pilate
/
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?”
