A HEART AS DARK AS MINE caos caliban x oc

pontious pilate's bowl (edited)

"WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG, PRINCESS?"

"Caliban, how did you get here so fast?" It had taken Sera hours to figure out the second trial or Pontious Pilate's bowl, with Lilith only assisting her so far.

"Time stone, didn't you see it?" Caliban asked her, as she slumped down in the cage, her back to his, as she shivered in the slight breeze that lingered in the wasteland of dull greys and blues.

"I think..." Sera responded, her mind flicking back to a large, tall stone, engraved with some sort of sigil.

"How did you get here then, it took you long enough?" Caliban mused, twisting the ring on his index finger to keep himself entertained.

She didn't want to say that it was Lilith who had brough her. She didn't want to give him a reason to ridicule her. Sera just shrugged. "Where do we find this bowl?" She asked, "I have far better things to be doing than sitting here with you,"

"You know you enjoy my company really," Caliban smirked.

They were sat back-to-back in their adjoining cages, and if Sera hadn't felt so focused on winning this next trial, she might have moved away. "Is that what you tell yourself?" She snorted, "I just want to get the bowl and get out of here."

"If you're lucky, you might just catch sight of it as you breathe your last," A voice answered. Sera hadn't noticed anyone else with them, she had been too busy giving herself a mental pep-talk. But surely enough, there was a man in the third cage.

He was fairly young, maybe in his early thirties, but premature signs of age gnawed at him like some wicked disease. His cheeks were sunken and lined with wrinkles, his face dirtied and bruised. His eyes, which Sera imagined had once been the colour of fresh earth and snowless winter forests were now dull and bleak, lifeless. He was somewhere between young an old, a man aged by what he had seen, what he had endured. For a moment, Sera saw herself in his lifeless gaze. Aged by trauma.

What horrors had he seen? What had he endured? A shiver ran down her spine. Would she endure the same on her quest for the bowl. Would it be like those angels?

"You see every hundred years or so, someone like you comes along, hoping to steal Pilate's Bowl, many don't even catch a glimpse of it before they die. I Barabbas, never die. It is my curse, destined to repeat this day of infamy over and over again, Centurion too, doomed to perform to a crowd long since vanished. Pilate could break the cycle but he won't," the man spoke.

"Barabbas, what do you mean, catch sight of it was they breathe their last?" Sera asked, battling the bitter panic rising in her chest.

"When Pilate pardons me, and condemns you to die, as he always does, he washes his hands of your fate, he scrubs them bloody, but the stains, they never go away, and then, you are crucified." Barabbas explains

"Crucified?" She asked anxiously.

She had been crucified before, or something similar.

She had been nailed to a cross, left to rot as a punishment, for what she was. What she had one. But she couldn't die, she never did. No matter how much she would wish for death in those days, those years, it never came.

She begged for it, the end. It would have been a mercy.

She could not... would not suffer that again. The eternal waiting, the pain and the tears. Pleading for death, but never receiving it.