i go red hot like a demon
i go ghost for no damn reason
stupid boy think that i need him
I
n the street, someone is laughing. Below me there is an ongoing festival, Solterra's tribute to the oncoming winter, a celebration of warm days and frigid nights, not much different than every other frigid night. Overhead the sky is smeared with red and purple and blue, with just the crown of the sun still visible above the horizon. It is an orange sliver in the distance, ringed in red-- and i can see all of it, from here.
Perched on the roof with my neck stretched over the low wall, and its edges pressed into the skin of my cheek, I feel more like a proper beast than any other time. It is easy to be a cat from here, hunched over in the dark, watching mice scurry by. I am obscured from the street by the glow of a lantern on the other side of our estate wall, I think, just a silhouette behind it, crouched low in waiting.
At least this is what I decide, as the minutes tick by and I search faces for recognition, or even just eyes, turned up my way.
There are none. I breathe sharp enough that it makes a sound, the sort of sound our father would have been mortified to hear, inelegant and petty and crass-- and slide my head from its resting place, floating back through the door like the ghost that I am.
If I am self absorbed, if I am vaguely narcissistic, it is only because as I descend the stairs toward the office, there is a feeling growing in me that I am perhaps not here at all. I sometimes wonder if I am a ghost, especially these days when our family is so bitter and broken. I wonder if I am really dead, and have been dead for so long I've forgotten just how.
Maybe I died with our mother. How can one know?
If I am self absorbed it is because my self is somehow fractured, I think, or at least not working properly. There is still a rock on my stomach when I knock on the door and push it open before the single servant in the room can be sent to do it for me. I step into the room with a rock in my stomach and a calm smile on my face and say--
"Pilate, I'm surprised you're not at the festivities."
And, looking at him, looking at a face I have literally known my whole life, that hasn't changed except to become sharper as it grows-- I feel real again.
the house seems to circle around you slowly. i circle around you, a wild / animal near a fire. i remember / i would kill for you. i remind myself / it won't be necessary.
I have little interest in the affairs of the commoners.
I know there is a festival going on: I have seen the flyers posted around town, and I can hear them laughing in the streets below. Lamps flash up into my window. Their music—not the good music I’ve hired to be played at tomorrow night’s party—seeps through my walls, through my pillows, and rings with annoying insistence in my ears. I groan at the sound of it; I debate opening my window and yelling down at them, but that is a pipe dream, a goulishly proletariat act that years of princely training simply would not allow.
Instead I satisfy myself with glaring at them, scowling down from my nearly-literal ivory tower. They all look horribly gaudy, I think to myself, either significantly over- or under-dressed; part of what makes a commoner a commoner is their inability to understand that thin line between opulence and excess, luxury and garishness. My cloak, for example. It is only white linen—anyone might wear it—but the bejeweled clasp at the chest, the chain of gold around my neck, marks it (and me) as better than.
Outside, the darkness is beginning to swallow things. The edges of storefronts melt away into blackness; the bodies of the crowds are no longer bodies, no longer individuals at all, but a roiling wave, pushing up against the dark like it is a blanket. I’m cold, I realize. Wind whistles in from the crack underneath the door. For just a second, I shiver. For just a second. I feel almost overwhelmed by my aloneness—hearing the sounds of people from the street below, while I stand in this dimly lit, empty room—and I feel not like myself, not like Pilate, not like a prince at all. I feel like nobody.
There is a knock on my door, and I know it is Hagar even before I hear her voice.
And all at once I am alive again, and real, and the knowledge of my blood comes rushing back to me; and by the time I whip around to meet her gaze, casting my head over my shoulder like the first stone, I am grinning wide and wild like the young boy she grew up with.
My mother did not raise liars. I would never pretend I love all my siblings equally. Hagar is my favorite; my twin, my other half. And she knows so.
“Darling sister.” I press a swift kiss to her cheek. She smells like my childhood—sunlight, wild orange, and the smell that is just her, Hagar; it softens me from the inside out. “Why would I go out there when my best friend is already here?”
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
I
know, the second the door opens and those eyes flash my way, Pilate would never have gone to the festival-- which is just as well, I think, because it means he is here, for me, exactly when I need him. He might have, at some point. A younger Pilate might have done it out of sheer boredom, but today's Pilate has grown up too much, too fast.
I wonder if this is why he's throwing this party.
I know he'd never say it, even to me, but I wonder if it's because our house seems so empty, these days, even though it is terribly full. I blame Adonai. If he had not gotten sick, we would not all be so... like this. I believe this. I have to believe this.
--but, Pilate smiles at me, then, and I forget all of it. Of course, he is still my brother. Of course, he is my twin, my Pilate. He kisses my cheek and I smile back at him. "If that's all it is, I would have gone with you." I say, "Say the word and I will take you to any boring festival you want."
There is a knot in my throat, or my stomach, that won't come out. Sometimes I forget that it's there. Sometimes I am painting, or laughing, or bothering the servants and I feel all there, almost incandescent with being.
It is just that, sometimes, like tonight, I can look at a lamp and see it is a lamp but no matter what I do I cannot quite convince myself that it is a lamp. Sometimes my head hurts with all the deciding: what is real? What is not? How can any of us know? I cross to Pilate's bed and sink onto it with a trembling smile. If our mother was here she would tell me to trust my instincts.
"What if my instincts are wrong?" I would ask her.
"They are not." she would say. It would answer no questions, solidify no great truths, but it would soothe me, anyway.
I blink, smoothing the fabric beneath me, laying the sheer silk of my robes over one side of my body so that it's not between me and the bed. "What were you doing?" I ask, and I am my bright self again, wishing for roses and spice and knowing exactly who I am."It looks..." I casually glance around the room. "very exciting."
the house seems to circle around you slowly. i circle around you, a wild / animal near a fire. i remember / i would kill for you. i remind myself / it won't be necessary.
If there is anything right in this world, I think, it is the bond between my sister and I. If there is anything that will survive the strain that Adonai’s mystery sickness has put on our family, it will be us: Pilate and Hagar, Hagar and Pilate, as it was always meant to be and always will be. There is no future without her. There is no world of mine she does not rule, no ship of mine she does not sit at the helm of.
If this is love—this thing I feel for her—then I know I will never love anyone else. (If it is better called obsession, I’d rather not think about it.)
She smiles when I kiss her cheek, and says to me: if that’s all it is, I would have gone with you. I laugh. It is the first real laugh I’ve felt in what might be days or what might be weeks, a low, silky sound, free of all the trappings and careful constraints I am usually forced to speak in—it feels good. It feels honest.
(I do not get many chances to be honest anymore.)
“And that is why you are my favorite,” I tell her, and my voice is still loose and warm from the way she has made me relax. Hagar crosses room and sinks down onto my bed. If it were anyone else, they would be chastise for rumpling the blankets I so carefully arranged—but it is her, so I only raise a brow, and saunter over to meet her. My window is closed, but not tightly. Streetlight and moonlight gleams off its perfectly cleaned surface; it pours into my room and across the floor like mercury. When I move to stand in that pool of silver, I am suddenly washed over by a gust of icy wind and the almost-sweet sound of the party in the streets, and despite my dislike for the commoners, I look down upon them and feel something like warmth, a god enjoying the view of his pawns and their wonderful, minuscule lives.
She asks what I was doing. I glance at the rumpled blankets, my journal left open on the desk. (If it were anyone else, closing that would have been my first instinct. But she wouldn't look. I know she would't look. And some part of me thinks, even if she knew what was in it —she would choose me over him.
I rest my head casually only the slope of Hagar's shoulder. The noise and pattern of her breathing is a balm to me: at least someone in this house is alive and well. "Writing. Nothing of importance." It's true. Nothing is of importance anymore, except keeping Adonai where he needs to be. "And what were you doing, ya danaaya? You must come talk to me more often," I add, quietly and perhaps more sincerely than anything else I've said.
One of my snakes uncurls from a knot on top of my head and slithers over Hagar's neck —not nibbling, not hissing, only resting against her skin just as I am.
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
H
e smiles and my heart ties in loose knots because I know he is mine, and I know that for every cruel thing I've done or every rotten little girl I've been on bad days, I am always a safe place for him. I often wonder if I am his only safe place.
My brother looks from me to the window, through which I can hear festival music and the din of the people. He is glowing in it, moonlight pooled on the ridges of his scales, the gold of his eyes turned white by its light-- and for a moment I wonder if I deserve him, this brother that loves me, this brother that I can never hope to compare to, as if I would want to.
I am his favorite, he says, and I smile wider. He is my favorite. There is no thing on this earth that could make that not so. There is nothing he could do that would make me love him any less than I do in this moment, where I am sat on his bed, watching him watch the people, and he looks so terribly whole for the first time in months, or maybe years.
My heart breaks for him. I want him like this always.
I do not know how to fix Adonai or our family but if it will make him happy like this I will do it.
(Sometimes I venture to imagine we are not our family's children, just two young, unknown siblings with only each other for company and no estate to think of-- but the more I consider it, the more I realize that we, or any of us, really, are only who we are because we are Ieshan. I know that goes doubly for me.)
Pilate says he has been writing, and I want to ask what, but he finishes, 'nothing of importance,' and I know I will not get the answer. I purse my lips quietly, and impatiently, only because I know he will not scold me for it. The sigh that follows, I am not quite as confident in. "That's not much of an answer." I say, but leave it at that.
He touches my shoulder and I forget my frustration, my impatience, my pride, and sink into the feeling. I feel small again, young, and complete. It almost hurts. "The only thing I ever do, brother, is cause trouble and wonder what you are doing. Sometimes both."
I smile at him, warm where his skin touches mine and cold where the snake winds its way down to my neck. I think, again, that I do not deserve him. I think, again, that he does not deserve any of these things that trouble him, though he would never say.
"You may guess, if you want, just what kind of trouble I've been causing, though."
the house seems to circle around you slowly. i circle around you, a wild / animal near a fire. i remember / i would kill for you. i remind myself / it won't be necessary.
So often I miss being a child.
Not that my childhood—any of ours—were normal. Even my very first memories are tinged in gold and green, money and envy. Everything I can remember from childhood has been smoothed out, enough to lose the detail, and overlaid with shiny plasticine perfection of a life lived in the noble circles.
Everything except for this. The comfort. The normalcy. The innate knowledge that this has not and will never change: my head against my favorite sister’s shoulder, so relaxed and heavy I feel like I might fall asleep. I am never safer or more at peace than I am here. I know the warmth of her body against my cheek; the smell of fresh linen on her skin and perfume in her hair. I know the relaxed pattern of her breath, her ribcage rising and falling against my shoulder.
She is the only part of my life—present, past, and future—that loves me more than the mask I wear. Maybe because she is the only one has ever seen him.
"The only thing I ever do, brother, is cause trouble and wonder what you are doing. Sometimes both." I laugh. The sound bubbles from my chest before I can stop it. My real laugh—loose and warm and unrestrained, full of affection for the only girl I’ve ever loved properly. And in my too-large room, it echoes and echoes and echoes before slipping out the open window, and it feels almost like a storybook whose pictures I loved as a child—a world venerated by moonlight, where I am not a prince, or head of house, or tenth in line for the throne, but just myself.
“What kind of trouble…” I muse. My voice is exaggeratedly, jokingly thoughtful, and I even trail off toward the end like I’m absorbed by my confusion. “Oh, I know. You’ve tricked another poor boy into falling in love with you.”
I pull my head from her shoulder to look at her directly. My eyes glint and mouth splits into a grin lined with tease. I want her to say yes; I want to know.
is head is so heavy, like some great stone laid over the bone of my shoulder, both an unbelievably comfortable pressure and an almost unbearable weight. I hold him gently, a bird cupped in the palms of my hands, dewy feathers too weighed down for a songbird to fly.
He is so fragile, really. I wonder how they don't notice-- Miriam, with all her guilt anyway, and the world at large with its discerning eye. Sometimes it is like he's just waiting for a strong enough wind to break him apart.
I think the primary rift between Adonai and I is that I used to say it. They would come in from playing or court or whatever my brothers would do while Miriam and I would learn how to paint, or to sing, or to hold our heads at just such an angle and wave in just such a way that we do not need to be asked who we are when seen-- and every month Pilate's face would grow just a little bit darker, the lines of it just a little bit sharper. He would frown more as he grew.
"Adonai," I said to him once, "please be nicer to Pilate. He looks tired."
Adonai had assured me, at the time, that he was fine. All boys sharpened as they aged. It was part of growing up. He knew, perhaps more than I did, that his brother, most fiercely beloved and desperately cherished, would be fine.
His head is on my shoulder--heavy as sin--and I hope he is fine, but I do not quite think so. He lifts his cheek off of me. You've tricked another poor boy into falling in love with you. In spite of my worry, in spite of my heart beating so hard I can barely hear myself think, it is my turn to laugh-- the only truly unrestrained thing I think I am capable of doing.
"Not a boy-- well, most recently-- but good guess."
I do not think of Isabella Foster, or her buttermilk skin. I do not think of the way she says things, always what I least expect in a life, an entire world ruled by strict expectations and carefully repeated lines. She is bold, but I do not care. She is interesting, but I care only a little.
Only enough to keep going back. "A Terrastellan noble, interestingly. She's... fun."
I know he is dying to ask, because I say the word 'fun' and it must sound just as tinny as it feels when it drops out of me and onto the bed, like I can watch it land and fan out around my knees. It is not something I would say. It is not something I want to say. But is is the only thing.
I speak again before Pilate has the chance: "I've been eavesdropping while painting," I say, "and it sounds like you've been busy, yourself. Do tell." I grin at him, wide, and bright. Expectant.
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