#Also hope there aren't any super terrible typos or embarrassing homophones

[wowbright]

Fic: Ancient Scrolls Don’t Lie

Klaine Advent 2022 #14: dispose

Words: ~1850 words

Rating: Teen and Up

Summary: Kurt finds out what happened to Elder Thompson. (Sort of.)

I’m back with more vignettes from my Mormon!Klaine universe for Klaine Advent 2022! This vignette takes after Convergence (they’re still at the mission conference).

My Mormon!Klaine Masterpost.

Notes/warnings: Anti-Catholic sentiment (very). Well-intentioned but ignorant discussion of Judaism. White boys both grappling with and ignoring racism at the same time.

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The one good thing about being assigned the family bathroom for afternoon cleanup was that Kurt finally had a few minutes alone with Elder St. James. The news that had been nagging at him on and off throughout the day could now be spoken.

“I can't believe you didn't tell me about Elder Thompson,” Kurt scolded the back of Elder St. James’s head.

The latter missionary was stooped over the toilet of the family washroom, scrubbing it with a bristled brush. “Look.” Elder St. James flung the toilet brush into the bowl and scowled at Kurt. “I didn't really even know what was going on most of the conference. First a text message that he and Elder Flanagan were going to be late, then that he was missing, then that they had found him. And President Steele kept telling me not to worry about it, that it was for him and area leaders to take care of. I should focus on this conference.”

“Apparently I need to keep a better eye on my companions. I didn't notice you talking to President Steele constantly. Just your interview with him today in his office, and that didn't last more than five minutes.”

“I wasn't. It was mostly text messages. He wouldn’t tell me exactly what was going on, and Elder Thompson is probably the most stable missionary I've ever met, and Elder Flanagan—well, you've worked with Elder Flanagan. He's nice, but he's a little … let's just say I wouldn’t be that surprised if he wandered off with a girl. So I thought maybe he was really the problem, and Elder Thompson had gone looking for him and gotten into an accident or something and that’s why he was missing. But I didn't want to start gossip.”

“You? Not wanting to start gossip? That's rich. And what if he had been in an accident? We should have all been praying for him then.” Kurt scrubbed the final corner of the diaper changing station furiously.

Elder St. James looked like he was about to set his hands on his hips, then seemed to realize that he was wearing gloves besmirched with toilet cleaner and folded them together, instead. “Yes, I like gossip. But passing on existing gossip is different than starting it.”

“Fine. Glad to see you’ve grown in the gospel so much more than I have over the course of your mission.” Kurt slammed the changing table shut and latched it to the wall.

“That's not what I'm saying. Besides, President Steele was very firm about me keeping it on the downlow.”

“Apparently he didn’t tell that to Elder Flanagan!”

“You think Elder Flanagan is capable of following directions from anybody? Besides, everything he said this morning was wrong.”

“What do you mean? Elder Thompson didn't run off?” Kurt grabbed a bottle of glass cleaner and turned toward the mirror.

“No. That part is right. And he is being removed from proselytizing. But he's not being sent home when he only has one week left in his mission. He's going to spend the rest of it working at the genealogy center in Freiberg.” Elder St. James looked at the toilet, gave it one final scrub with the brush, and flushed it.

“I thought you said you didn't know anything,” Kurt said through gritted teeth.

“I didn't. But President Steele gave me a little update in my interview with him this afternoon. And I'm really not supposed to be talking about it with anybody, but …” Elder St. James lower his voice. “Elder Flanagan was also wrong about it being a girl.”

Kurt froze. He couldn't look at his own reflection in the mirror. He concentrated on a white soap stain in the lower corner and rubbed at it steadily. If it wasn't a girl, did that mean it was a— But no. Kurt had never clocked Elder Thompson as gay. But he’d never clocked him as a criminal or an apostate, either, and those were the only other two choices.

“Elder Hummel, you look as white as the sink. What do you think I'm gonna say?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, stop worrying. It’s not that bad.” Elder St. James pulled off his gloves and disposed of them in the trash. “At least, I don't think so. But … I guess there have been incidents. You’ve worked with him a bit, right? You know how he's sympathetic to other religious views almost to a fault?”

When Kurt had served in the same district as Elder Thompson, it had been Elder Thompson's idea for them to visit the local mosque on P-day. But they hadn't done anything there. They’d just stood in the back, listening to the prayers, and then they’d talked to the imam about the similarities in their religions. No one made a declaration of fealty to Muhammad. It wasn't much different from visiting a cathedral, which Kurt had done on many P-days. “I wouldn’t say that. He was open in a way that all missionaries should be.”

Elder St. James made a contradictory click with his tongue and grabbed the broom. “Are missionaries supposed to go to a Catholic church and take the Eucharist?”

Kurt almost dropped his paper towel. “He what now?”

“Yeah. Which I shouldn't have even known about, it was like three transfers ago apparently. But he told me … maybe a month ago? I told him to tell President Steele, but he said why should he, he used to do it whenever he was visiting with his grandparents and he was just feeling a little homesick—you know his grandfather died last year while Elder Thomas was out here, right? And yeah, it sucks not to be able to go home for funerals, but that's no excuse for cannibalism with the Catholics. I mean, seriously, who knows what's in that wafer? Catholics think that it's the actual body of Christ but it can't be, so whose body it it?”

“It’s bread, Elder St. James. Made out of flour. And wine. Made out of grapes.”

"I know it looks that way. But they do all those incantations and there's that incense and … I don’t know. It's like a Satanic mass or something. There's something creepy going on with those wafers.”

“Exactly how many Satanic masses have you been to, Elder St. James?”

“None, but I was an extra in a horror movie called—”

Kurt held up his hand to stop the onslaught of stupidity. “That's fiction.”

“Yeah, but … fiction can have a kernel of truth in it, can't it? And Catholic churches make me so uncomfortable. All those statues and candles and stuff. I don't feel the presence of the Holy Ghost there. Which is exactly what I told Elder Thompson.”

“OK. So he's in trouble for taking the sacrament at a Catholic Church?”

Elder St. James shook his head as if to clear it. “No. I don't think he ever told President Steele about that. Now it has something to do with Judaism. He’s been teaching a Jewish family for a while and I guess … they did a better job of converting him than vice versa?”

This conversation was a rollercoaster of the unexpected. “But Jews don't convert people.”

“Everyone converts people. That's what religion is for.”

“No. They don't. I mean, I'm not an expert, but I had Jewish friends in high school and I visited a synagogue, and no one tried to convert me. My friend Rachel told me that if I wanted to convert, I’d be turned away at least three times before they'd finally agree to consider it, and that would just be the beginning because the actual preparation for baptism or whatever they call it would take years. She thought that's how Mormons should do things, too. Said it would make us a lot less annoying.”

Elder St. James stopped sweeping. He rested his hands on top of the broomstick and tilted his head to the side, like a robin listening for worms in the ground. “She might be right. I mean, about the less annoying thing.” He smiled as if he had come upon a perfectly cut gem in a pile of rough stones, and shook his head again. “OK, so I don’t know his official status as far as conversion. But ever since they had this sort of pre-Easter celebration dinner over at the house of this Jewish family—”

“You mean Passover? Jews don't celebrate Easter.”

“Yes! Passover!” Elder Saint James snapped his fingers. “Like Jesus and the disciples did, except … different, I guess? Anyway, ever since he went to this dinner, he's been asking a lot of questions about the temple and the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses. Which confused me, because if Judaism is so hot, why is he complaining about their scriptures? And he was like, ‘No, dummy, they’re in the Pearl of Great Price, not the Old Testament; Joseph Smith wrote them.’ He actually said that. ‘Joseph Smith wrote them.’ Not ‘translated them.’”

“Joseph Smith didn't write that stuff. He translated it from ancient scrolls.” Kurt tossed the paper towel into the garbage. He was no expert in the books of the Pearl of Great Price. It was probably his most neglected set of scriptures. But he remembered that much from seminary. The Book of Abraham was proof of Joseph Smith being a prophet and translator, because the church and the actual ancient Egyptian scrolls that he had translated it from.

“Right. I know. But Elder Thompson has gone off the deep end. He’s saying none of it is real, and if we really want to follow in Moses and Abraham’s footsteps, we should talk to the people who've been following them for millennia, instead of blindly swallowing what some racist white guy from America wrote about them in the 1800s.”

“But Joseph Smith was an abolitionist!”

“I know. But Elder Thompson keeps making me question it. He made me super uncomfortable the other day. He's been trying to prove to me that he's right, and he read out loud the part about ‘for the seed of Cain were black’—and I know it isn’t racist just like ‘the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon’ the Lamanites isn’t racist, because it really means that they were without the light of Christ and not that they were, like, African-American, but— Well. It sure sounded racist, when he read it to me.”

Kurt’s stomach churned the way it did every time he encountered those passages. He knew what Elder St. James said was true. He had heard it in Sunday School and seminary and from his bishop and from his father. God wasn't a racist, and the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price were the word of God, so what they said couldn't be racist either. If the words sounded racist to us, that was human fallibility. If too many of the Mormons he'd met on his mission took these passages at face value, that was a lack of spiritual discernment on their part, not a problem with the text itself.