and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding

Coward.
He thinks it, over and over, from the second he wakes to the second he falls, like a rock, into fitful sleep.

A week passes, perhaps two, perhaps three. There is no shortage of trouble, rather a surplus of it: bristling tension, hour upon hour of reports, endless hunting, endless thinking, endless and still mounting frustration the size of Viride itself. Andras has spent so long staring at carefully drawn corpses, their eyes gone, their organs either splayed across the scene or missing altogether, that their empty faces, bereft of what made them special, valuable, coveted, has become as much a part of him as his own electric rage. He sees their eyes when he closes his own--and more, yellow like marigolds, orange like fire,  like heat, like--

A coward's, Andras thinks. He looks out the window, head tilted so his cheek rests on one bent knee, watching the wind through the canopy until the fist of his anger lets go of his heart, and returns to his work. The world is much quieter when you are the only one in it.

---

He can't quite remember what brings him here: the street corner curved under a thick sheet of snow, the traffic, passing, the steady drum of his heart as he thinks about bodies in the woods, bodies in the streets, bodies and more bodies, everywhere he looks. He wonders if he is suffocating. He wonders if it matters.

The rock of the citadel, a cold silhouette behind the stacked shops and the still-empty streets, is the same gray as the overcast sky, which is the same gray again as the dirty snow that gathers in corners and curbs, uneven where the rest of it is so flat, and too clean, in a way that makes Andras both happy and tense in a pattern that rises and falls with his breathing.

Each drawn breath is some rising anger. Each exhale lets some of it out, but not enough. He is thinking of fire, now. Sand and fire. Sand and fire and scales, and some bottomless want that he glances at, now and then, but cannot quite bring himself to touch until it rounds the corner toward him: the clean white linen, the slender legs, the dull light that his scales somehow still catch and hold like a trophy. His heart runs away with him, anger turned to rage turned to magic, one branch of blue light with its fingers stretched from his skin to the wall behind him.

Andras wonders how much trouble it would be, to punch a Solterran prince in his beautiful, awful face. He wonders if Pilate would punch him back. He hopes, he hopes, he hopes. It is as deep and as black as his hatred.

and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding

Overhead, the sleepy sun leers down, a fuzzy white silhouette behind the heavy cloud cover. It is a cold sunlight that filters down in shades of gray. Andras fades into it, black as the bottom of the ocean except for the bright, bright white on his wing, his chin, his ankle; but Pilate is a brown like spring earth, like the soft floor of Viride itself, and Andras sees their eyes meet from a distance.

"Don't." he warns, and like lead it falls out of him, crashing. 

He is a snake, rattling in the tall grass, full of air, full of venom that seeps into the snow on the cobblestone, crackling away at the teeth of a predator. Perhaps he is the coward - who watched Pilate shrink into the distance while the deep ache of want cut his throat. Perhaps he is the coward, now, bristling on the street corner, crying for vengeance and itching to sink his teeth into the man's throat, his ribs, his jaw -- in a way that is not entirely violent, but tightens his jaw, anyway.

Chest to chest, wolf to wolf, Pilate eats up the space and Andras bares his teeth like a feral thing dragged out of the forest, still covered in the loam he crawled out of. Andras is searching his face like he's taking auspices, reading each line for answers: the sharp cheekbone that might tell him why (and this is the loudest, why, because everything is overshadowed by his eyes, his scales, his mouth and Andras feels half-insane with it), the soft brow that might tell him how, the curve of the jaw that might say what--what Pilate wants, what Andras wants, what thing is sitting next to his endless rage and growing by the second.

Certainly, Andras is the coward, buzzing with pause, strife with hesitation. This close he can feel the bone-deep ache that begs him to bite, to claw, to kick, to scratch, to scream. When Pilate speaks his blood does the screaming for him, so loud he can't think.

"That's a pity," he says, measured out like a hand, reached toward the fire. He doesn't know if it's a palm or a fist. He laughs--or barely does, an exasperated slip of the chest, more breath than noise. His smile is all teeth. "I'm busy. What do you want?"

and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding

His heart is crouched like a beast at the altar, slobbering as it prays with its claws in the floorboards. It confesses that it hadn't expected Pilate to laugh so the way it breaks over the sharp lines in his face in a way that smoothes them, for just a moment, knocks the breath out of its lungs. It has to beat so hard just to breathe that the clergyman hears it, the congregation hears it, and the choir sings along to its drum.

It doesn't sound so much like a hymn. 
Its sound can't be anything holy at all.

Pilate grins the way Andras grins, like every tooth is another threat to spit out with the others. If he were the introspective type, Andras might remark on the savage curve of his mouth, sharp as a sickle, or the look in his eyes like his heart says yes just as loud. Andras is not the introspective type. As the space closes up Andras thinks only that it must be a crime, that he is equal parts hate and want, and when one winks to life the other just rises to meet it.

Don't what? Pilate purrs. Andras grits his teeth so hard he's surprised the whole grin doesn't fall out of his mouth. He'd spit his own bloody teeth in the dirt if he could relive it for the rest of his life. 

Andras leans forward. "You tell me." Each lens of his glasses shines cruelly in the light until it too is eaten up by the closeness. Andras wonders if Pilate can see his reflection in them. He wonders if he would like what he sees: the reeling, the ghost of something like ichor, straight from the heart of a god.

His magic hums against his skin. He has so many questions and none of them seem to matter. Andras tips first his head forward, then his body. His smile is as dark as his skin. "I look busier than you." he says. They are close enough that Andras can see each scale on each dormant snake.

He repeats: "What do you want, Pilate?"

and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding

Andras reads Pilate, with eyes that are far too serious and a mouth that drops from a grin to a smile to a still, concentrated line.

At first he thinks only that the whole scene is beautiful in a way that a more poetic version of himself may have loved to describe but the Andras of here and now can't find the words. He only sees Pilate lick his lips because he's looking. He only sees the hard edge of his smile become gaussian and mellow because it fills him like fear, first the lungs then the throat. How does a body know if it or the snow is run through by the rain? 

Pilate looks like a dream, or a statue with even the veins carved into perfect shape. Andras looks lost, like he cannot remember the last time he wanted to turn someone's pages. Maybe never.

For a moment they are watching each other in perfect silence, two boys in the street with knots in their throats, barely breathing through their lungs crushed by cinderblocks, one barely smiling and one that doesn't even try. If hell has a name Andras is sure it's the space between them, small as it is--close enough to feel the heat, close enough that he's claustrophobic and hot.

Attention, Pilate says.
Just like you.
Then he grins like the devil and Andras' heart crawls straight out of his mouth.

First is the searching, again, as if Pilate will spit up the reason, the answer, before Andras can even think to ask it. For a second he holds his breath, imagining--something nameless but tangible, though he doesn't know what it is until he leans forward again, so close they are almost touching but not quite, barely atoms from skin to skin, and another arc of static flicks over his wings.

"Then take it." he says, barely a whisper. What little self control he has is groaning under the pressure of not reaching in, not knowing what it feels like to touch Pilate's cheek, his jaw, his neck. He forces a breath to keep from combusting. "I dare you."

and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding

He is spiraling, like a bird with a hole in its wing, on some long collision course toward the mountains, wheeling through the air with his eyes closed and his head tipped back toward the sun. It does not feel quite like falling, but something lighter, something like white light, something like the sun as it turns his muscles to wet clay.

It feels good. Maybe that's all that matters. 
Maybe that's all that should.

It is not quite like falling but it is very close, when the city holds its breath and Andras does so along with it. He is thankful for the quiet streets, the hush of a Court with its head in the sand, first consumed by their own private lives and shuttered windows and second by the all-encompassing fear of the times they live in. Usually it would drive him mad, the silence. Usually he would stand on this street corner with his head on his chest and think we are dead, surely, but now that same silence feels somehow sacred.

Pilate is still. Silent, too. He is thinking. Andras cannot stop the way his shoulders tighten, his legs, as if Pilate has leveled a gun on him and Andras is smiling down the barrel. By the time he moves, Andras is sure he will die, one way or the other.

He is a bird, spiraling. Pilate leans in, to kiss him, but doesn't. Andras watches him, the slapdash grin, the sudden blur of his own glasses falling--no, not falling at all, being pulled--and then white, and gray, and white. He didn't think he liked copper, and green, and gold, until it was all he couldn't see. 

He turns. There he goes, smiling like the devil, he thinks. The thief smiles. Like a challenge. Like a dare. Andras had asked for this.

Two black wings unfold in an eruption of lightning that forks off each feather with a sound like small thunder. I'm going to fucking kill him.

He is aloft before he knows it, leaping forward with the wind pillowed beneath his wings. If he hadn't been so fucking twitterpated, if he hadn't stood there like a complete idiot, Pilate may have gotten nowhere at all, just a turn, and a lunge, and Andras would have him on the ground, or against the wall, or-- not running, is what's important. "Give my FUCKING GLASSES BACK, PILATE!" he yells, pushing himself forward, faster and faster until it hurts to breathe the cold air coming in so quick, filling him like a balloon. He hopes Pilate hears his crackling skin as he banks, hitting the cobblestone like a ton of bricks, still running.

He is a bird, hitting the ground. It leaves a crater the size of his pounding heart. Its bones crack like glass. Andras can't tell if it's falling or flying.