Chapter Text
Hush now, my baby,
Be still, love, don't cry,
Sleep like you're rocked by the stream.
Sleep and remember my lullaby,
And I'll be with you when you dream…
The palace air was heavy in a way it’d never been before. Not with the familiar scent of incense or the weight of flashy royal decorum, but with the silence that followed the loss of something great, the loss of something young. The unnatural stillness that followed the last breath of something once so full of life. Moses passed through the arch of raised pillars and was struck, not for the first time, by how small the room felt.
It hadn’t always been like this.
The Pharaoh stood beside the marble platform at the very center of the room, hunched over and unmoving. His eyes bore into the body of a boy, his son, who lay breathless on the pedestal. Lifeless. For a moment Moses thought Rameses, too, wasn’t breathing. His eyes were fixed, unblinking and bloodshot.
The prince—no, the boy—had been carefully wrapped in precious silks and satins. An excessive amount of golden jewelry adorned his tiny body; he would be buried like a true pharaoh, despite never getting to be one. His skin was already beginning to pale, face still damp from the water rituals performed by high priests, as though the cleaning could reverse the horror of what had been done.
The boy was dead, and no amount of fancy rituals and pretty satins could make it anything other than horrific.
Moses hesitated at the doorway. Coming here was disrespectful, tasteless. A slap in Rameses' face. And yet, not showing up somehow sounded even worse. Every instinct inside him was screaming to leave before he was discovered. Interrupting Rameses’ mourning felt like knocking on death’s door; it felt like taunting God himself. And yet, Moses took a step, small, hesitant. His sandals made the faintest whisper against the sandstone floor, a sound that felt blasphemous in the silence.
This room was special. He remembered it clearly now, walking towards the center. Before it was a mourning chamber, it had been their kingdom. Two young boys running in circles, shrieking adolescent voices shouting commands and pretending the pedestal at the center of the room was their ship, the pillars - mighty giants to slay.
“When I am Pharaoh, I will build towers higher than the Nile is long!” Rameses would shout while climbing on the dais, his arms spread out in victory.
“Then I will knock them down just to watch your face crumble,” Moses would challenge him, jumping onto the older boy’s back and knocking them both to the ground. Servants would rush into the room and they knew they’d get the scolding of a lifetime once their father found out, but it didn’t matter; they were just boys, kids, enjoying each other’s shrill laughter, blissfully unaware of what was to come.
Years had passed, yet they were still there; only Rameses stood differently now, shoulders hunched, spine curved like a man aged decades in a single night. His hands were clenched so tightly on the edges of the pedestal, the knuckles had blanched white. Only then did Moses see the rise and fall of his chest. Still breathing, then. Shallow. Mechanical. As though Rameses wasn’t breathing by instinct anymore, but because grief hadn’t yet remembered to stop him.
“Rameses,” Moses said, his voice low. The man flinched; the only sign he had heard him. When he didn’t answer, Moses stepped forward and placed a single hand on his brother’s—if he still had the right to call him that—shoulder. “He is—”
“Do not.” The word came out flat. Empty. Rameses pushed his hand away and refused to face him, spitting the words like it disgusted him to address him. “Do not say his name. Do not speak to me as if you have any right.”
Moses’s throat tightened. “I’m not here to—”
“I said don’t ,” Rameses snapped, voice cracking at the edges, though his body never turned. “Get out of here. Let me bid farewell to the son you stole from me.”
Moses’ chest constricted with the words. His mouth suddenly felt dry as he looked at the child again. So small. So terribly still. Dead .
And it was all because of him.
“Believe me, Rameses, when I say I never meant for this to happen,” Moses whispered. Within the blink of an eye, Rameses turned to face him, but all Moses saw was his tight fist before it collided with the edge of his jaw. The force of the punch knocked Moses backwards, but he managed to catch himself with the staff. Pain blossomed from his cheek, yet he couldn’t bring himself to be angry; this was the price he had to pay. A mere slither of it, at least.
“My wife is dead as well, Rameses,” he swallowed. “Do you truly think I’d do something like that on purpose?” That got Rameses’ attention. Moses saw the man’s jaw shift slightly. Eyes that once gleamed like carved amber now burned low, dimmed to dull embers threatening to give out. But there was a flicker in them now—disbelief tinged with curiosity. He was listening .
“ God has come to me again, saying, ‘Take a lamb, and with its blood, mark the lintel and posts of every door, for tonight, I shall pass through the land of Egypt, and smite all the firstborn. But when I see the blood upon your door, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not enter.’ My wife was supposed to mark our door, but she didn’t. She was firstborn. She—” He paused, feeling the raw edge of the memory press against his ribs. Something shifted across Rameses’ face—not sympathy, not forgiveness, but something closer to recognition. Pain mirrored in another man’s eyes.
“Where were you, then? Why didn’t you mark your own door?” Rameses inquired after a beat, his eyebrows furrowing. The look of pure disgust and fury in his eyes was too much for Moses, so he averted his gaze. The tiniest, saddest smile spread across his face.
“ You seem to have forgotten you, too, are firstborn, Rameses.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Fire flickered from the torches on the walls, and in their flames, Moses saw Rameses’ muscles tighten. Every last bit of his body tensed, his eyes blew up impossibly wide. The Pharaoh’s lips parted ever so slightly, yet no sound came from them at first. Then, slowly, after what felt like a lifetime, he took the tiniest step forward. Rameses had always been bigger than him, older, broader, yet at this moment, he looked shockingly small.
“There was blood on the doorframe of my chamber,” he whispered, yet it didn’t feel like an accusation. It felt like confirmation, like he was saying it out loud not for Moses, but for himself. His eyes twitched. “You—you were in my palace? You entered my home —after everything—and defiled it with your God’s ritual?!”
Moses didn’t say anything. Silence was enough of an answer.
The Pharaoh laughed. Not humorously—it was a sharp, bitter exhale that cracked like pottery. “You could have saved my son.”
“Rameses, I didn’t—”
“Why not all the doors?!” Rameses roared. “Why not his nursery? You came here to save me?! Me?! ” He stepped closer, until they were breath to breath. “You spared me —but couldn’t spare him ?”
“I would have spared you everything ,” Moses said, quietly, earnestly. “If I could.”
The words hung between them, unanswered. They had always spoken like this; thoughts, feelings and meanings hidden beneath the words. What was said was never the heart of it. The truth lived in glances, in shared silences, in long shadows and stolen touches between day and dusk.
A tremor rippled through Rameses’ expression. His lips parted with the start of a breath, a cry. And then, without sound, a single tear slipped down his cheek. He didn’t wipe it away, Moses only lowered his eyes, blinking back his own tears.
“Your people,” Rameses whispered, so quietly it might’ve been wind, “have my permission to go.”
Moses felt the ache of that sentence lodge in his chest. It was done . The cost had been paid. The sea of blood behind him, the promised land ahead. Jerusalem.
He turned to leave. But as he took the first step towards the exit, a cold hand wrapped around his wrist, stopping him dead in his tracks. He looked down. Rameses was gripping him, knuckles taut, eyes locked onto him like a man clinging to the last thing keeping him from drowning.
“Your people have my permission to go,” Rameses repeated, stepping impossibly closer. His face was unreadable—glassy and strange, a king barely holding together his crown of ash. Moses had never been afraid of his brother, but right now—he wished for nothing more than to run away. “But you—you stay in Egypt.”
“What?” Moses breathed after a beat of silence, tighter than a noose.
“If your people want freedom, you stay. That is the price. You are the price.”
Moses could barely breathe. He swallowed hard, staring into the eyes of the man he grew up with—the boy who had once chased him through palace corridors, who had stood beside him on chariot races, who had laughed and bruised and bled with him.
He was still there, somewhere beneath the grief. But he was also this now; a pharaoh brought to his knees, and in his fall, clinging to the only thing he had left.
“Let me say goodbye to my siblings,” he said, voice thin. “Just that. Only that. Then I will stay.”
Rameses let go of his wrist, nodding once. His eyes whispered words the Pharaoh didn’t have the strength to say aloud. Don’t make me regret this.
And Moses?
Moses already did.