A Trail of Smoke and Smugglers (Santi/PopexReader)

Trial of Penance

[A/N: Hello, my lovelies! I hope you enjoy this next chapter with some more revelations! As always, please enjoy! -K 🖤]

[🌿This chapter contains swearing, violence, and angst.🌿]
***
After Tom had left me in the apartment with his gracious donations of much needed groceries, I had put each item away in cupboards and in cabinets that I hadn't used before.

It felt strange, unnatural even, to place items in their respective positions, as if I was planning on staying more than the allotted time I had planned, or pretending to play "home". Then again, it was different now, because I didn't have to acclimate to a nomadic lifestyle anymore.

Or at least, that's what Tom had tried to explain to me.

Trusting my brother more than myself, I heeded his instruction and began to situate my collection of weapons and ammunition into the farthest bedroom. Hopefully it would create a sense of normality, and maybe one day, I could move a couch in to the emptying living room.

As I made the several trips to and from the bedroom to the living room, I believed that this short exercise was a yet another penance, a trial of shame and purging for my time dedicated to working in the shadows and devolving into an unforgivable menace of the lowest order of society.

There was no religion that could save me at this point.

As much as I tried to believe that I could be redeemed, the blood on my hands and the sins of my heart continued to weigh me down, dragging me further down to the raging rings of the inferno below that had been waiting to consume me.

I placed the last assault rifle on the floor, mindful not to scratch it. Just like I had done in the living room, I had a perfected arrangement, an organized chaos, an execution of the most intended order.

This was a habit, a draining and exhausting quirk that I had absorbed while oversees. It was obsessive and compulsive, and any disorder within my immediate vicinity had the potential to incapacitate my attention until I had resolved it.

My eyes flickered over every weapon, every side arm and assault rifle, even a varied collection of knives. While Tom believed that I harbored them because I felt unsafe in this new world, I knew deep down, that I collected them for another reason.

They were daily reminders of my transgressions. They were my physical sins, material copies of my choices, and the proof that I would be damned for eternity.

Keeping them close to me only reminded me that there was nothing left worth saving, and that no savior was searching to deliver my tortured soul from the writhing agony from self-inflicted destruction and punishment.

I was already in hell.

There had been many nights, years of it, where I would beg for deliverance and forgiveness in silent tears and trembling, uneven breaths.

But eventually, I stopped pleading, because I realized that I didn't deserve it.

And I embraced the name that I had rightfully earned in the battlefield.

I closed the door to the bedroom and walked into the living room where my backpack sat idle against the wall. In it was everything else that consisted of my life. The material was camouflaged, and still attached to the velcro strip was a boldly printed patch of my last name, Davis.

Other names had been vandalized onto the backpack, but not of my own accord. They were written in ink, marker, and permanent mediums that wouldn't wash off no matter how hard I tried or stubbed my fingers raw.

Full Metal Bitch. Mutt. Hellhound. Reaper. Bootlicker. Walking Piece of Ass. Angel of Death. Fresh Meat. Available. Whore. Warning: No Soul Ahead.

These names, included those that had faded from countless washes, haunted me, and each one vandalized my backpack for a different reason, although most of them were lies, written because of a disgruntled man that I had either refused or victoriously subdued in a sparring match, or outwitted in the field.