He willed her zealotry to recognize his authority, the weight of the Vatican behind him. - nice. The rhythm of zealotry and authority are very nice here.
You killed two people and it did nothing. - Obviously this refers to the two new bodies last month, but I am curious about before that. Is it that there were previous murders connected to this town (connected to the previous saved child) but they were a cold case until the most recent ones? I think that's what I'm supposed to get out of the phone call with Suskins + this information, and it's fairly neatly done, but if I'm wrong there might be something else to tweak.
You must know that you can't force a sacrifice. It has to be willing, as our Lord was willing." - This is a nice twist, with just enough sincerity - I admire the neatness of the set-up. He does consent to be tortured even unto death to spare Hiraga. Of course, he sees no moral difficulty with aiming to be rescued. Nice sentence lengths for what you're trying to do in this part.
She understood him, thank God. She understood him, and she didn't suspect anything. - another structure I would note as a favourite of yours at times of emotional height. Two sentences in a row starting the same way, building on each other. Working here!
but Roberto felt like smiling, anyway - I like this - it edges into melodrama but isn't quite too muh for me. And I like the calm before the intensity ratchets up again.
There is something cruel about this that mars the sweetness of Roberto's certainty for me - Hiraga not getting a say. Roberto gets his beautiful moment and Hiraga doesn't get input. Hiraga's been angry and terrified and in pain for a while, and although his safety is bought, someone else is trading it in for a different kind of pain without asking what he feels or wants. It sits uneasily with me, what Roberto's taking on. The way you write Roberto as if almost in a trance already helps, but … it kind of feels like Roberto's doing this for himself. Not for Hiraga.
tore the cassock off his back, - this should be "and tore" because it's the last in this particular list, being the last one that has "They" as its subject. "and he fought not to shudder" is an independent clause.
like some of his seminary mates had , - delete extra space
-I like the struck/stuck echo. -When you say "he thought he got it, finally", like with the knowing / not knowing, I want a little more narrative space for the importance of this change.
splintered his breath and voice. - Nice.
The next parts feel a little too sped up for me. You've built this all up so much, and then we get one paragraph and a couple of scraps - it feels like you don't want to write this part. I think just one more described sensation at the start would help a lot to avoid "it didnt' stop" and "it didn't help, not at all" to feel a little less like generalizations. This is very heightened, with him forgetting why he's there and the passage of time getting uncertain, and the immense drama of him screaming out prayer lines, but underneath there's a slight vagueness that takes away some of the impact of the drama for me. When you first describe him screaming, you do that in a way that implies he was already screaming, and it's simultaneously true that the earlier screaming wasn't important to describe AND that the fact that he's *still* screaming, after a duration of screaming, gives this true pathos.
He couldn’t find his legs beyond the bright core of agony - this is pretty but not totally sure what it means - find and beyond are uncertainly metaphorical. I like his eyes not focusing, though.
because it was beyond him not to recognize symbols - this feels a little fancy. It strains my belief a little that he's as incoherent as you've made him and he's still having these kinds of very ironic, reflective, self-deprecating thoughts-on-top-of-thoughts. I think his mind whispering to him and him not being able to suppress a laugh reaction conveys the most important meaning!
now covered in blood and snot and tears; the indignity of it made him laugh harder - the following metaphor isn't working perfectly for me, but I like this and the combination of grounding and hysteria.
They were droning over him, something horribly like a sermon and he didn’t listen - This needs a comma after sermon - "something horribly like a sermon" is a parenthetical description in between the two independent clauses of a compound sentence. (Also there have already been sermons in this scene, so this being a sermon and him having an indignant reaction to that feels a little like old information presented as new.)
Then his right arm was grabbed and stretched out and pushed flat, palm out, against the stone and he rolled his head to follow the movement - preferably needs comma after stone, but you can get away more easily without it here - omitting the comma before the conjunction joining two independent clauses is a less strict rule.
time had mercifully stuttered to stop - to a stop
They grabbed his left arm and this time there was no mercy of going away. - In this part of the scene, the amount of detail you give really does work for me, much better than in the whipping part above. I'm not super into the puzzle pieces and this is important part - too abstract for me - but I really like the arm movement details, his head moving, and the way you let him check out for the first nail penetration but make him experience the second. The pacing is good there.
horrible quiet corner of his memory where his father lived and his mother died - I don't 100% understand this, and lived/died are a little grammatically complicated to put in parallel like this, BUT I really love it. The images are great and I totally buy into this being strange and dark and personal.
He wondered, inanely, if they had drilled the holes in the altar beforehand, if the man who had done it had whistled as he worked. - Personal reaction: the altar-drilling is interesting inconsequentiality, the whistling idea tends towards the maudlin.
The world was dimming, collapsing. Nothing was left but the four centers of pain, and yet something left of him was suspended between them, something small and insignificant, still whispering. - I like this a lot.
who it was that was praying for. - that he was
He floated in the pain I think this is a kind of conventional description, but it always seems a bit suspiciously contradictory to me. Floating is numbness or comfort, lack of pressured contact. Pain is not those things!
urgency he didn’t recognize - Not sure what you mean by recognize here. Do you mean something like relate to? If he's calling it urgency, he recognizes it.
saw a face, black hair, and terrified eyes - strictly speaking, these are three things that don't quite belong in a list of discrete things, because eyes are part of the face. Preferably tweak so this isn't structured as a list of three.
The comment "look, a miracle" is too maudlin for me personally because it isn't grounded. WHAT is a miracle? But would probably land fine with others.
“No,” Hiraga said, “no, no, Roberto, no.” - So this picks up in Hiraga's viewpoint here and we don't get even a flash of what it felt like for him in the intervening time; the bias towards Roberto feels strong. The explicit narratorial approval of Roberto's choices is a little heavy.
and this wasn’t right, couldn’t be. Surely He was not here now. - that wasn't right; otherwise, effective drama.
shock and blood loss and where’s the fucking saw already - this is a device you like that works if used sparingly. It's the second time in the fic that someone has been able to hear only certain words, and those words are coincidentally the most important words. (There are ways to tweak this to imply "person hears lots of disjoint words, and some are nonsense, and only the key ones are reported to the reader," but this isn't quite that.)
He nodded dumbly at her , - delete space
The knees of his vestment were stiff with Roberto’s blood. - Nice awful detail.
It was weird how the hospitals - you use weird a lot in this fic
like stale exhaustion and frozen minutes - ooh, I really like that
and he didn’t regret it for one minute. - the idiom is "for a/one moment". "for one minute" does not make sense here.
when he made himself hear her words - stable and you can see him now- he - again you're using the trope of special selected words. Also, space between now and punctuation
The transition to the dream is really confusing and jarring to me. First, it's that I can't easily tell whose perspective it is, and since you have Hiraga looking down, I don't even understand why he would be asleep. It's a big transition from the previous scene.
black of the cassock and red of the blood - I am not quite sure what these structures are meant to be doing, but they are very marked/weird/incorrect in English.
but it turned into the black snake in his hands - a black snake
His breath was whistling in his throat, his heart pounded - a semicolon works better than a comma there. They're independent, complete actions.
the dream forgotten - just MY experience of it makes me question that. Quite the dramatic dream!
Two days of bedside vigil - Oh! Quite the timeskip then!
He laughed, because it was better than drowning poor Roberto in tears on his sickbed, and said “No - drowning is a little melodramatic. Comma needed after said.
so heavily bandaged that it was hard to guess at their contours underneath - nice detail!
Hiraga sat down abruptly. “Roberto, it’s not... I can’t... You shouldn’t have done that. I can’t bear you having done that, God, you could have been - you could have…” - I AM VERY GLAD HE MAKES SOME PROTEST, BECAUSE WTH. Also, hm. You give us a lot of Hiraga's immediate feelings here, relating to the current situation, but this is overall very light on Hiraga's thoughts about the main traumatic event: being kidnapped, and manhandled along; being prepared for sacrifice; seeing his beloved friend tortured in front of him. It's all concentrated on the now, and that doesn't ring 100% true for me. He's not happy about Roberto having offered himself in Hiraga's stead, but it feels to me as if you're writing him as if he was off-screen for the event.
and I didn’t have to find it within myself at all. - I like this. The numinous sense is very clear to me, and it's a lot like Bujold's Chalion saints and their experience of being vessels.
as if he was suggesting Hiraga dismiss his words - suggesting Hirago should dismiss his words
where Hiraga spent way more time than at his own place - again, 'way' in this context is a register below, incongruously informal. 'much'?
“Roberto,” Hiraga said, “when you’re teaching at the seminary, where am I ? In this future of yours?” - This is a moment I like a lot! It's an insightful question and so lightly delivered.
and petted his hair until Hiraga fell asleep. - very minor quibble: a transition that doesn't require Hiraga to be aware of Hiraga falling asleep would work better for me. But otherwise I like the catharsis!
Re: create in me a clean heart
You killed two people and it did nothing. - Obviously this refers to the two new bodies last month, but I am curious about before that. Is it that there were previous murders connected to this town (connected to the previous saved child) but they were a cold case until the most recent ones? I think that's what I'm supposed to get out of the phone call with Suskins + this information, and it's fairly neatly done, but if I'm wrong there might be something else to tweak.
You must know that you can't force a sacrifice. It has to be willing, as our Lord was willing." - This is a nice twist, with just enough sincerity - I admire the neatness of the set-up. He does consent to be tortured even unto death to spare Hiraga. Of course, he sees no moral difficulty with aiming to be rescued. Nice sentence lengths for what you're trying to do in this part.
She understood him, thank God. She understood him, and she didn't suspect anything. - another structure I would note as a favourite of yours at times of emotional height. Two sentences in a row starting the same way, building on each other. Working here!
but Roberto felt like smiling, anyway - I like this - it edges into melodrama but isn't quite too muh for me. And I like the calm before the intensity ratchets up again.
There is something cruel about this that mars the sweetness of Roberto's certainty for me - Hiraga not getting a say. Roberto gets his beautiful moment and Hiraga doesn't get input. Hiraga's been angry and terrified and in pain for a while, and although his safety is bought, someone else is trading it in for a different kind of pain without asking what he feels or wants. It sits uneasily with me, what Roberto's taking on. The way you write Roberto as if almost in a trance already helps, but … it kind of feels like Roberto's doing this for himself. Not for Hiraga.
tore the cassock off his back, - this should be "and tore" because it's the last in this particular list, being the last one that has "They" as its subject. "and he fought not to shudder" is an independent clause.
like some of his seminary mates had , - delete extra space
-I like the struck/stuck echo.
-When you say "he thought he got it, finally", like with the knowing / not knowing, I want a little more narrative space for the importance of this change.
splintered his breath and voice. - Nice.
The next parts feel a little too sped up for me. You've built this all up so much, and then we get one paragraph and a couple of scraps - it feels like you don't want to write this part. I think just one more described sensation at the start would help a lot to avoid "it didnt' stop" and "it didn't help, not at all" to feel a little less like generalizations. This is very heightened, with him forgetting why he's there and the passage of time getting uncertain, and the immense drama of him screaming out prayer lines, but underneath there's a slight vagueness that takes away some of the impact of the drama for me. When you first describe him screaming, you do that in a way that implies he was already screaming, and it's simultaneously true that the earlier screaming wasn't important to describe AND that the fact that he's *still* screaming, after a duration of screaming, gives this true pathos.
He couldn’t find his legs beyond the bright core of agony - this is pretty but not totally sure what it means - find and beyond are uncertainly metaphorical. I like his eyes not focusing, though.
because it was beyond him not to recognize symbols - this feels a little fancy. It strains my belief a little that he's as incoherent as you've made him and he's still having these kinds of very ironic, reflective, self-deprecating thoughts-on-top-of-thoughts. I think his mind whispering to him and him not being able to suppress a laugh reaction conveys the most important meaning!
now covered in blood and snot and tears; the indignity of it made him laugh harder - the following metaphor isn't working perfectly for me, but I like this and the combination of grounding and hysteria.
They were droning over him, something horribly like a sermon and he didn’t listen - This needs a comma after sermon - "something horribly like a sermon" is a parenthetical description in between the two independent clauses of a compound sentence. (Also there have already been sermons in this scene, so this being a sermon and him having an indignant reaction to that feels a little like old information presented as new.)
Then his right arm was grabbed and stretched out and pushed flat, palm out, against the stone and he rolled his head to follow the movement - preferably needs comma after stone, but you can get away more easily without it here - omitting the comma before the conjunction joining two independent clauses is a less strict rule.
time had mercifully stuttered to stop - to a stop
They grabbed his left arm and this time there was no mercy of going away. - In this part of the scene, the amount of detail you give really does work for me, much better than in the whipping part above. I'm not super into the puzzle pieces and this is important part - too abstract for me - but I really like the arm movement details, his head moving, and the way you let him check out for the first nail penetration but make him experience the second. The pacing is good there.
horrible quiet corner of his memory where his father lived and his mother died - I don't 100% understand this, and lived/died are a little grammatically complicated to put in parallel like this, BUT I really love it. The images are great and I totally buy into this being strange and dark and personal.
He wondered, inanely, if they had drilled the holes in the altar beforehand, if the man who had done it had whistled as he worked. - Personal reaction: the altar-drilling is interesting inconsequentiality, the whistling idea tends towards the maudlin.
The world was dimming, collapsing. Nothing was left but the four centers of pain, and yet something left of him was suspended between them, something small and insignificant, still whispering. - I like this a lot.
who it was that was praying for. - that he was
He floated in the pain I think this is a kind of conventional description, but it always seems a bit suspiciously contradictory to me. Floating is numbness or comfort, lack of pressured contact. Pain is not those things!
urgency he didn’t recognize - Not sure what you mean by recognize here. Do you mean something like relate to? If he's calling it urgency, he recognizes it.
saw a face, black hair, and terrified eyes - strictly speaking, these are three things that don't quite belong in a list of discrete things, because eyes are part of the face. Preferably tweak so this isn't structured as a list of three.
The comment "look, a miracle" is too maudlin for me personally because it isn't grounded. WHAT is a miracle? But would probably land fine with others.
“No,” Hiraga said, “no, no, Roberto, no.” - So this picks up in Hiraga's viewpoint here and we don't get even a flash of what it felt like for him in the intervening time; the bias towards Roberto feels strong. The explicit narratorial approval of Roberto's choices is a little heavy.
and this wasn’t right, couldn’t be. Surely He was not here now. - that wasn't right; otherwise, effective drama.
shock and blood loss and where’s the fucking saw already - this is a device you like that works if used sparingly. It's the second time in the fic that someone has been able to hear only certain words, and those words are coincidentally the most important words. (There are ways to tweak this to imply "person hears lots of disjoint words, and some are nonsense, and only the key ones are reported to the reader," but this isn't quite that.)
He nodded dumbly at her , - delete space
The knees of his vestment were stiff with Roberto’s blood. - Nice awful detail.
It was weird how the hospitals - you use weird a lot in this fic
like stale exhaustion and frozen minutes - ooh, I really like that
and he didn’t regret it for one minute. - the idiom is "for a/one moment". "for one minute" does not make sense here.
when he made himself hear her words - stable and you can see him now- he - again you're using the trope of special selected words. Also, space between now and punctuation
The transition to the dream is really confusing and jarring to me. First, it's that I can't easily tell whose perspective it is, and since you have Hiraga looking down, I don't even understand why he would be asleep. It's a big transition from the previous scene.
black of the cassock and red of the blood - I am not quite sure what these structures are meant to be doing, but they are very marked/weird/incorrect in English.
but it turned into the black snake in his hands - a black snake
His breath was whistling in his throat, his heart pounded - a semicolon works better than a comma there. They're independent, complete actions.
the dream forgotten - just MY experience of it makes me question that. Quite the dramatic dream!
Two days of bedside vigil - Oh! Quite the timeskip then!
He laughed, because it was better than drowning poor Roberto in tears on his sickbed, and said “No - drowning is a little melodramatic. Comma needed after said.
so heavily bandaged that it was hard to guess at their contours underneath - nice detail!
Hiraga sat down abruptly. “Roberto, it’s not... I can’t... You shouldn’t have done that. I can’t bear you having done that, God, you could have been - you could have…” - I AM VERY GLAD HE MAKES SOME PROTEST, BECAUSE WTH. Also, hm. You give us a lot of Hiraga's immediate feelings here, relating to the current situation, but this is overall very light on Hiraga's thoughts about the main traumatic event: being kidnapped, and manhandled along; being prepared for sacrifice; seeing his beloved friend tortured in front of him. It's all concentrated on the now, and that doesn't ring 100% true for me. He's not happy about Roberto having offered himself in Hiraga's stead, but it feels to me as if you're writing him as if he was off-screen for the event.
and I didn’t have to find it within myself at all. - I like this. The numinous sense is very clear to me, and it's a lot like Bujold's Chalion saints and their experience of being vessels.
as if he was suggesting Hiraga dismiss his words - suggesting Hirago should dismiss his words
where Hiraga spent way more time than at his own place - again, 'way' in this context is a register below, incongruously informal. 'much'?
“Roberto,” Hiraga said, “when you’re teaching at the seminary, where am I ? In this future of yours?” - This is a moment I like a lot! It's an insightful question and so lightly delivered.
and petted his hair until Hiraga fell asleep. - very minor quibble: a transition that doesn't require Hiraga to be aware of Hiraga falling asleep would work better for me. But otherwise I like the catharsis!