A/N: The further this arc progresses, the bigger fan of Chase I become.

The problem with absolution is that it's never absolute. You could say a hundred Hail Marys or live out sixteen life sentences but sometime, always—you're going to wake yourself up in the middle of the night with your lungs too full of your victim's blood to utter a single scream.

At that moment, the only thing that can save you is screaming: ripping your heart apart with decibels too potent for mortals to even comprehend, too tainted for gods to notice; for hell has made its fiery tendrils creep up through the earth to lick at your feet, latch around your ankles, prepare you for the slow, tortuous descent into madness.

All this Chase never took into consideration: since when did good deeds imply a reversal of his reality? His entire life, saintliness was a vertical spectrum, with him floating in the awkward plane between angels and devils—and now, and now it's horizontal. Each second that ticks by, he gets closer to sprouting horns beneath his mat of blond hair, but God himself was present at his birth.

These are the things he saw flashing by in Dibala's crimson fountain, a fortuneteller's crystal river, the famished saliva of Satan come to claim another unwilling follower.

In that one moment: flash regret, flash doubt, flash horror, flash remorse and assurance and "I did the right thing." Flash a broken wedding ring. Flash a broken wife, a broken dream so many years and lonely nights in the making. But blink—and they all disappear, leaving just the blood-stained skin to act as a default image for his mind's eye.

After that first priest, he must have searched out every Catholic church in a sixty-mile radius. Bloody GPS shouting directions at him as he shakily drove, sniffing defiantly and eyeing himself in the rearview mirror because hell no he wasn't crying—this goes on for hours.

And every conversation is the same.

Sign of the cross searing into his flesh. "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned."

"How long has it been since your last confession?"

"Twenty minutes"—or sometimes, if he had been having particular troubles—"An hour."

The curious pause folded into the silence—it sounds no different to anyone else's ears, but to him, it's a slithering hiss of damnation that sends shivers directly to his stomach.

"I killed a man." After the first priest, he never waited to clarify—"I'm a doctor, he was a dictator and he was orchestrating a genocide. I had to do something."

And always: "Every life is sacred. Judgment is not the task of man—"

"Even when he was so clearly evil?"

"That is for God to decide, not you."

"Just tell—" and his voice breaks, like his heart, like his soul, and like he can see Cameron in the near future and that nearly kills him on the spot. "Just tell me what I need to do."

"You want absolution?" What else, what else is there? "You must turn yourself in." Always the same, as if these however many priests shared a brain, so even if he traveled to the other side of the globe, their formula would be the same.

Surrender. Jail. Ruin. Misery. Death.

And Cameron—God….Cameron. A collapse, an implosion, a good thing she kept that sperm since there's no way she would want a murderer's genes in her children.

It's then that he decides the chase for forgiveness is over—this time, the goal is just a figment of his dissolving imagination. And it's then he decides to get wasted.

"I can't…I can't turn myself in."

"My son, every action has consequences. Every life, even his, is sacred."

And it's then he can sense his composure begin to shred under the light of judgment, leaking the acidic divine punishment and burning a trail down his face. Gasping. Heaving. Everything twisting. "What about mine?"