leave me where i am, i'm only sleeping

🥺

chic-ly reintroduces my main lotf oc again...Mackerel Damiano Sagrado !🎣 uhh feel free to ask anything about my fella Ik I haven't developed him here as much recently😭

THE KISS (probably in Graz) this year

Even the smacking sounds are recorded lol

Now, on this black Friday, she stood at the corner of the Tyropoeon Valley road, her back pressed against the rough, lime-washed stones of a dyer’s shop. The air was thick with the stench of boiling urine, vinegar, and fear.

A different crowd was roaring now. A few hours ago, she had been swept into the courtyard of the Praetorium by the sheer mass of moving bodies. She had seen the Roman governor, pale and indifferent, stand before them. She had seen the rebel, Barabbas—a man with grease in his beard and blood under his fingernails—blinking at the sunlight like a mole dragged from the earth. When the temple guards and the leaders stirred the press of people to shout for the robber’s release, Dvorah had kept her mouth shut. Her throat was tight, choked with a bitter, rising bile. But when they demanded the execution of the Rabbi from Nazareth, she had not spoken for Him either. Why should she? He had let them capture Him. He had sat in the garden like a lamb waiting for the butcher’s knife, offering no resistance, flashing no lightning from heaven. He was just another broken promise in a land of graves.

A sudden, violent surge in the street jarred her from her thoughts. The crowd pressed backward, trampling her sandals.

“Move! Out of the way, Judean dogs!”

The harsh, metallic rattle of Roman lorica segmentata cut through the din. Four legionaries, their faces grim and slick with sweat under their iron helmets, cleared a path with the flats of their spears. Behind them came the wood.

It was a massive, rough-hewn crossbeam of unpeeled pine, scraping along the cobblestones with a sound that set Dvorah’s teeth on edge. Bearing it was a man she barely recognised. On Sunday, He had ridden a donkey with the bearing of a quiet king. Today, He was a tapestry of raw meat and grey dust. His tunic was torn, soaked through the back with dark, widening patches of blood that stuck to the wood. A crown of long, black buckthorn spines was jammed into His brow; drops of scarlet ran down His temples, matting into His beard and clouding His eyes.

He stumbled, His knee hitting the stones with a sickening crack. The crossbeam pinned Him down for a second, a heavy, dead weight. The crowd jeered, spitting insults that mixed with the dust.

An anger, hot and wild, flared in Dvorah’s chest. It overcame her fear of the Roman short-swords. She stepped out from the shadow of the doorway, right onto the edge of the path, just as the guards hauled Him to His feet by the ropes tied around His waist.

“Look at you!” Dvorah cried out, her voice cracking with the fury of a betrayed believer. She did not care who heard her. She wanted Him to know the weight of the despair He had left behind. “You let us wave those branches! You let us sing to you! We called you the Son of David! My brother gave up everything to follow you—he left his ledger, his trade, his home, all for this?”

Jesus halted. The Roman guard behind Him raised a whip to strike His back again, but Jesus shifted His weight, turning His head slightly through the blood and sweat to look directly at her. His eyes were swollen, one partially closed by a blow from a guard’s fist, but they were clear. They held no malice, only an ocean of sorrow that made Dvorah’s breath catch in her throat.

“You are a failed prophet!” she screamed, though her voice lacked its initial sting now, trembling under the steadiness of His gaze. “You promised a kingdom, and you give us a hill of skulls! You cheated us!”

A few feet away, a woman forced her way through the throng. Her dark blue mantle was torn at the collar, her hair spilling out from beneath her veil in tangled, chestnut waves. It was Mary of Magdala. Her face was tracked with tears, her lips moving in a silent, agonizing prayer as she tried to reach the Rabbi. She reached out a trembling hand, her fingers twitching as if she could pull the heavy timber off His shoulders by faith alone.

Jesus did not look at the Roman soldiers who were cursing and shoving the crowd back. He looked at Dvorah, then at Mary, and then His gaze swept over the circle of strangers who had gathered to watch the spectacle—women with weeping children, merchants annoyed by the traffic, old men shaking their heads.

“Daughters of Jerusalem,” Jesus spoke. His voice was raspy, dry as parchment, yet it carried an odd, resonant authority that seemed to drop a blanket of silence over the immediate radius of the street. He breathed heavily, the chest under His ruined tunic heaving. “Do not weep for me. No... do not weep for me. Weep for yourselves, and for your children.”

He took a ragged breath, His fingers clutching the rough bark of the crossbeam.

“For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

Jesus looked back at Dvorah, His eyes drilling into her soul. He knew her, though she had never spoken a word to Him before this moment. He knew the blood that ran in her veins. He knew the name she carried.

“Dvorah,” He murmured.

She gasped, stepping back. “How do you—”

“Mary,” Jesus said, His eyes shifting to the Magdalene, who had managed to slip past a Roman shield, her hands hovering near His elbow.

“Master,” Mary sobbed, the tears flowing freely now. “Let me stay. Let me walk with your mother. We are here.”

“Mary, listen to me,” Jesus whispered, His strength visibly waning as a soldier shoved Him from behind, forcing Him to take another agonizing step forward. He leaned toward them, His voice dropping so only the two women and a few nearby strangers could hear over the rising clamour of the street. “I need you to go to the temple.”

Mary blinked, her face contorting in confusion. “The temple? Master, no. I belong at your feet. I cannot leave you now.”

“Go to the temple,” Jesus repeated, each word costing Him a heavy price of breath. “To the court where I overturned the tables. He is there.”

“Who is there, Master?” Mary asked, her voice trembling.

“Judas,” Jesus said.

Dvorah’s heart gave a sudden, violent thud against her ribs. Judas? Her brother? She thought he was with the other disciples, hiding from the authorities. Why would he be at the temple now, of all times?

Jesus kept His eyes on Mary, His gaze intense, filled with an urgent, pleading love. “He is lost, Mary. He is drowning in the deep water. Go and bring him back to the fold. Do for him what I did for you when you ran from the camp... when you went back to the dark places, and I sent Simon and Matthew to find you.”

Mary’s breath hitched. The memory of her own flight—the terrifying return of her old demons, the filth of the tavern, the crushing despair that had gripped her before the Master’s grace hauled her out a second time—flashed across her eyes. “Master... he betrayed you,” she whispered, her voice cracking. She didn’t know the details, but she knew the whispers among the women that morning. She knew Judas had disappeared before the garden. “He brought the guards. He... he gave you to them.”

Dvorah’s world tilted. The cobblestones seemed to sway beneath her feet. She grabbed Mary’s arm, her fingers digging through the blue wool into the flesh beneath. “What did you say? My brother? Judas did what?”

Jesus didn't answer Dvorah’s question with words. He looked at Mary, ignoring the soldier’s fist that came down hard on His shoulder. “Bring him back, Mary. Do not let him go.”

“Move on, Nazarene!” the guard roared, delivering a brutal kick to Jesus’ calf.

With a low groan of agony, Jesus was forced forward. The heavy crossbeam lurched, and He dragged Himself along the rising path toward the Gate of Judgment, His blood leaving a dark, intermittent trail on the pale stones of Jerusalem.

Mary stood frozen, her chest heaving, staring after Him as the crowd closed the gap, swallowing the Nazarene and His executioners in a sea of turbans, spears, and shouting.

Dvorah shook Mary’s arm violently, her face pale as death. “What did he mean? What did Judas do? Tell me!”

Mary turned to Dvorah, her eyes filled with a profound, aching pity that only made Dvorah’s stomach twist into tighter knots. “He... he went to the priests last night, Dvorah. He told them where the Master would be. He took money.”

“No,” Dvorah breathed, shaking her head. “No, Judas wouldn't. He loves the law. He loves the nation. He believed in the Rabbi more than any of them!”

“We have to go,” Mary said, her jaw tightening as she looked up the hill toward Golgotha, then back down toward the massive, golden structure of the temple rising over the city walls. She was torn, every fiber of her being screaming to follow the blood trail up the mountain, to be with Mary His mother, to witness the end. But the Master’s words echoed in her ears with the force of a divine command: Go to the temple.

“I’m not going with you,” Dvorah spat, though her tears were finally coming now, hot and angry. “My brother is a good man. If he is at the temple, he is doing something to help! He is trying to fix this!”

“He isn't fixing it,” Mary said softly, her voice steadying with a grim, sorrowful resolve. “He is breaking. I know that look. I know what it feels like when the dark comes back and you think there is no way out. The Master told us to go. Are you coming or not?”

Dvorah looked up the street. The crowd was moving toward the city gate, a great, morbid procession heading for the place of execution. She looked down toward the Tyropoeon Valley, toward the massive bridges that led to the Temple Mount. Her brother was out there. The brother who used to help her calculate the cost of linen when they were children in Judea. The brother who had looked so proud, so full of hope, when he first told her he had found the One of whom the prophets wrote.

“I’m coming,” Dvorah whispered.

The Temple Mount was an island of deceptive sanity in a city gone mad, yet it was drowning in its own peculiar noise. It was the preparation for the Passover. Thousands upon thousands of pilgrims from every corner of the Roman world—Cyrene, Alexandria, Persia, Ephesus—thronged the vast, white stone courtyards.

The air here did not smell of Roman sweat and executioner’s iron; it smelled of holy smoke, burning incense, and blood. A terrifying amount of blood. At the great altar, the priests were working in shifts, their white linen tunics splashed with crimson up to their elbows. The drains at the base of the altar were already running thick with the life-force of hundreds of yearling lambs, their throats cut in rapid succession to ensure every household in Israel had its sacrifice before sundown.

The sound was deafening. It was a chaotic symphony of human voices shouting, changing money, arguing over the price of doves, overlaid with the constant, high-pitched, terrifying bleating of thousands of sheep waiting for the knife. It was a wall of sound that swallowed thought.

Mary and Dvorah pushed through the Royal Stoa, their arms linked to keep from being separated by the dense wall of humanity. Dvorah’s eyes scanned the crowd frantically. Every young man with a dark beard and a Judean tunic looked like her brother for a fraction of a second, only to turn into a stranger as they drew closer.

“Where would he be?” Dvorah shouted over the roar of a money-changer arguing with a Galilean merchant. “Where?”

Mary led her toward the Court of the Gentiles, specifically the covered colonnades where the religious authorities held their public audiences and chambers. This was the area where, just days prior, Jesus had upturned the tables of the dove-sellers, scattering coins across these very stones.

“There!” Mary suddenly pointed.

Near the entrance to the Chamber of Hewn Stone, where the Sanhedrin often met, a small knot of temple guards had formed a loose perimeter. Inside that circle stood several men in splendid, long-fringed robes with wide phylacteries bound to their foreheads. Among them was Caiaphas, the High Priest, his face an unreadable mask of aristocratic dignity, and several older priests with grey beards and sharp, calculating eyes.

And there, standing before them like a ragged ghost, was Judas.

Dvorah lunged forward, but Mary caught her by the waist, pulling her behind a massive Corinthian column. “Wait,” Mary hissed. “Look at him. Look at his face.”

Judas looked as though he had been dragged through the wilderness for forty days. His cloak was gone. His inner tunic was covered in dried mud and tears. His hair was a wild, matted nest, and his eyes were wide, white-rimmed with a madness that made Dvorah’s breath stop. He was clutching a heavy, greasy leather pouch to his chest with both hands, his knuckles white, his frame shaking so violently that his knees knocked together.

The two women tried to move closer, but a dense crowd of scribes and curious onlookers blocked the way, and the noise of the slaughtered lambs from the inner court rose in a sickening wave, drowning out the voices of the men by the chamber doors.

Mary strained her ears, leaning around the pillar. She could only just make out the shape of the confrontation. She saw Judas open his mouth, his lips moving frantically, his chest heaving as he spoke to Caiaphas. He was gesturing wildly toward the city, toward the place where the Nazarene was currently dragging His cross.

Caiaphas did not move. He stood with his arms folded, his face cold, looking down at Judas as if the young man from Kerioth were a stray dog that had tracked filth into the sanctuary.

Judas stepped closer, his hand reaching out as if to grab the High Priest’s robe. A temple guard instantly brought the shaft of his spear down, blocking him, shoving Judas back a step.

Judas screamed something—a desperate, high-pitched shriek that barely cut through the sound of a nearby merchant crying out the price of salt. Mary caught only a fragment of his posture, a universal language of despair. He was begging. He was trying to hand the pouch back.

Caiaphas sneered. He made a brief, dismissive gesture with his right hand—a flick of the fingers that said you are nothing to us. Another priest next to him smiled a cold, thin smile, his lips moving in what looked like a brief, mocking sentence before he turned his back on the disciple.

What happened next occurred with a shocking, violent suddenness.

Judas let out a sound that was not human—a raw, howling screech of pure agony that tore through his throat. He unstrung the leather pouch. With a wild, sweeping motion of his arm, he did not merely drop the money; he hurled the coins directly at the priests.

Clink! Clink! Clink!

The heavy Tyrian shekels—the price of a slave, the blood money—struck the stone steps and the white robes of the priesthood. Judas didn't throw them all at once. In his madness, he reached into the bag, grabbed a handful, and threw them one by one, pitching them with vicious, bone-snapping force at Caiaphas’ face, at the chests of the elders, at the boots of the guards.

“Judas!” Dvorah shrieked, breaking away from Mary’s grip. “Judas! Stop!”

“Let me through! That’s my brother!” Dvorah screamed.

Through the gaps in the scrambling crowd, Mary saw Judas throw the empty leather bag directly at Caiaphas’ feet. He turned around, his face a mask of sweating horror, his eyes locked on nothing, seeing nothing. He ran.

He didn't run like a man escaping a crime; he ran like a man whose clothes were on fire, bursting through the perimeter of the guards, knocking over a table of small clay oil lamps that shattered on the pavement.

“Judas!” Mary yelled, trying to follow him, but the press of the crowd was too immense. A wave of pilgrims entering from the Southern Gates met the wave of people scrambling for the coins, creating a human bottleneck.

Judas was fast. Fueled by a terrible, demonic energy, he shoved past old men and women, dodging between the massive columns of the Royal Stoa, heading straight for the Huldah Gates—the exit that led down into the dark, subterranean tunnels beneath the temple and out into the city valley below.

“We’re losing him!” Dvorah cried, her face covered in sweat and tears as she tried to squeeze between two large Judean men who refused to move. “Judas! Please!”

Mary managed to fight her way to the edge of the colonnade, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She looked toward the exit where Judas’ dark head had just vanished into the shadows of the descending stairwell. Then she looked back over her shoulder, out across the city toward the west.

The sky was changing. It was barely midday, yet a strange, unnatural gloom was beginning to crawl across the horizon. The sun was losing its brilliance, turning a dull, copper yellow as if a shroud were being drawn over the heavens.

Mary stopped. Her heart felt as though it were being squeezed by an iron fist. The Master. He was on the hill now. They would be nailing Him to the wood. He was dying, and she was here, in the middle of the noise of sheep and silver, chasing a man who had already run into the dark.

She had gone to the temple. She had done what the Master asked. She had looked for him. She had found him. She had technically fulfilled the command, hadn't she? But she couldn't stay here. She couldn't spend the final hours of the Light chasing a ghost through the alleys of Jerusalem while her Lord hung naked in the iron air.

She turned to Dvorah, who was still trying to fight her way toward the stairs, her clothes dishevelled, her breath sobbing in her throat.

“Dvorah!” Mary shouted, grabbing the girl’s shoulder one last time.

Dvorah looked back, her eyes wild with a mixture of terror and anger. “Help me! We have to catch him!”

“I can't,” Mary said, her eyes filling with a fresh wave of tears that reflected the darkening sky. “I have to go to Him. I have to go to Golgotha.”

“You’re leaving me?” Dvorah screamed over the bleating of a hundred doomed sheep. “He’s your friend’s disciple! You said he was breaking!”

“I went to the temple, Dvorah! I did what He told me!” Mary cried back, her voice breaking with the sheer agony of her division. “But my place is at the cross! Go after him! He is your brother! Do not let him go!”

Without waiting for Dvorah’s answer, Mary turned and ran in the opposite direction, her blue mantle flying behind her as she pushed through the crowds toward the western exits of the Temple Mount, her face set toward the hill of the skull.

Dvorah stood alone for a single, terrifying second, the world spinning around her. The priests on the steps were calmly instructing the guards to gather the scattered silver—money that could not be put into the treasury because it was the price of blood. The lambs were still screaming in the inner court.

With a final, desperate gasp of air, Dvorah turned toward the dark archway of the Huldah Gate and plunged into the subterranean shadows after her brother.

The tunnels were cold, smelling of damp stone and ancient dust. Dvorah burst out into the blinding, eerie light of the lower city. The darkness was growing deeper now, an unnatural twilight that made the oil lamps in the windows of the houses seem bright, though it was barely the sixth hour.

“Judas!” she called out, her voice echoing off the high stone walls of the houses that lined the steep, narrow street leading down into the Kidron Valley. “Judas! Stop! It’s Dvorah!”

A few people were standing outside their doors, whispering among themselves, pointing up at the bruised, purplish-black sky. No one had seen a man running, or if they had, they didn't care. The portents in the heavens were too terrifying.

Dvorah ran until her lungs felt as though they were filled with broken glass. She followed the only path that made sense for a man fleeing the temple and the city—down toward the valley floors, away from the faces of men, away from the light.

She passed through the city walls near the lower pool, her slippers tearing on the sharp rocks of the path. The Kidron Valley was a place of tombs and ancient olive groves, a deep, rocky gash between the city and the Mount of Olives. The air here was still, heavy with the scent of dust and wild mustard flowers.

The darkness was almost complete now, a thick, suffocating gloom that felt like the weight of a heavy wool blanket. The wind began to pick up, a low, moaning sound that rattled the dry leaves of the olive trees.

“Judas!” she wept, her knees buckling as she tripped over a loose stone, scraping her hands raw against the gravel. She got up, ignoring the blood on her palms, and kept walking, her eyes straining against the shadows.

She found herself in an old, neglected orchard on the lower slopes of the hill, a place where the trees were ancient, their trunks twisted and gnarled like the bodies of old men frozen in agony. The ground was thick with thorns and dry weeds.

Then, she saw it.

A few yards ahead, where the slope grew steep and rocky, a massive, solitary fig tree stood against the grey, bruised skyline. It was an old tree, its branches thick and long, extending out over a small ravine like skeletal arms.

Something was moving beneath it in the wind.

Dvorah’s heart stopped. The blood in her veins turned to ice. She stopped walking, her legs trembling so violently she had to lean against the trunk of a nearby olive tree to keep from falling.

“No,” she whispered into the dark. “No, no, no...”

She forced her feet forward, each step taking an eternity, the dry grass crunching beneath her sandals with a sound like breaking bones.

It was too late.

Judas was there, hanging beneath the thickest branch of the fig tree. His head was slumped forward against his chest, his dark beard jutting up at an unnatural, broken angle. His arms hung loose at his sides, his fingers curled into stiff, empty claws that had so recently held the silver of Israel.

The wind caught his body, turning it slowly, a terrible, heavy pendulum swinging against the black sky.

Dvorah fell to her knees in the dust beneath his dangling feet. She reached up, her bloody fingers just barely able to touch the hem of his ruined tunic, the wool cold and damp with the sweat of his final panic.

“Judas,” she sobbed, a sound of pure, unadulterated heartbreak that rose into the silent valley.

The sky above Jerusalem seemed to rip open. A distant, low groan of an earthquake shook the ground beneath her knees, loosening small stones that rattled down into the ravine. The veil of the world was tearing, but here, under the dead tree, there was only the silence of the end.

She remembered the Rabbi’s face on the road—the blood in His eyes, the heavy wood on His back, and the desperate, loving urgency in His voice: Bring him back to the fold. He had wanted to save him. He had known the depth of the dark that was coming for her brother, and He had tried to send a hand into the deep water to pull him out.

But the crowd had been too thick. The world had been too broken.

Dvorah wrapped her arms around her brother’s cold ankles, burying her face in the dust of his feet, and wept into the midday darkness, while on a hill not far away, the green wood burned to ash.

Yooo I'm getting anonymous The Chosen fics in my ask box that's crazy! (At least I think it has to be The Chosen with Dvorah being present and the reference to Mary's return to her old demons and Simon and Matthew going to get her)

That's very well written, lovely. Incredibly sad, but lovely.