and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding
that never stopped exploding
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.
@
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
