Faith As You Define It

📅 April, 2018

〚ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ ғʟᴇᴇᴛɪɴɢ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴄʜɪʟᴅ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ / ʀᴇʟɪɢɪᴏᴜs ᴀʙᴜsᴇ〛

Aetos watched with measured interest from the venue’s lofted area as Chey wove his way up through the crowded club, stopping and chatting with any familiar face he found—and maybe a couple unfamiliar ones to boot. He accepted a cold shoulder from Kato with an easygoing shrug, then lingered to share a laugh with Athena, Fawkes, and Teagan. Aetos watched him draw closer and wasn’t at all surprised when Chey sidled up beside him with a delighted “Hey, ‘Tae! How’s it going?”, that ever-present smile firmly in place. His pleased tone sounded like one to be used if the interaction was happenstance, but Aetos felt distinctly that it wasn’t: He’d noticed the way Chey had done this since coming on the scene—taken to talking to each of them individually at some point, almost in turn...as if aware that everyone would say things differently; have different secrets and different knowledge. It seemed he was already privy to the fact that for all their presentation as a group, they were—in whatever fashions—still compartmentalized.

“Hey, Chey. It’s going fine.” Aetos raised his eyebrows and smiled; friendly but unwilling to leave his hunch unaddressed. “...You know, you act like you’re just abnormally friendly. But that’s not all of it, is it?” 
Chey blinked at him, the smile briefly dropping—though into something more puzzled than defensive.
“Hmm? I am abnormally friendly, ‘Tae-’Tae.”
Aetos huffed good-humoredly even as he shook his head to reject the nickname.
“You’re the second person to try and call me that, and I won’t let you get away with it either,” he said, friendly but firm; “It’s ‘Tae. Anyway—yeah, I know you’re friendly, I'm not saying you aren’t! But that’s not the whole reason you’re sort of...talking to each of us in turn.” Aetos tilted his head to indicate his friends, and Chey gave him a momentary look of something akin to appraisal.
“...Well, everyone has their own stories and tells them in their own way,” he said, looking out across the room and speaking more carefully than before. 
“And everyone has everybody else’s stories and tells them in their own way, too, right?” Aetos asked, and Chey gave him another look; not appraisal this time, but something more like impress. He smiled softly, and his shoulders appeared to loosen.
“Part of getting to know people is understanding how they see one another,” he all but murmured. The carefully-spoken quality had left his voice, to be replaced by something Aetos could only label as tender, and Aetos felt himself relax, too. If he’d had misgivings that he hadn’t been aware of, they dissolved with the honesty of Chey’s tone: He spoke like someone who loved, who loved people, who loved people as people.

“I’ll accept that,” Aetos said with a slow nod and a thoughtful blink, followed by playful side-eye and a quirked eyebrow. “...What are you learning about us, then?”
“What do you know?” Chey asked in return, a wry sort of smile on his lips that made Aetos laugh.
“That’s fair.”

Aetos appreciated the deflection and relaxed further into the certainty that if it was all for anything, at least Chey’s apparent reconnaissance wasn’t for gossip. A few moments passed with them side-by-side and quiet, just standing and watching the rest of the crowd ebb and flow through the club, down where the music was louder and the drinks were closer.

“...We do the same thing, basically,” Aetos finally said. “You actually talk, though—I just observe. If I learned anything from my evangelical upbringing, it was how to keep perfectly silent while learning everything I could.”
Chey blinked at him and seemed to give him a once-over. 
“Can you spell that out for me?” he asked. Aetos shrugged.
“I like to learn. I like science, logic, math...data interests me. So does discovery. I under no circumstances was meant to question the Earth being 6,000 years old when I was a kid.” Aetos took a sip of his drink and cast Chey a c'est la vie glance. “I educated myself anyway and hid it. I learned I was queer, too, and tried to hide it. I watched how everyone else acted, listened to how everyone else talked, figured out that I was different, and taught myself to fly under the radar.”

“...That sounds devastatingly lonely,” Chey murmured. The frown on his face seemed out of place there; Aetos shrugged again and shook his head, turning to look out over the club.
“It was lonely; it wasn’t devastating. I had my faith. There were hard times, clearly, and the whole of it couldn’t last, but...I ended up here and I’m glad I did.”
“Non-devastating loneliness...I’ll have to try that out sometime,” Chey half-laughed; “Or not. Isolation...Isolation haunts, for me. It’s good to hear you have the perspective you do. And I know how grateful everyone else is that you ended up with them, too.” He paused and tilted his head slightly to the side. “...I know that you’re the one they all rely on when it comes to Seth. That’s a lot to carry.”
Aetos didn’t turn to look at him immediately, instead pausing and pressing his tongue to his cheek, unsure of his emotions.
“Do you not want me to know that?” Chey asked.
“No, I don’t care that you know,” Aetos said slowly. “...I think I like to imagine to myself that it’s not as hard as it is.”
“But it’s hard.”
In those words it sounded both obvious and an understatement; Aetos’s brow twitched and he let out a short laugh.
“It’s at least a lot,” he said; “I’ve been trying to help him since I was sixteen. I think it sort of baffled him, honestly: He was trying to help me and I kept doing strange things like adapting to change.”
Chey smiled and quirked his own eyebrows, but there was an underlying softness to his expression which came out in his voice:
“Since you were sixteen? That’s so young. And that was immediately, wasn’t it? After meeting everyone?”
“Yeah…” Aetos leaned back and let himself grow pensive; “It wasn’t difficult to see that he was in trouble, you know? I was living with him.”

“...You took that on yourself, though,” Chey said gently. It was lucky they were so far from the DJ; even in their semi-secluded corner, the thrum of the bass threatened to drown out his sympathy; “You took that on as a teenager. Along with everything else you had going on. Things are different for me now, but as a sixteen-year-old…? I wasn’t even dealing well with myself. Let alone anyone else I met. Do you realize that it’s...above and beyond, to do that? Do you give yourself credit?”
Aetos blinked.
“I...Yes, I mean, sure. That’s not really a thing, for me: I don’t feel taken for granted, and I don’t feel like I’m on my own with it. Again...it’s not for everyone and I’m not preaching, but my faith in God helps me. This isn’t something I feel I’m carrying alone.”
“Ah, God…” Chey sighed. His tone was essentially unreadable but his eyes seemed sadder. “It feels like God and I have a lot to talk about, but I don’t know if we do.”
Aetos tilted his head. “...Can you spell that out for me?” he asked.
Chey’s lips curled into a small smile at being echoed.
“That would be a lot to spell. But I can try.”

There was a distinct feeling of Oh, there it is to Chey’s summary of his childhood; Aetos hadn’t been in search of Chey’s history—or the portions of it he wasn’t privy to just by virtue of knowing Anarchy—but there had been that blank space there; the ‘before,’ the ‘so what was the heroin about?’ It turned out to be—despite the fact that Chey clearly summarized and sanitized some of it—a devastating account of religion wielded as a weapon, something which always hit Aetos with grief. Chey relayed some of his foster mother’s religious delusions and the warped version of piety she used to torture him and her other charges.

“...I’m a lot better now, clearly,” Chey finally said, in a way that suggested he would have liked it to come out as close to a laugh but couldn’t quite manage it; “But...I feel pretty disconnected from my past, still, and even though I believed in—and was scared of—both God and The Devil as a kid...those beliefs feel pretty far away, now. I have trouble with the...Biblical God, because of all of it, like...why would He let that happen in His name? I don’t want to believe any god would endorse what she did; I don’t have a faith in her God...so...I struggle. Sort of feels like I shouldn’t have any faith, right? But I can’t help but feel like...there’s something more. More to...existence.” Chey shrugged but his expression was too troubled for any of it to look nonchalant. “It’s like I’m directionlessly spiritual. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, it does,” Aetos said, causing Chey to blink in apparent surprise. Aetos just adjusted his glasses and gestured towards the small silver cross he wore around his neck; 
“Clearly I believe in God, and in Jesus,” he said; “But I also feel like...there are many paths to God, and faith can—and does—take many forms. And it could well be God’s will that it does. We can learn to love one another despite all differences, this way. And...different people need different things, across the board...including from their faith.” Aetos paused and thoughtfully swirled his soda in its glass.
“I have a different understanding of God and piety than my parents did,” he said slowly; “People create faith for themselves just as much as God creates faith for them—and faith is what gets us through in the absence of miracles.”

Chey stared at Aetos for a couple moments, apparently taking it in; his own expression turned contemplative and he looked out over the crowd below again.
“‘People create faith…’” he echoed, almost half to himself but with a slow nod. “...I think that helps me. Maybe I'm not certain what I believe in, like, in terms of...divinity. But I believe in people. I have faith in people. And maybe that’s faith in their faiths, too.” He looked back over at Aetos.
“Is God love? Or is Love god?” he mused, a smile on his lips again. Aetos raised and lowered one shoulder.
“God is love to me. But maybe Love is god to you.”
Chey nodded again. “Yeah, maybe, huh? ...Thank you, Aetos. I'm glad we talked.” He clicked his glass to Aetos’s. “I think I have some stuff to think about…It’s good to know I can come to you with it.”