this fic was kindly beta'd by my friends at the psychowhatsits discord server, Ash (nerdwrite) and Marsh. Thank you so much for making this a better piece of work! If you'd like to see what all the fuss is about, feel free to contact me on discord (username sincerelymendacious, same as on here) and I'll hook you up to this cursed gay psychonauts server.

The chapel at H.Q. was a short, squat building located half-an-hour's walk from the Motherlobe, near one of the small ponds scattered around the area. Established twenty-five years ago, it was a relatively recent construction that had been demanded by many and ultimately utilized by so few that hardly anyone within the agency was even aware of its presence. With it's flat roof and red brick facade, it resembled a post office more than a church, the only evidence of its religious affiliation being a cross carved into the concrete sign. The sign read ' 'ST. HILDEGARDE'S CHAPEL', named as such because the people in charge of building the place could not think of any other saint more appropriate than the one who had written the oldest surviving record of the collective unconscious.

The interior did as little to encourage religious piety as the exterior. In the interest of keeping the exact denomination vague so that persons of any Christian persuasion could patronize it, the team assigned to decorating the main hall had gone out of their way to make it as generic as possible. Off-white walls, deep red drapes, and evenly-spaced wall to ceiling windows all combined to create a bland, unengaging atmosphere. The pews were lined up in 2 columns consisting of seven benches each, with a long, red rug leading up to the stage the pulpit was set upon. The pulpit itself looked like it could have been a prop from a D-grade T.V. movie. It smelled like dusty old pages and mildew, courtesy of the bibles inside and the pond outside respectively.

In the third row, right column, Milla sits, hands folded primly in her lap, her gaze fixed on a wad of gum generously donated by one of the previous visitors. Her company consists of a very still old woman in the front left pew, a senior agent imbibing cough syrup, and two interns who had come in to make-out and were now sitting awkwardly in the back waiting for everyone to leave. The chaplain, one A.T. Tappman, was absent, and perhaps non-existent.

It's all the same to Milla, she supposes. She's not feeling very Godly right now, and it is unlikely that the presence of a preacher droning on at the pulpit about righteousness and faith would have changed any of that. Her mouth is dry and her head has been throbbing ever since she awoke from her brief, fitful sleep. Her eyes feel heavy, and they close for long intervals before opening to stare blankly at the pew in front of her. The dress she is wearing is more suited for a night out on the town than a morning of prayer and contemplation, a slinky, satiny piece of orange and yellow fabric that does little to protect her from the chill. My mother, she thinks, would never have allowed me to leave the house looking like this. She pinches the hem between her fingers and pulls it down to cover her thighs. It falls back into place the moment she lets go. Strange how the skin she has created to conceal her past failures should feel so uncomfortable now- or maybe it isn't strange; maybe it makes more sense than anything she's done today.

She's been sitting in this hard, creaky pew for an hour, and during that hour she has not said a single prayer. The words are there, in her head, she knows how they go- she must have said thousands of prayers in the years before the fire. And yet here, four years later, she cannot speak them out loud, cannot whisper them into her hands or under her breath, cannot even think them without her stomach flipping uncomfortably. And she believes she put a good effort in, praying in Portuguese, in Spanish, and in English, even attempting to use the scant bits of other languages she's picked up from her peers. She gave up after trying German, because it made her think of her partner, and the idea of him saying any kind of prayer was so absurd that she almost began laughing right there.

Sighing, Milla casts her gaze up to the low ceiling. It is made up of stucco, the same plain tile pattern found in her office back in H.Q. It should be higher, Milla thinks, high enough so that when someone speaks, it echoes all around. Silence covers the room here, save for the occasional shuffling of feet or coughing from the senior agent, and those noises do not bounce far from their sources. Back home, the ceiling at the village church was high, allowing the priest's voice to reverberate throughout the room and touch the ears of the entire congregation, spreading the message of God and the Mother. The choir, too, would echo, the beauty of their voices and the organ that accompanied them amplified by the main hall's spaciousness. There is a piano here, tucked away at the back of the stage as though its presence were shameful. Even without hearing it, Milla can tell that the piano can't hold a candle to the grand organ her grandmother and mother used to play during Mass every Sunday back home. For once she is glad that she can no longer bring herself to touch the keys of a piano; she thinks that attempting to play a hymn here would end up being just another disappointment.

It would be easy to attribute her lack of spiritual inspiration to her dreary surroundings. Easy and false. One did not need to be in a church to seek refuge in God's love. Milla should know this, for it is what her grandmother, her mother, her father, the nuns at the school she attended, and the ones she worked with at the orphanage had said. It was what she had told her children too, on those particularly difficult nights.

She recalls the big asylum in Rio that she'd been transferred to after her case had proven to be beyond the expertise of the doctors at the local hospital. Much of that time is a blur of sterile white walls, white coats, and eye-searing bright lights, but the one thing she does remember vividly is the woman in the room next to hers. That woman- Milla had never learned her name, had been too deep in her own personal hell to do so- had prayed all through the long, nightmarish nights, her voice managing to be loud enough to penetrate the wall between their rooms, yet soft enough to nearly be a whisper. Perhaps she hadn't been speaking at all, perhaps what Milla had presumed to be the woman's voice had actually been her thoughts seeping into Milla's mind. Either way, her prayers had been the one thing able to cut into the screams of her burning children, her serene tone somehow able to overpower the horrific, heart-breaking howling. It had not brought Milla any comfort. If anything, it had been akin to a torturer laying down one tool and picking up another.

She could just be out of practice. It has been years since the last time she talked to God, and in that time she has seen and done things that would make Father Ademar back home blush. When she had come in here, she had sat down and hoped that the Lord's grace would come back into her automatically. That may have been too much to expect after four years of secular living, but she hadn't even felt a sense of familiarity upon entering the church- she may as well have been walking into one for the first time.

Maybe she needs to ease herself into it by putting her body in a more physically pious position. She makes the sign of the cross and clasps her hands together, resting her elbows on the pew in front of her. She leans forward and touches her forehead to her hands, closing her eyes. After inhaling a deep breath, she begins to pray again in her native language. "Oh Father, who art in heaven…"

It sort of works. The words come to her mind and flow out past her lips, which is progress. The more she speaks, however, the more she realizes that the words are nothing more than that, they do not give her the ease of mind she sought, leaving her feeling hollow and helpless against her despair. She tries flattening her palms together, tries straightening back and bowing her head, considers going so far as to get down on her knees to the floor. She decides against it, not wanting to get her tights dirty.

None of it works. Milla goes quiet in the middle of the prayer, opening her eyes and slowly taking in the room around her. Her eyes slide over the walls, the pews, the windows and the trees visible through the glass, and then straight ahead, to the pulpit on the stage. Affixed to the wall behind the pulpit is a crucifix, the body of Christ hanging on it. He is depicted as bearing his pain gracefully, his face turned upward at the ceiling and his Father above.

Milla tears her gaze away, her attention falling onto the old woman in the front. If Milla has met this woman at work, she does not remember it. She wonders what the woman is praying for, and if she feels confident that the Lord will provide her with peace, or absolution, or whatever it is she is asking of Him. Jealousy sparks up within her, smoldering deep in her gut, and Milla immediately smothers it, ashamed. She looks down at her hands, which have returned to their place in her lap.

Leaving would probably be her best course of action. After all, what is the point in remaining here, other than to wallow in her own misery? Milla stays put, because she knows that once she does, she will have no choice but to face the loss of her faith head on, the loss of yet another piece of herself, consumed by the same fire that took her home, her family, her work, and her children, her sweet, beautiful children. She brings her hands up and covers her face with them, but cannot even bring herself to cry for this loss the way she had for the other.

Ten years ago, six before the fire, her grandmother had passed after an agonizingly long battle with breast cancer. She had been old, and her death had been expected (maybe even greeted with a bit of relief), but that had made it no less devastating. It had hurt, but Milla had been able to rely on her family, her community, and the word of God to cope. The idea of her grandmother in heaven, free of pain and watching over her with the Mother had kept her going through the hard months that had followed.

Her faith had not been rattled during that time, but it seems to have now crumbled into dust. In a last ditch effort to locate some small shred of it, Milla tries to picture her children up in heaven with her grandmother, all of them happy and safe and smiling. The image only lasts for a moment before the fire erupts and screams begin.

Milla shoots up from her seat. Suddenly the room is hot, swelteringly so, even though it had been cool mere seconds ago. She has to go, has to get out of here before she burns up. Using shaky levitation, she removes herself from the bench and floats down the aisle running between the pews, biting her lip and clenching her fists as she rushes to the exit, the eyes of the two interns on her back.

She practically flings herself out the door, moving so fast that she is barely able to stop herself from careening into the pond. Though perhaps she should have just let herself fall into the water, she thinks as her boots hit the dew-damp ground. It would do more to chill the molten anger running through her veins than the air has. Milla settles for simply standing near the pond and staring out at the still water, her eyes squinting as the light of the sun reflects off of its surface.

It's not the first time that she's had a sudden rage spark up, but it is the first time she hasn't tried to redirect it towards herself. This time she acknowledges the true source of her anger, and that is God Himself. All her life she'd been raised to believe that the Lord above was a loving, merciful being, but where had Mercy been when the flames had burned her children down to ashes and bone? Where was Love when the smoke had blinded her babies and made it impossible to escape; when it seeped in through their mouths and nostrils and choked the breath in their lungs? Had he been trying to test her faith? If so, then why had he not inflicted the suffering onto her directly by making her ill, or by having her get hit by a car, or by just striking her down with lightning? Job may have been able to bear the unfair treatment with his faith intact, but Milla cannot, not when that treatment had been forced upon innocent children who never done anyone harm. Father Ademar would have told her that this anger, and these musings were the work of the Devil's whispers. Maybe her mother would have said that too. Milla does not care. She's mad, and tired, and cannot pretend that her faith will one day come back to her like a dove returning to its nest.

As quickly as it came, Milla's anger dissipates, as though the very act of admitting its existence was enough to relieve it. She's left with a sore lip and deep feeling of emptiness. If she can no longer turn to God for aid and answers, then what else is there? Her family? She hasn't spoken to them in years and they certainly wouldn't approve of her current lifestyle. Her friends? All casual, and Milla cannot bear let any of them get too close to her anyway. Her partner? They work together well enough but he has a tendency towards prying and offers little emotional support in his approach to problems like these. Grand Head Cruller? No, he has enough to deal with already without piling a broken subordinate on top of that.

Milla is not sure of many things right now, but she does know that she won't find what she's looking for near this pond, and definitely not in the building behind her. She wipes the tears away from her eyes- she didn't even realize they were there until one slides down her cheek- and heads back down the path she floated up here on. This time she walks, for her heart and mind are too heavy for her levitation to function well. The next time she needs comfort, she decides as she treads onward, she will seek it out at the bar, on the dance floor, or in the arms of a complete stranger. The relief they offer her will be temporary, she knows, but it will be more than her faith has given her, and she supposes that it will have to do for now.