Work Text:
La Catedral de Santa Perla is a beautiful thing.
Sausage built it himself, or so Oli understands - brick for brick, it’s all his handiwork, and he does mean hands when he says it. They’ve not got all that fancy modded construction stuff round here or anything, so it has to be hand-made. Every turret, every window, every plank in the rafters was hoisted up on the power of Sausage and the villagers of Sanctuary alone. In fact, all of Sanctuary is handmade by its citizens - the shops and the houses and the docks - that’s sort of how it works.
Honestly (and Oli doesn’t like to admit his weaknesses, but) it puts the Olipelago to shame. At least he can blame his own empire’s lagging excellency on the fact that he doesn’t have a whole town full of willing accomplices to build it. Plus the whole stuck in the credits of the universe for several days and then in jail for even longer thing. That put him at a bit of a disadvantage. Definitely not just Oli’s fault he can’t build as well.
But the Cathedral is a new construction, something that he didn’t see the first time he visited Sanctuary, half-blind and still bleeding from arrow wounds he can’t quite remember sustaining. Back then it was just the halls of Sausage’s lovely tavern and a few brief looks at other locations, like his farms and his warehouses. Nothing unusual for a self-made city.
And, well, La Catedral’s not really unusual for Sausage either, but…
It towers. It’s fairly mute against the bright stained clays and dyes of Sanctuary’s other buildings - grey and brown walls, dark wood floors - but it is huge. The copper-green domes of its roof and the warped nether-plank accents along its sides are the only things that really make it pop, and even then that could just as easily meld with the grass and vine-draped trees that surround Sausage’s empire, or the blue-bright ocean that stretches to its rear. Still, birch-white siding and a blackstone cross atop the Cathedral bring stunning contrast to a build that you could spot from miles away.
All this Oli had seen from the hill, been taken aback for a couple of seconds, and then shrugged and admitted that yeah, that was Sausage for you.
It’s gorgeous from the inside, too. Lanterns hang from every angle; pews of simple wooden seats stretch far enough to seat three empires’ worth of people, if you needed; and the stained glass paints the ground in red and yellow and cactus green slits like a half-spun rainbow, heavy in the late afternoon light. Oli pads across the thick red carpet that lines the aisle and feels like he’s wading through it - the light, that is, not the carpet. It’s quiet in here, and still. Slow. Cosy.
Sausage kneels before the altar at the other end of the room. As Oli gets closer, he starts to hear him reciting… something. Oli’s never been religious, not really (yes, he’s met God personally, that’s irrelevant), so he’s not familiar with the murmured phrases he can catch escaping from his old-friend-turned-new’s lips once he makes it past the halfway point of the church. Or maybe that’s just because Sausage isn’t speaking English. His old friend’s foreign language changes names like Sausage changes lives and memories, although the sounds never differ - Enochian, he’d called it last, and Wither-Speak before that. Elytrian, which he’d feigned was called Angelic for the first few days they’d known each other. Spanish, some other time or place that Oli can’t quite recall. (His memories span further than anybody else in this world’s seem to, but they don’t cover everything that Oli knows he’s lived through life to life.)
He speaks with fervour, though, with hushed conviction and with passion. “Madre de Girasoles, guardiana de este país y sus habitantes, ella que fertiliza el suelo abajo y que guía al sol arriba, por favor protege a mis queridos y mi pueblo, para que todos los que aparecen aquí puedan encontrar santuario. Tú que eres bendecida y santificada, bendíceme, santifícame. Amén.”
Oli keeps his distance, keeps an eye on Sausage ‘till his voice quiets and his head rises. He doesn’t understand a lick of what Sausage is saying, of course, but he thinks he can probably guess what santuario means, if nothing else. And it’s obviously a prayer - an entreaty to Santa Perla, most likely, although he never actually said that name. Maybe Oli just missed that bit. It’s hard enough for him to process when people are speaking English.
Something lifts in the atmosphere when Sausage notices Oli. It's like a weighted blanket has been hefted off the room. "Oh! Hello."
"Sorry to disturb, I -"
"No, no, not at all," Sausage smiles, uprighting and asserting himself, placing a sword back on a pair of iron-wrought hooks. "Anybody is welcome in la Catedral at any time. It wouldn't be Sanctuary if it wasn't a place you could go, right?"
"I don't know. It just seemed like you might want some privacy."
"I can pray at home." He's still smiling, beatific, like the saint that he is - that he's always been, even when he was half-Withered and all conflicted. "The grace of the gods extends to everybody, even people who don't live here. And, you know, I pray for everybody's harvests and stuff."
Oli thinks back to his own encounter with God. She'd been short with him, told him that he couldn't visit Sausage (that Sausage, at least) and kicked him off her cloud pretty sharpish. Some grace that had turned out to be. "I don't know much about her."
"Oh, Saint Pearl? She's… well, she's an old goddess. Somebody that we used to worship back home, before things went south and I had to move away. People have different ideas about her. Joel says they had a goddess of death called Peril in his pantheon, and by all accounts it's the same deity, just… differently interpreted. There's two ways to swing a sickle, right?"
Death and the harvest. Two sides of the same cycle. Oli nods.
"But in Sanctuary, she's the goddess of hope. New beginnings, and sunflowers, and spring. She guides lost souls to the place they belong like she guides the sun across the sky, and she grants us the strength to grow into the people that we need to be, whatever challenges are ahead of us. Obviously she can't prevent the tragedies of life, but she can help you be the kind of person that endures them. Does that make sense?"
“Well, yeah. And is she the only god you’ve got in Sanctuary, or…?”
“I mean, people can worship whoever they want. We have another chapel on the other side of town that’s more private - this is where you’d go for ceremonies and that kinda thing. But Santa Perla… she’s special to me. I’ve always felt a lot more close to her than any other deity. Except Thunder Daddy! But, y’know, that’s different.”
Oli has heard quite enough about Sausage and Joel’s special coparenting relationship to last him a lifetime. “Yeah, I reckoned.” And then, quieter, testing a little - “You never knew Pearl?”
“No. She’s far older than me, or anyone in my family. If she ever walked the earth, then it was centuries ago. But… she still feels kind of like a friend.”
That tracks, Oli thinks. They were friends, in whatever past life came before the time that Sausage met him in their Afterlife. A lot of people Oli knew from other worlds had turned up rather shaken - Katherine, Lizzie, Jimmy, Fwhip. Scott especially. They didn’t quite remember what had killed them off, but it was clearly a shared tragedy, and it had spurred them all to make the most of the new lives they’d been granted. (Oli was doing the same, obviously, but that was for Orb reasons more than anything else.)
Sausage had devoted himself to holiness, a self-made angel on Elytrian wings. He’d hidden the glint of chitin under a layer of faux white plumage and pretended it was his true nature. And Oli missed the bit that came between, but when he came back to Afterlife, the wings were real and the holiness glowed from behind his eyes and beneath his skin - so maybe it was his true nature in the end. Either way, he’d played the man out of that world to the sounds of Hallelujah, up to the clouds where he’d later follow… and when he’d got there, she'd been the one to keep Sausage from him. So they were friends, if transcendentally so. It only makes sense that he would feel connected to Pearl even lifetimes later.
“It’s weird,” Sausage continues, “but I guess religion’s kinda like that. You feel connected to somebody that you’re never gonna meet. But Santa Perla does so much for me and my people - she guides us, and she strengthens us. It would be weirder for me not to pay my respects in return.”
Oli nods again. “I’m glad you’ve got… something to fall back on.”
(When he’d been devoted to the Orb, it was a comfort, almost; he assumes that Pearl serves the same purpose for Sausage in this life. Something to believe in - to know that, whatever the world threw at him, he could keep it in the back of his mind, and get through this.)
“So did you need something?”
Oli startles. “Er - yeah, actually! I wanted to ask about getting a new shovel, I’ve broken my old one trying to sort out one of the islands in the Olipelago. Sand - tricky stuff. And I heard you’ve got a particularly talented blacksmith out in these parts…?”
“Oh - Oli! If you wanna come see Eddie, you don’t have to ask me. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. I don’t wanna know what the heck you two get up to.”
“That's coming from the professional pole dancer?”
“Not in the church! Keep that in the Tavern, please!”
“Says the guy who was just talking about Thunder Daddy!”
And so they head for the doors of the church again together, red and yellow and cactus green striping Sausage in vibrant light like a Renaissance painting as he walks ahead, his robes flowing round his legs in sweeping waves. Oli trots behind and wishes he could look this cool. He’ll need to ask for colour palette advice some time as well, because that tent he's got back home is a bit of a patchwork mess, but Sausage manages to make it look so effortless in every build.
Sausage dips a hand in holy water at the door and dabs it on both his and Oli’s foreheads.
“Now you’ll be blessed with a bountiful harvest,” he nods, with that same indelible smile.
Oli stills for a moment, touches an absent finger to the wet patch. But Sausage is walking again already, and so he can’t stay standing in the doorway of la Catedral for long - so he chases after his friend again, the mark already drying in the Sanctuary warmth.
The path runs east before them; along it, every sunflower has turned its face to greet the rising sun.