[P] holy water cannot help you drown

[Adonai]

« different defections, cut the lines »
—

I

have never wished for the death of my brother. 

Even when he reduced me to this, even then, I have never wanted to kill him. In all of my life spent as Honourable Adonai, Cleric of Virtue, Prince of Eminence, a reluctance to commit fratricide seems hardly the thing to prove definitively just how much I deserve—deserved—my titles. Lesser men would have succumbed. Greater men would have certainly succumbed.

I wish I could say it was because, whenever I looked at Pilate, sly-mouthed, honey-eyed, beautiful beyond recognition, I remembered him not as he is now but as he was then: a child, my brother, beautiful still yet innocent as a lamb, his laughter like church bells, his heart as radiant as his scaled brow. The light of our mother’s life and, by extension, the light of mine.

I wish I could blame it on memory.

But my months spent in a sickbed has lent me time for introspection. In that time I have tried to understand: Had I really been that horrible to him? Were our feuds not simply the feuds of brothers, the feuds of blood and of House and of children pretending to strap knives to their belts and crown themselves kings? Our sisters wanted to kill us. Miriam, I think, could have really done it. Corradh wanted to kill one of us, flip a coin and assign a face, and to do it himself, preferably with a sword, for all the little bits of grief we gave him. It is the language of siblings to proclaim such desires with regularity. It is a testament to the strength of the sibling bond. I was as guilty of this as the rest of them. Our mock wars, our mock threats, our mock hate, all of them sick, twisted declarations of love.

Pilate slides into the seat besides me, his robe rippling grandly to the floor. “They decided to dine in the courtyard,” he says, “when they heard you were joining us.” I know he is lying. He forgets that he has left me alive enough to catalog my memories as obsessively as a priest over prayers. And in them, my siblings have never been so quick to depart a scene that stinked of blood.

I watch, brooding over my wine, as a servant slides his bowl of pomegranates back in front of him. “Did they? Then they are angry with me. I have neglected them.” I smile at him as I say this, as he smiles at me with his crimson teeth. 

I think of the letter I had written him. Really, Pilate. Had you done it to anyone but myself I would have gladly toasted to your genius.

A laugh, sudden yet warm, spills like sun from my lips. I have eaten little and drank too much. I know exactly what I am doing. Pilate has made me this way: I never used to be so cunning. 

So I laugh like a prince and lift up my glass in a toast. “As I have neglected you.” I lean forwards in my chair until my lips brush against his ear. “Quick, little brother. Embrace me. So that the servants will see and report to our siblings, dining in their courtyard, how gracious we are to each other.” 

I drop my glass and it shatters when it hits the table. Wine sprays like little flecks of blood over me, over him, over his spotless white robe, like shed skin on the ground.

Pilate's snakes hiss softly against my hair. I collapse back into my seat and wipe my wine-stained mouth with the tablecloth. I have never wished for the death of my brother. It does not make me better than him. I have never been better than him, and believing that I was became my undoing. In truth, I am worse than him; in truth, I am the worst of us all. 

And I think that Katurah was the only one who knew it. 

There are so much worse things than death.

@Pilate

♢