come back to him, that she could still be saved. How Angel had seemed so true to his nickname, when he’d agreed to protect her, to help her keep the baby. And how he had seemed like God’s righteous anger when he had killed the Master.
But those thoughts had always led back to the same place. If she was meant to be saved, why had God taken Connor from her?
Suddenly all the years hoping that a private eye would bring her the answers she needed seemed absurd. Her rational mind told her she was being foolish, desperate, and yet she couldn’t help but see a bit of hope. All the money in the world hadn’t brought back her son, who else but God could?
Darla knew she was setting herself up to be destroyed and disappointed all over again, and yet her lips parted and the word, “Yes,” slipped weakly out.
“Will you be baptized?” Lorne asked.
“Yes,” she said taking his hand and rising from her chair.
They moved together out of the ante chamber into the main part of the church where the service was wrapping up. She was unaware of the reactions of the other parishioners as she was lead to the altar and the large baptismal font made not for children but for adults.
She could remember her father explaining to her as a young girl that unlike her Catholic friends she would be given a choice. She would come to Jesus with understanding of her own flaws and sins, and ask to be saved.
It terrified her now, but a stronger part was compelled forward, and she moved in an almost trance like state, unaware of what was going on until Lorne whispered to her, “What’s your name, honey?”
“Darla Holtz,” she said softly.
“Darla Holtz,” he repeated in a loud voice so everyone could hear. “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?”
“Yes,” she said, surprised at how sure her voice sounded.
Kind hands took a hold of her, easing her into the font.
“Then I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
It felt a little like falling, as she was guided back, under the water. Even as the water closed over her head, she felt reassured, safe in the hands that held her. And for just a moment she imagined it was her father, his commanding voice echoing through the church that lived in her memories.
It wasn’t until she was brought up for air that reality hit her again, and she was glad it wasn’t. That he never knew her shame. She didn’t feel as if she had been washed clean. Mostly she just felt wet. But she did feel a little bit lighter, as if something small but heavy had passed from her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lorne should have felt happier. This was after all the sort of thing that gave him purpose. Helping someone find their path in life. Being in some small way God’s instrument.
But as the service ended he found he couldn’t look at the young woman who had stumbled into his church that Sunday morning. Luckily some of the older women in the church had come up to help her dry off, and to cluck happily around her. Who was he to tell them the dark thoughts she had brought into his mind.
They were ridiculous thoughts, evil thoughts. But once they had started, once she had told him her name, they had begun to grow, to take root in his mind, and now he couldn’t forget them, couldn’t push them away, and he certainly couldn’t ignore them.
Because if there was even the slightest chance they were true. . . Well, if they were true, it was no accident that she had come into his church. And it meant God had work for him to do, that he was in fact God’s instrument, here to set her back on her path.
He only wished he could be sure that that path wouldn’t bring more pain and misery than she had already seen.
Pairing: Spike/Angel and flashbacks to Angel/Darla
Rating: NC-17 (please read the warnings)
Summary: All human AU. It was eight years ago that Liam promised to protect Darla and be her angel. It's a promise he's done his best to keep, even if these days she can barely stand to be around him. Then one night he finds a young prostitute, William, getting beat up in an alley. But will helping William destroy the delicate balance of Angel's life, or will it be William who saves Angel from his own dark past?
Disclaimer: The characters belong to all sorts of other people like Joss, ME, and Fox. I just do strange things to them for free.
Previous chapters are here.
Chapter 20
Darla wanted to run. Everything inside her was screaming that this had been a horrible mistake and that she should get out now. But there was no way to do that without looking like a fool.
Without another choice, she took a step forward and entered the church. She could feel the curious eyes on her, and she made a mental note that next time she searched for a Baptist church on MapQuest she would pay more attention to what neighborhood it was in, and not simply which was easiest to get to. For if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was the only white person in the room, she could have slipped out without anyone noticing. But, everyone who had seen her would think she was afraid to be around so many black people.
So, trying to pretend that she hadn’t noticed that she stuck out like a sore thumb, Darla made her way into the church and took a seat about half way in.
As she sat down, she told herself she was being ridiculous. It didn’t matter what these people thought. But each moment that she didn’t get up and leave made it harder to leave the next. She felt enough like idiot without looking like one too.
It was her idiocy that had brought her here.
It hadn’t taken long after she had finished her anonymous call to the police for Darla to realize what a stupid thing to do that had been. No matter how mad she was at Angel, how hurt, bringing him to the attention of the police was bad for both of them. It frightened her that she had been so reckless; that she had let her emotions get the best of her. She had kept her emotions locked down in a safe place since she was fourteen, knowing it was more important to survive than to cry.
But last night something had taken ahold of her and she might have destroyed everything she and Angel had worked so hard to build. Darla’s eyes suddenly came to rest on the cross above the altar, and she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. They had built their little empire for one reason only, to have the money to find Connor. But that hadn’t worked out, and after almost five years, all the trails had gone cold.
What was worse, she didn’t yet know if she had ruined everything or not. By the time she had gotten home there were no lights on in Angel’s condo. Whether that was because the police had taken him away, or because he’d gone to bed, she didn’t know. She could hardly knock on his door and ask without letting him know that it she was the one who had called the police
Her thoughts were interrupted by the start of the service. She wasn’t sure exactly what her desperation had thought it would find here. Hope? Forgiveness? A second chance? If she had wanted something familiar, something that reminded her of home, she had come to the wrong place. The sermon wasn’t the sort of harsh call for repentance she remembered from her childhood. Instead the Reverend talked of love, of each soul finding its own path to Jesus, however long and uneven the road was.
The music was more lively, more passionate than the hymns she had sung as a child. A part of her longed to join in, but she didn’t know the tune or the words.
Until they came to the Hallelujah. She still wasn’t familiar with the music, but after the first chorus, she found herself joining in, relying on the fact that the words wouldn’t trip her up. And there was a moment when she lifted her voice and all her worries flew free. When she was nothing but the sound and exultation of the word.
But it was only a moment.
And when it passed it left behind an empty sorrow. Her voice began to crack, and she could feel the tears beginning to form behind her eyes. She refused to break down right there, but she could feel something giving way inside of her, and before she’d really made up her mind, she was moving to the end of the pew and the edge of the church. She tried to hurry out of the building, but the music outpaced her. It swept over her in its glory and she only made it outside of the main room, into the entry hall before the tears burst out of her. Stumbling with the force of her grief, she made it only to a side chamber where she sank down into a chair and let the pain poor out of her.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had really allowed herself to cry. She had learned to lock all of that down deep inside her. She had never allowed herself the luxury of crying for Connor, and it was her fourteenth birthday when she had last cried for herself. Whatever moments of weakness she’d had since, she’d been able to stop, to pull herself back before she let the sorrow overcome her. But as the music rose and fell behind her, she couldn’t control it anymore.
And so she gave herself into it, letting the grief wrack her body and come out in ugly choking sobs.
She was so consumed that she didn’t notice when someone came into the room with her.
“Here you go,” a kind voice said, and she could see the trailing end of a handkerchief hovering in front of her nose.
She took it, mostly to clear the tears and runny nose before she showed her face to the stranger. When she felt at least minorly presentable she looked up to see the Minister pulling a chair next to hers.
“Aren’t you supposed to be out there?” she asked. It had only been a few minutes and she could still hear the sounds of the service coming from the main room.
He shrugged, “We've got a new minister who could use the chance to get his feet wet. Besides, I read something once about leaving the flock to find the one lost lamb.”
“I’m not a lamb, Reverend” she said defensively. As soon as the words left her mouth she felt foolish. She knew the parable he was referring to, and felt silly for arguing about a metaphor.
“But you don’t deny being lost,” he pointed out. “And you can call me Lorne,” he said hold out his hand. “Never really got a hang of the formalities.”
“I shouldn’t be here,” Darla said, ignoring his hand and starting to rise.
“Clearly you should, sweetie” he disagreed. “They say music reveals the soul, and yours is clearly hurting.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, but she settled back into her seat, too exhausted at the moment to escape.
“Nothing matters more,” he said softly. “You came here alone. No one dragged you here. So something inside you wanted to be here.”
She let out a heavy breath. “It doesn’t matter, because I don’t belong. God doesn’t want me here,” she told him.
“Shouldn’t you let him decide about that?” Lorne asked.
“He decided that a long time ago. You don’t want whores like me in your church,” she said hoping to shock him into leaving her be.
“Well,” he said, without any trace of shock or disgust. “If Jesus thought prostitutes were worth saving, far be it from me to second guess. Besides, it’s not the people with good and happy lives that really need the Lord. It’s easy to have faith when life is easy. It’s the people who’ve fallen away who really need this place.” He gestured for her to sit back down.
It angered her. She could easily imagine his fantasies of saving her from her life of sin. But he didn’t know her, didn’t understand her. She sat back down, but only so she could let him know that God had left her long ago.
“I’m not some runaway,” she said proudly. “I’m not some poor girl whose daddy was mean to her, or touched her the wrong way. I loved my daddy. He was a preacher too. And I never wanted to be wicked. I didn’t fall away,” she said coldly. “I was taken. Just taken.” She paused, the memory suddenly cutting into her. When she spoke again her voice was almost a whisper. “No more school, no more church on Sunday, just a man who liked young girls and had the power to take them and make them his.”
As the words left her mouth she regretted speaking them. She had never spoken them before to anyone, even Angel. She had always let him think she had come to this life the usual way. Worse she hadn’t put all her walls back up after her earlier breakdown. The pain was still too close, and she could remember all too vividly the terror when the Master first had her kidnapped. Those first few horrible nights that turned into weeks, months and finally years, when she had to learn to give up her body to others, or else risk giving them her sanity.
Lorne could see her distress, and he slowly, obviously, reached out a hand which he carefully placed on her shoulder, ready for her to pull back from him.
“Are you in danger now?” he asked, his voice becoming more serious than it had been.
“No, he’s dead. A long time now.” The words helped pull her back together. The memory of the Master’s dead body brought its familiar and dark comfort. “And God had nothing to do with that.” Thinking of Angel and the blood on his hands, and mix of horror and relief on his face snapped her out of her reverie and made her strong again. “You can’t save me Reverend. I’m not one of the elect. God has no place for me.”
“You seem awfully sure of that, sweetie. God doesn’t turn away from his children, even when it seems like he’s not there. He still loves you.”
He still didn’t get it, Darla could see. But then he couldn’t know how clearly God had rejected her. That she had tried to come back to him, and he had turned her away.
“If he loved me,” she told him, looking him in the eyes, daring him to disagree. “He wouldn’t have taken my child.” She paused letting the words sink in. “I tried to be good, I tried to be better. We were changing our lives. We were gonna go straight. I would have done anything for my darling boy, but God took him. He didn’t want me back, and he didn’t want me to have my child,” she finished bitterly.
“Oh, honey,” Lorne gripped her shoulder comfortingly. “I can’t imagine losing a child, and I can’t tell you why you lost him, but it wasn’t because God didn’t want you to have him.”
She laughed, bitterly at the minister’s misunderstanding. Connor wasn’t dead. At least that’s what she told herself for years.
He had been born premature, they had had to do an emergency c-section, and it had all happened during Angel’s trial. Connor had had to spend the first weeks of his life in the hospital, and only Darla had been there to visit him.
The day the nurses said he could go home, was also the day the jury was likely to deliver their verdict. Darla had struggled with the decision of when to get Connor. She had thought of getting him first and taking him to the court house so Angel could see him just in case. . .
But that had seemed too pessimistic. Angel had already missed his son’s birth, Darla wanted him to be part of taking him home, so she had decided to go to the court house first. Hoping that her confidence that they would release Angel would make it so and that she wasn’t robbing him of his last chance to see his son before a life in prison.
She would spend the next five years regretting that decision.
The jury had come down on Angel’s side, and happier than they had ever been Angel and Darla drove to the hospital convinced they were free, that they really had a chance at starting the better life they had planned in whispers for months.
But when they got to the hospital, Connor wasn’t there. His tiny bed was empty. At first the nurses told them that he was probably just being given one last check up by the doctor before he left the hospital. But no one seemed to know which doctor had taken him.
It was a slow horror that crept over Darla that day as it became clearer and clearer that her son had somehow been lost, had simply disappeared. The cops were little help. There didn’t seem to be any leads, and they knew Angel and Darla’s past so clearly, that she often suspected they thought Connor was better off anywhere but with his parents. The cops only asked Angel about enemies he might have made in jail, gangs he might have crossed, or people angered.
Darla on the other hand suspected the nursing staff, which had always seemed to look down on her. It would have been so easy, she thought, for one of them to decide she wasn’t fit to be a mother to her beautiful boy, and to give him to a more ‘deserving’ family.
She never found out if she was right or not. After Connor’s disappearance, they tried to hire a private investigator to help them, but they didn’t have the money. So all their dreams of leading an honest life evaporated, as they turned back to prostitution to get the money they needed to find their son. And there was always a better P.I. out there, who was also always more expensive. They always needed more money, and they never found anything.
“If God wanted us to have him, he wouldn’t have been taken,” Darla said simply. “And if God couldn’t stop that, he’s not much good, is he?”
“Even if he could ease your pain,” Lorne said softly, simply. “That would be something, wouldn’t it? Even just a little peace? You’ve carried this for a long time haven’t you?” he asked.
His words scared her. She didn’t know who she would be without her pain.
“Five years,” she finally admitted. “And it doesn’t get better.”
“Because you hold your pain,” he told her. “You let it shape and become you. But that’s exhausting isn’t it? You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t want some small part of it taken away.”
“God won’t have me,” she whispered, his words starting to find a way inside her.
“Will you have him?” Lorne asked simply.
Those words broke her a little. She could remember so clearly her fourteenth birthday. The day, which if the Master hadn’t kidnapped her, her father would have baptized her. Instead it was just another day spent locked away in the Master’s brothel.
Except that was the day she finally knew her father wasn’t coming. That the FBI wasn’t going to knock down the doors, kill the Master and rescue her. That was the day she knew she wasn’t one of the elect and that the rest of her life was going to be spent in that hell.
And she also remembered how she had thought that her pregnancy had been a sign from God. That he was telling her she could come back to him, that she could still be saved. How Angel had seemed so true to his nickname, when he’d agreed to protect her, to help her keep the baby. And how he had seemed like God’s righteous anger when he had killed the Master.
But those thoughts had always led back to the same place. If she was meant to be saved, why had God taken Connor from her?
Suddenly all the years hoping that a private eye would bring her the answers she needed seemed absurd. Her rational mind told her she was being foolish, desperate, and yet she couldn’t help but see a bit of hope. All the money in the world hadn’t brought back her son, who else but God could?
Darla knew she was setting herself up to be destroyed and disappointed all over again, and yet her lips parted and the word, “Yes,” slipped weakly out.
“Will you be baptized?” Lorne asked.
“Yes,” she said taking his hand and rising from her chair.
They moved together out of the ante chamber into the main part of the church where the service was wrapping up. She was unaware of the reactions of the other parishioners as she was lead to the altar and the large baptismal font made not for children but for adults.
She could remember her father explaining to her as a young girl that unlike her Catholic friends she would be given a choice. She would come to Jesus with understanding of her own flaws and sins, and ask to be saved.
It terrified her now, but a stronger part was compelled forward, and she moved in an almost trance like state, unaware of what was going on until Lorne whispered to her, “What’s your name, honey?”
“Darla Holtz,” she said softly.
“Darla Holtz,” he repeated in a loud voice so everyone could hear. “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?”
“Yes,” she said, surprised at how sure her voice sounded.
Kind hands took a hold of her, easing her into the font.
“Then I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
It felt a little like falling, as she was guided back, under the water. Even as the water closed over her head, she felt reassured, safe in the hands that held her. And for just a moment she imagined it was her father, his commanding voice echoing through the church that lived in her memories.
It wasn’t until she was brought up for air that reality hit her again, and she was glad it wasn’t. That he never knew her shame. She didn’t feel as if she had been washed clean. Mostly she just felt wet. But she did feel a little bit lighter, as if something small but heavy had passed from her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lorne should have felt happier. This was after all the sort of thing that gave him purpose. Helping someone find their path in life. Being in some small way God’s instrument.
But as the service ended he found he couldn’t look at the young woman who had stumbled into his church that Sunday morning. Luckily some of the older women in the church had come up to help her dry off, and to cluck happily around her. Who was he to tell them the dark thoughts she had brought into his mind.
They were ridiculous thoughts, evil thoughts. But once they had started, once she had told him her name, they had begun to grow, to take root in his mind, and now he couldn’t forget them, couldn’t push them away, and he certainly couldn’t ignore them.
Because if there was even the slightest chance they were true. . . Well, if they were true, it was no accident that she had come into his church. And it meant God had work for him to do, that he was in fact God’s instrument, here to set her back on her path.
He only wished he could be sure that that path wouldn’t bring more pain and misery than she had already seen.
