[P] so now we have come to a great battlefield

[Andras]

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.

@Pilate