Here are some Jesus/Pontius Pilate sketches because I’ve re-read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov recently.
This has been living rent free in my head for months and OP tagged it fix-it fic, so. This is not exactly a fix-it plot but consider:
In the Bible, Pilate’s wife pleads with him not to execute Jesus. What if Pilate decides to listen to her? He manages to swing some kind of political arrangement, but he also can’t just let this Problem go wandering around causing a rebellion. So instead Jesus ends up just. Living in Pilate’s palace/villa/whatever under house arrest or something like that and Pilate just being simultaneously fascinated, infuriated, and slowly falling in love with this guy who is supposed to be a political hostage or something like that.
And Pilate’s also watching his wife have this Thing with this weird Jewish rebel but like. He can’t even manage to be jealous even if he feels like he should be. The three of them spend more and more time together, even though it’s making important people question his loyalty to Rome. His perspective begins to shift, and he’s not making the decisions a good Roman would, or the decisions a pragmatic politician would, because he finds himself less and less willing to sacrifice others for power and convenience.
Pilate watches his carefully constructed political career unraveling around him and just. Lets it happen, because he can’t accept the alternative. Pilate and his wife lose their prestige and political security because they’ve been sheltering this wild Jewish rebel, and the volatile nature of the Judean provinces and the cutthroat nature of Roman politics mean that they don’t long survive their fall from power. They live just long enough to see the man they both love crucified before themselves becoming some of the earliest Christian martyrs.
@absynthe–minded this is still your fault, I hope you’re proud of yourself.
