Lockjaw (Joshler)

15. Rosary

Start the song. It's Travelling Alone by Passenger.

Josh was returned to his cell in the solitary block the next day. There was a stack of letters sitting on his bed to greet him, and none of his stuff seemed to have been stolen or messed with in his absence. He sighed gratefully as he was uncuffed and allowed to go sit on his bed. The officer in charge of the block at the moment wasn't one Josh interacted with much, but he didn't suck. There would be a shift change in a few hours though, so Josh tried not to get his hopes up.

He looked around at the familiar cinderblock walls surrounding him. He'd personalised his cell just slightly over the years. Polaroids and drawings from his family were taped up on the walls, books filled the shelf at the top of his desk, and all of the nonsense religious paraphernalia his mother sent him had its own shelf. There was a Bible, a rosary, prayer candles Josh couldn't light, and a statue of a saint he honestly couldn't even remember the name of all tucked into that shelf. He didn't know why he kept any of it. Maybe it was just because he missed his mom. Maybe it was because he still found himself praying the rosary whenever that awful poisonous guilt started to surface within him, simply out of habit.

Josh changed back into his regular orange jumpsuit, setting his suicide watch clothes aside to be collected by the next guard on duty before picking up his rosary and sitting down on this bed. He let the beads slide through his hands, but didn't pray. He thought about Frangipane and how she might be doing right now. Would she be done with her procedure by now? Was she in recovery? Would her husband hurt her if he found out what she'd had to do? Would he even care?

With a sigh, Josh set the rosary aside and picked up the menacing pile of letters sitting beside him. They all bore proof of having been opened previously by guards, but that was nothing new. He picked up the top one on the stack, sliding out the few pages of lined notebook paper tucked inside. A brief scan of the words let him know that this was from someone who wished he would've died in the fire. Her name was Leslie, and she was from Indiana. She called him a murderer six times. He tucked the letter into the box beneath his bed before continuing to make his way through the stack.

Unsurprisingly, seeing as it was the day after the anniversary, the majority of the letters were either death threats, teenage copycats looking for validation, or pictures of the charred bodies that had been discovered after the fire. Josh picked up his rosary again, dropping his head back against the wall and closing his eyes as he ran through the familiar prayers in a whisper. There was only one letter left after he muttered his final "amen."

This letter was just written on lined notebook paper too. It was addressed to "Josh Dun" instead of Joshua Dun, which Josh surprisingly had never seen anyone else apart from his family write. The friendly nature of the opening to the letter, a simple "Hi Josh!" intrigued him, causing him to set his rosary down and read the first paragraph carefully.

Hi Josh! I know you don't know me, so maybe it's weird for me to write to you, but there were just some things I've wanted to say to you for the past few days. I should say up front that I'm not expecting you to write back, and there's no pressure for you to do that. I know you probably want to save your time and energy for communicating with your family and working through whatever you need to in there, and I completely respect that. There are just a few things I feel like I really need to tell you if you have time to read them.

Josh stared at the page in front of him in surprise. No one wrote him un-intimidating letters without expecting a response. There was always the hope that he'd write them back, play into their weird little fantasy, and allow them to feel important. He'd never had someone write just for him. Even members of his family didn't really do that. He couldn't help but keep reading.