and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding
Coward.
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.
I am not brave, either, but then that’s something I’ve never been accused of. When I leave him, the words cowardice and bravery are weighing on me very faintly, if at all; instead I am thinking about the way he looked at me before he leaned in, and how the coal-dark of his skin was shot through with blue electricity, and the expression he wore the second I pulled away, which was simultaneously so much worse and so much better than I could have hoped for.
But, really, I am hardly thinking at all. My attention is focused on managing a casual walkaway. There is a lot of spine involved in resisting the urge to turn around, look over my shoulder, backtrack. It is indescribably difficult to down my overwhelming desire to grin and say: just kidding, to listen to my blossoming ego and not to the dark and hungry part of me that wishes, with the ferocity of a dying man, to sink my teeth into him. Or something. Anything. Anyone.
I make friends with the men here, and sometimes more than. It’s quite easy, because they have nothing else to do.
In fact, it’s too easy. It almost lacks a sense of the satisfactory. It almost doesn’t please me at all to string them along by the ties and cloaks and glasses, pretending to listen as they recount to me books I’ve already read. Almost I am irritated by the easiness with which they drift to me, wearing dark, sleepy eyes and patterns made of ink. Almost I wish I would find that boy in the library again, to punch him or kiss him or really do anything but wake in the hours before dawn, tossed from the waves of a fitful sleep, bleary from hours of reading and mediocre sex, and think: I am fucking bored.
Almost.
Full of this almost-boredom, I slip into the streets when the sky turns gray, the same dirty, slushy silver as the snow underfoot. (Why am I here? For fuck’s sake, I hate snow.) Against the hanging sky, pale lanterns cast spears of yellow light onto the ground. They sway back and forth like so many pendulums; for a brief moment, as I adjust to the strange dimness of the outside world, I am nauseated by the movement of those spears as they cross over one another, slashing wildly back and forth. I bite back the rising bile.
Delumine is too still and far, far too cold. My scales clatter against one another when I shiver. Against my cheek and neck, the snakes are fitfully asleep, brittle-black and hibernating in the cold. But I know if I go back inside the boredom will only grow too strong to stand, and I am resigned to continue my aimless trudge down the icy street, my lip curled, eyes low, body tense against the biting breeze.
And I am wound so tightly I can hardly find it in myself to flinch when I see him, a patchy ghost at the end of the street. My step hardly slows. I am too cold to run, and more importantly too intrigued: when I see him, I have to suppress a smirk, and something better and more vile than excitement thrills in my chest. I close the distance between us with easy purpose.
Rolling my eyes, I say with perfectly practiced disappointment: “This is poor timing. I just remade my bed.”
and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding
Overhead, the sleepy sun leers down, a fuzzy white silhouette behind the heavy cloud cover. It is a cold sunlight that filters down in shades of gray. Andras fades into it, black as the bottom of the ocean except for the bright, bright white on his wing, his chin, his ankle; but Pilate is a brown like spring earth, like the soft floor of Viride itself, and Andras sees their eyes meet from a distance.
"Don't." he warns, and like lead it falls out of him, crashing.
He is a snake, rattling in the tall grass, full of air, full of venom that seeps into the snow on the cobblestone, crackling away at the teeth of a predator. Perhaps he is the coward - who watched Pilate shrink into the distance while the deep ache of want cut his throat. Perhaps he is the coward, now, bristling on the street corner, crying for vengeance and itching to sink his teeth into the man's throat, his ribs, his jaw -- in a way that is not entirely violent, but tightens his jaw, anyway.
Chest to chest, wolf to wolf, Pilate eats up the space and Andras bares his teeth like a feral thing dragged out of the forest, still covered in the loam he crawled out of. Andras is searching his face like he's taking auspices, reading each line for answers: the sharp cheekbone that might tell him why (and this is the loudest, why, because everything is overshadowed by his eyes, his scales, his mouth and Andras feels half-insane with it), the soft brow that might tell him how, the curve of the jaw that might say what--what Pilate wants, what Andras wants, what thing is sitting next to his endless rage and growing by the second.
Certainly, Andras is the coward, buzzing with pause, strife with hesitation. This close he can feel the bone-deep ache that begs him to bite, to claw, to kick, to scratch, to scream. When Pilate speaks his blood does the screaming for him, so loud he can't think.
"That's a pity," he says, measured out like a hand, reached toward the fire. He doesn't know if it's a palm or a fist. He laughs--or barely does, an exasperated slip of the chest, more breath than noise. His smile is all teeth. "I'm busy. What do you want?"
Don’t, Andras says. And instantly I am grinning: laughing, even, through the grit of my teeth, a bright, burbling thing from the bottom of my chest. Despite the grayness of the sky, the cold that ruffles my long hair and close-packed scales, I am suddenly radiant. Smirking. Flashing bright-white teeth. Blinking molten amber eyes. Scales shining mossy green, then cloudy gold, as the sun passes over.
I am a statue made of copper, covered in patina. Rusting with disuse. Sculpted by someone who sculpted my mother and her mother before her, who breathed life into the ropes of muscle, the finely carved bones, the soft metal smile: no matter how long I am stuck here, how time freezes me and my family as the world turns around me, I will never stop being beautiful.
By the time I close the distance between us, I am almost prancing. I tingle with new energy, tail slashing behind me and chin high, enamored with the thrill of seeing how his face closes up when our eyes meet. Half my mouth turns up into a lazy smirk. “Don’t what?” I purr. The sound of it is so familiar, so just like the last time I asked him a question closer to a dare, that for a moment I am struck with deja vu. My head swims; I falter, I slow. Snow bites at my ankles.
I blink. The feeling is gone. I am calm again, or calm enough, pulse slowing to a purposeful stutter against my ribs. The space between us is negligible now: I am watching Andras intently, with clear, serious, eyes, unabashedly memorizing the way he looks with the calm perfectionism of a scientist—the forking of lighting over his skin, how it turns the white on his chin pale blue, the little laugh that slips out of him, less amused than exasperated.
Color me endeared.
“You don’t look busy to me,” I drawl. Purposefully, I let my gaze drift up and down, side to side, all the way over him. We could be, though, I think.
and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding
His heart is crouched like a beast at the altar, slobbering as it prays with its claws in the floorboards. It confesses that it hadn't expected Pilate to laugh so the way it breaks over the sharp lines in his face in a way that smoothes them, for just a moment, knocks the breath out of its lungs. It has to beat so hard just to breathe that the clergyman hears it, the congregation hears it, and the choir sings along to its drum.
It doesn't sound so much like a hymn.
Its sound can't be anything holy at all.
Pilate grins the way Andras grins, like every tooth is another threat to spit out with the others. If he were the introspective type, Andras might remark on the savage curve of his mouth, sharp as a sickle, or the look in his eyes like his heart says yes just as loud. Andras is not the introspective type. As the space closes up Andras thinks only that it must be a crime, that he is equal parts hate and want, and when one winks to life the other just rises to meet it.
Don't what? Pilate purrs. Andras grits his teeth so hard he's surprised the whole grin doesn't fall out of his mouth. He'd spit his own bloody teeth in the dirt if he could relive it for the rest of his life.
Andras leans forward. "You tell me." Each lens of his glasses shines cruelly in the light until it too is eaten up by the closeness. Andras wonders if Pilate can see his reflection in them. He wonders if he would like what he sees: the reeling, the ghost of something like ichor, straight from the heart of a god.
His magic hums against his skin. He has so many questions and none of them seem to matter. Andras tips first his head forward, then his body. His smile is as dark as his skin. "I look busier than you." he says. They are close enough that Andras can see each scale on each dormant snake.
I can see myself in the cold, clean reflection of his glasses. Behind me rises a sooty-gray snowbank, run through by rivulets of coalescing, misty rain. My hair is frozen stiff but not dead, arranged around my head in a perfect serpentine halo with unblinking black eyes, as if caught by the cold air mid-movement. My eyes are no longer molten; they are bright and warm, still ferocious, but now they are nearly still, the kind of amber that traps bugs. I am wearing a smile, but it doesn’t look like I thought it would. It’s not as sharp as I expected. Not as self-satisfied.
It’s softer than I meant it, much softer than I want it to be. In the reflection, I see myself frown for millisecond, how it makes my scales rattle and shift in the cloudy light, the way my eyes go dark as if suddenly docked in shadow.
Then I’m grinning again, easy and light. Something inside me feels drawn tight—forced, like I am biting down on a stick in pain, like someone is pulling at each of my joints—but I don’t think it’s visible, at least not in the warped glare of his lenses, where I stare back at myself with a heart-stopping mix of disappointment and anticipation.
I lick my lips unthinkingly.
You tell me, Andras says, and I’m watching the movement of his mouth with something like reverence, It’s impossible to hear the words over the level of attention I pay to the way he looks like he says it, leaning forward, smiling dark and uncertain, like I’m in charge of his falling apart.
Something inside of me grinds. Shifts, then snaps into place. He says he’s busier than I am; I don’t believe him, but I won’t argue, there’s more important things to fight about. Despite the icy wind, I am suddenly flooded with heat. I feel sweat beading on my neck. We are too close for comfort, too close for anything but combustion. I am sparking. My body is tense, too electric. Suddenly I feel my breath squeeze in my chest, a white-knuckled fist, and my throat is closing fast and dry, but something in me still manages to curl my lip in something almost like a smile.
“Attention. Just like you.” I grin for real this time, dark and cocky, my head half-turned.
and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding
Andras reads Pilate, with eyes that are far too serious and a mouth that drops from a grin to a smile to a still, concentrated line.
At first he thinks only that the whole scene is beautiful in a way that a more poetic version of himself may have loved to describe but the Andras of here and now can't find the words. He only sees Pilate lick his lips because he's looking. He only sees the hard edge of his smile become gaussian and mellow because it fills him like fear, first the lungs then the throat. How does a body know if it or the snow is run through by the rain?
Pilate looks like a dream, or a statue with even the veins carved into perfect shape. Andras looks lost, like he cannot remember the last time he wanted to turn someone's pages. Maybe never.
For a moment they are watching each other in perfect silence, two boys in the street with knots in their throats, barely breathing through their lungs crushed by cinderblocks, one barely smiling and one that doesn't even try. If hell has a name Andras is sure it's the space between them, small as it is--close enough to feel the heat, close enough that he's claustrophobic and hot.
Attention, Pilate says. Just like you.
Then he grins like the devil and Andras' heart crawls straight out of his mouth.
First is the searching, again, as if Pilate will spit up the reason, the answer, before Andras can even think to ask it. For a second he holds his breath, imagining--something nameless but tangible, though he doesn't know what it is until he leans forward again, so close they are almost touching but not quite, barely atoms from skin to skin, and another arc of static flicks over his wings.
"Then take it." he says, barely a whisper. What little self control he has is groaning under the pressure of not reaching in, not knowing what it feels like to touch Pilate's cheek, his jaw, his neck. He forces a breath to keep from combusting. "I dare you."
For the first time in a long time, I am paying attention:
To the whorl of black hairs where they meet the splash of white on his chin, how they interlock like waves eating at the shore. To the sharp blue seaglass of his eyes, cold when they meet mine, but warming with every passing second. To the faint, coal-hot curve of his smile, the swath of black lashes, how his face has become one painterly swirl of black and white and gray and interrupted by lightning-strikes of blue.
For the first time in a long time, I am paying attention, because how can I not? We are so close that I can feel his body heat bleeding into the cool air, the crackling, skin-snapping surges of electricity. When I breathe in I feel like I can smell his anger. Or maybe I can just read it in everything else about him, in the tense hunch of his shoulders and the painfully harsh curve of his smile, something like a reaper’s scythe in the already dark planes of his face. It’s a disaster, but I can’t look away.
I am watching us crash. I am enjoying it far more than I should.
Andras leans in closer. Which I didn’t even think was possible. But when he does, I realize I was waiting for it, hungry for it; tense, then suddenly flood-relaxed, with the awkward pleasure of relief that comes when the string is cut and the distance between us folds, again, in half. I blink. My heart is soft and slow, near-dazed. When I breathe, it doesn’t feel quite right—stilted, gravelly, a marker that I am vulnerable.
I dare you, Andras says. And if I thought I was defenseless before, I was wrong. Now I am close to combustion. On the verge of trembling with tension, body stretched like a violin string, every muscle and tendon wound tighter than I thought was possible, and my gaze is burning-intense, and my mouth is desert-dry; I can’t breathe. Or don’t want to. The rush, when it comes in, will be too good to refuse.
When I inhale, I am expecting a shudder but hear a purr. (Gods, I impress myself sometimes.) It builds in me like a fire. I am exhaling plumes of smoke into the cold air, watching them dust Andras’ skin like frost on the short grass below us. He’s kissed me already; what else is there left to grab his attention with?
I roll my jaw in thought. Feel, then hear, a kind of click. Like something has come back into place.
I lean in, close enough to kiss him, with the heavy-lidded eyes and slack jaw of someone who is about to. And then with a firework-fast grin and in one nimble movement, I snatch the glasses from his nose and go bolting past him, my whole body a question mark, a dare.
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.
From the moment I hit the ground, I feel like a different person.
I am bolting, tearing down the street with my heartbeat pounding fire-fast in my throat until I can’t hear anything but the pulsating rush of blood rising up into my skull and the clattering sound of my hooves on the cobblestone, only slightly dampened by the blanket of snow below. All of it makes a ringing in my skull like the peal of the church bell, but there’s nothing holy about it.
My muscles are beginning to burn. My life of leisure in Solterra requires little of me but to eat, drink, and be merry, and my siblings and I often spend days at a time without leaving the property, except for leisurely games played on the dunes outside. So I am out of practice. This—running as fast as I can away from the teeth I know are gnashing at me from behind—is something I don’t have cause to do often, and I’m already feeling the pressure of it as my lungs start to burn and my bones begin to feel like they’re knocking together.
Give me my FUCKING GLASSES BACK, Andras roars. He sounds pissed. Angrier than I could’ve expected, like I’ve broken his wing and not stolen his eyewear; it’s still dangling from my mouth like a limp rabbit picked up by whoever’s been poaching in Viride. But I’m not as afraid as I should be. In fact, I’m not afraid at all. I laugh, loud and clear. The noise of it vibrates the metal I’m holding in between my teeth. It’s a noise both brilliantly satisfied and exhausted. The waves of laughter are interrupted by my gasps for air; I am still struggling for breath, distracted by the effort of dodging out of his reach.
His wings stir up a tumultuous wind behind me. I can feel it swirling forward like a tornado and the force of it nearly knocks me off my feet. Suddenly I know what it feels like to fly—just for a second, a heartbeat, a lightning-struck pulse.
Caught off-guard by a suddenly extra-strong, buffeting breeze, I stumble over the divots in the cobblestone street below me, and my heart rushes up into my throat: it sparks a thrill that tingles through me like noxious gas, numbing my legs and my chest and every muscle in between, and in the next moment I can’t feel anything but the lightness in my muscles and the constant ringing of my bones.
“Come get them, then,” I call over my shoulder. “I dare you.” My voice is half-caught in the icy breeze, but I think it will still reach him, at least before I go careening sharply around the next corner and duck into an open shop.
