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kiraalexander · 7 years

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BCS/Young Pope AU part cuatro:

Valente led Jimmy up another flight of stairs, and Jimmy was beginning to get worried that he wouldn’t be able to find his way out again.

“So, uh, where are we going?” he asked, trying to keep his voice down. He had no idea whether there were any cardinals asleep behind the imposing doors they were passing, but his footsteps echoed ominously on the gleaming floor. Father Valente’s shoes, on the other hand, didn’t make a sound.

“The holy father wishes to see you,” Valente said implacably.

“Yeah, you said that,” Jimmy said, his voice raising involuntarily, then hastily lowering it again. “But isn’t his office back that way?”

“Yes,” said Valente, “It is.” Then he turned, and continued ascending the stairs.

Those stairs led to a tightly coiled spiral staircase, which Jimmy ascended, trying not to rattle the metal and cause more of a racket. When the staircase ended in a tiny smoked glass bubble of a vestibule, Valente opened a door embedded in one translucent wall and stepped back, holding it open for Jimmy to step through. “Please,” he said, and when Jimmy stepped onto the roof, he retreated, closing the door behind him before descending the stairs.

And there he was, standing in front of the thick stone railing that partitioned the roof of St. Peter’s Basilica from the empty air over the vast square below. He stood like he always did, perfectly ramrod straight, and maybe that’s why Jimmy started thinking of his mother - how she’d always grab his shoulders and wrench them up when she caught him slouching. “You’ll get a hunch, like Father Thomas,” she’d say. Father Thomas walked with a permanent shuffle, his head jutting out in front of him, and his shoulders a rounded hunch that threatened to go higher than the top of his head. Still, he always said a short homily, which was why Jimmy always signed up to serve at his mass. Father Thomas sucked horehound drops almost constantly, and it mixed with the communion wine and his halitosis into a sweet and sour reek that Jimmy forever associated with Latin. Sometimes he gave the altar boys a piece of the candy after service. The other kids joked about how gross it was, but Jimmy always secretly liked the bitter herbal flavor. He tasted it now, and wondered what Father Thomas would say if he knew Jimmy were on top of the Basilica of St. Peter, about to talk with the pope.

Of course, that would entail Father Thomas knowing what Jimmy had been doing with the pope over the past few weeks, and the thought made his stomach twist.

He tried to dispel it by walking forward - after all, it was a little late to start getting squeamish - and realized that the pope’s silhouette was all wrong. There was no capelet thingy - what the name of it was, he had no idea. Kim would know, she knew every stitch these people wore, there was some fancy name for everything. But he wasn’t wearing it. Instead, he was wearing what looked suspiciously like a hoodie.

Well, Jimmy decided, even popes were allowed to be comfortable now and then. He cleared his throat a little, just in case Valente’s “please” hadn’t signalled that he’d arrived, but the pope didn’t turn around. So Jimmy walked up beside him, and put his hands on the heavy stone balcony.

“This is quite a view,” he said, then cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Your, uh, holiness.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” the pope said. “I didn’t even know you could come up here before I was elected.”

“Well. Thank you for showing it to me-”

“No. Don’t thank me. I’m being entirely selfish.”

Jimmy didn’t know what to say to this, so he stayed still, rubbing the pads of his fingers on the smooth stone of the balcony until his holiness continued. “I usually ask Don Tomasso up here when I can’t sleep. But it seems he’s taken ill and needs some rest.” Finally he turned to look at Jimmy. “You can’t honestly be happy that I dragged you out of bed at two in the morning.”

Well, Jimmy thought, but decided not to vocalize this particular train of thought. “To be honest, I was having trouble sleeping myself.” At least this wasn’t a lie. He hadn’t even been in bed, or even undressed - he’d been pacing his tiny room in the Casa Santa Marta after Kim had given up the ghost and stopped work for the night.

“Well then, you can thank me,” the pope said, turning back to look over the square.

“Thank you,” said Jimmy. “Holiness.”

The pope made a satisfied little sound in the back of his throat at this, but didn’t say anything further, leaving Jimmy floundering as to how he’d fill the silence. He tried to go back to what he’d been thinking about, and landed on Kim. She’d been agitated when he’d come back from his… well, one on one audience with the pope in the afternoon, and for a few heart-stopping minutes, he’d thought she’d found them out. Finally, after he’d nagged her, she’d told him what her real problem was.

“So,” he started. “Kim - Ms. Wexler - told me that she’d talked to the head of marketing for the Vatican - and she heard you were refusing to have your picture taken? For any of the new merch?”

“That’s right,” the pope said, with the edges of a satisfied smirk.

“Huh,” Jimmy said. “That’s - I mean, it’s different. Like, I remember my mom had a whole shelf full of commemorative plates. Paul the sixth, John Paul the first, but John Paul the second - man, she really loved that guy. She had at least five, six of those plates alone, you know.” Glancing to one side, he saw that the pope’s expression hadn’t changed. “Not that I’m saying you should do it if you don’t want to, right? Just, you know, if my mom were still around, she’d probably double her order for you. I mean, you’re kind of a looker.”

“Oh, you noticed that?” the pope said, bringing his fist to his mouth, and leaving a cigarette parked there when he withdrew it. He lit it, and Jimmy looked away to avoid that dry craving in his mouth that he felt whenever Kim lit up in front of him. Ostensibly he didn’t smoke any more, and never bought for himself, and he knew it was a shitty thing to do to bum whenever he was with someone smoking. So instead he looked away and just breathed the secondhand smoke as hard as he could. He thought about the incense that Father Thomas used to swing in the censer, how rich and heavy it smelled compared to the shitty stuff he used to get to hide the smell of weed on his clothes.

“The plates,” the pope said. “Let me guess. Franklin Mint?” The disdain with which he cut off the final plosive was palpable.

“Oh no,” said Jimmy. “Bradford Exchange. Much classier.” This brought the first genuine smile to the pope’s face, and Jimmy felt his shoulders relax a little.

“It’s still tacky,” the pope said. “Just more expensive. I couldn’t bear to be party to tackiness. Don’t you think it’s inherent, that tackiness, to being flattened out? Reduced to a two-dimensional image? Perhaps that’s the trouble with the Word, after all. When it’s pressed into a page, when it’s flattened, it loses its breath and its life. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to - to hear.”

Jimmy turned to look at his face, and was startled to see the pope looking back. “Look,” he said, and grabbed Jimmy’s arm, pulling him back to a bench facing the balcony rail, sitting him down thigh to thigh as the edge hit them both behind the knee. “Look,” he said again, pointing upward to the stars above the square. “Each and every one of those tiny dots is greater than a world, and made entirely of fire. The distance between them is so vast that we could never hope to travel a fraction of it. But when we look up, all we see is white spots on a black canvas. Flat. And we tell our fortunes by them.” He scoffed, sending a stream of smoke through his nose. “That’s the danger of a two-dimensional image.”

He flicked his cigarette butt over the balcony, and the red, dying sparks it gave off seemed to momentarily join the white stars overhead.

“They’re trying to flatten me,” the pope said. “Every single one.”

“They can’t,” Jimmy said compulsively, and the pope scoffed.

“There’s so many of them,” he said. “Every single person in that square. Every member of the clergy. Every middle aged housewife with a John Paul the second commemorative plate. They want to turn me into a thing. And in the end, they will.”

“No,” Jimmy said. “You’re going to burn.” And because he couldn’t think of anything better to do to get the message across, he snaked his hand up the thigh of the pope’s track suit trousers, to find him already hard.

The pope’s breathing didn’t quicken as Jimmy worked, but seemed to get more deliberately slow and calm. He even lit another cigarette, and closed his eyes only after he’d taken the first few drags. So it was Jimmy breathing hard, feeling the first beads of sweat on his forehead, trying not to think that this was the pope, the goddamn pope, and only that he was breathing an inch away from the man’s neck.

He had to be careful, he’d figured that out weeks ago. The man was wearing all white after all, so when the moment came, Jimmy made sure to position his palm just so to avoid any staining of the pope’s pristine athleisure. He tried to hold his breath, but it came out in ragged exhalations in spite of himself. He felt desperate to press himself against the

Christ almighty, pope?

man next to him, to feel his tongue along the back of his own teeth, the back of his hand doing - what, he didn’t care, something.

When the pope moved, Jimmy surged against him, but met stolid resistance. The pope took a last drag from his cigarette, and flicked it, as with the first one, over the balcony, letting the sparks from the cherry wink out in the black. Then he stood, adjusted his track suit bottoms, and pulled something from the pocket. He threw it at Jimmy.

“Clean yourself up,” he said. “Valente will see you out when you’re finished.”

It was only after the pope had vanished down the spiral stairs that Jimmy realized he’d been given a linen handkerchief with the papal insignia embroidered on it in delicate, tiny stitches. As he used it to scrub come off his palm, all he could think of was how much his mother would have loved it.

#welp here we are #actually it's my first m/m scene so sorry it's a bit perfunctory #i've never been big on long detailed sex scenes #we'll get a bit more prose when sofia seduces kim over a dinner she pretends to cook herself and amaro laced espresso #bcs #lil' pope #better call st. paul #jimmy mcgill #lenny belardo #up on the roof #oh btw again this is completely unedited

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