AN: For my pal Beth, whom I managed to convince to watch some of my weird Shakespeare videos; they read Measure for Measure as a result and now we're collaborating on a fic (stay tuned!). In freewheeling discussions of the play and its characters they suggested this prompt: "An idea that just randomly sprung to mind is perhaps delving a little deeper into the more moral characters of the play, i.e. Escalus and the Provost, and exploring how they perceive Angelo's actions and the situation unfolding around them?" So while working a night shift last week I banged out a little story. Enjoy!

Condemned for a fault alone

One man could not a fortress move. His ghostly father's words, once upon a time, which he had long since adopted for his own. Countless times he had repeated them to the council, when tempers rose and desires clashed, the tension in the room pricking at his skin like so many stinging gnats. One man could not a fortress move. Forethought, insight, patience, above all things; temperance above that. Cooperation and unity, a strong front before a weak and wilding throng.

Even when he'd been but a clerk in the courts of justice, Angelo had always been a voice of dissent. He seemed to delight, actually, in being so, at least insomuch as a man whose very nature, at the best of times violently restrained, could delight in anything. Escalus assumed, anyhow, that the restraint was violent. The man never did a single thing by half measures, so surely that philosophy had its roots in his governance of himself. Escalus thought himself quite a pious man, hardly given to excess, but Angelo comported himself with an asceticism that bordered on fanatic, and made even the Camaldolese hermits seem licentious in comparison: fasted not once a week at Lent but thrice a week year round, prayed in solitude not thrice a day but the full seven times, and took confession and communion from the trembling hands of brothers of a shadowed order, who wore barbed chains about their thighs and whipped their backs bloody before bare altars, begging deliverance from a merciless god.

Perhaps if Angelo had not hungered so strongly for earthly influence, he would have numbered fully among the ranks of those brothers. But perhaps if he had not hungered, he would spare himself the rod and live at peace.

But peace was Escalus' bent, not Angelo's. Never Angelo's. Hang him for a flunkey, but when Vincentio forewent castigation time and time again, Escalus stood by him, for the light of repentance could, he deeply believed, shine through even the most clouded soul if the storm within was granted ample time to pass. Not always, of course, but often enough that mercy tended to prove a risk worth taking. And it wasn't as though Vincentio was over-liberal where it mattered most. He held no love for murderers, would execute almost on the spot anyone who harmed a child. Escalus himself, though he would hear any case out with an ear deaf to hasty judgement, would sooner put out his own eye than stoop to pardon a man who wronged a woman. Unless, as was rarely but on occasion certainly the case, the woman had wronged the man in equal measure.

That was justice. Real, equitable justice. The sentencing of Claudio Levasori della Motta, whatever else it might have been, was not justice.

If the boy had been of meaner birth he would have made a lesser scapegoat, and Escalus would have taken up his cause regardless. But the family had been one of Vienna's greats, in its day, and perhaps that was why Angelo sought so fiercely to blacken its name: to raze the old order to dust and pave the road for his kind-the entrepreneurs, the opportunists, the nouveau riche-to rise. Or perhaps Escalus merely fancied to impose reason upon a crusade built on crumbled foundations.

For that was what Claudio was, in truth: a scapegoat. A martyr for a senseless cause. It was one thing to tear down the bawdy houses: Vincentio himself, as the ducal convocations turned their thoughts evermore to war, had thought to do the same, the city's underbelly one great sore weeping venereal disease and crimes of passion like stinking pus. Lance the festering wound, then, Guarino di Santi; tear down the houses. But it was quite another thing to fall back upon the old marital laws, worm-eaten in the codexes and nearly a full score of years unthought of, as a means of putting a boy to death. Especially when the consummation was, by all accounts, a perfectly consensual affair. And especially when, by more accounts than that, crimes far more heinous were perpetuated unchecked every day.

"'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, another thing to fall," Angelo said, shaking Escalus from his reverie. "I not deny the jury passing on the prisoner's may, in the sworn twelve, have a thief or two guiltier than him they try. What knows the law that thieves do pass on thieves? What's open made to justice, that justice seizes. 'Tis very pregnant: the jewel that we find, we stoop and take't because we see it, but what we do not see we tread upon and never think of it." He smiled a little, the expression entirely devoid of humour; even in that brief silence sententious contempt rang clear like the tolling of death's-head bells. "For I have had such faults; but rather tell me, when I that censure him do so offend, let mine own judgement pattern out my death, and nothing come in partial." Sighing, he cast his eyes, blank and cold as a midwinter sky, about the hall, fingers flexing as if itching to grasp a pen. "Sir, he must die."

Escalus could feel the heavy presence of Justice Friedman and the young Provost behind him; he dared not turn to meet their eyes, fearing to find the mirror of the desolation he felt cloud his soul in their eyes. "Be it as your wisdom will," he murmured, holding Angelo's indolent gaze for only a moment. He could bear it no longer. That-draconian deputy, that smug usurper, holier than thou, how could he remain so unmoved, condemning a soul guilty only of loving too well? Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. And for a brief, uncharitable moment, Escalus could not but hope to see him fall.

It is a bitter deputy

Do you your office, or give up your place, and you shall well be spared. The dismissal was unmistakable, the threat more so. Though it was not, at present, a threat he cared to acknowledge; by all accounts Lord Angelo had never made any great secret of his dissatisfaction with his governance of the prison in the three years he'd held the Provost's office. It was not the first time that lord had alleged dismissal. He doubted it would be the last. No heed paid, of course, to the fact that Angelo was alone in expressing such dissatisfaction. His officers and inmates hadn't, at least, and in his mind theirs were the only opinions worth a damn. At all events he had made it clear, when he'd been elected to the post (in the conspicuous absence of any volunteers or official nominations), that any of them should feel perfectly at ease to confront him, man to man, with any grievances. Those who had them had done so, and it was mere mathematical fact, not boasting, to note that "those" numbered few. Few complaints, fewer riots. Only one, actually, in the early days when he'd still been splitting time between the Provost's office and the hangman's block and the iron fist of his predecessor still held the prison in its white-knuckled grasp.

Do you your office, Angelo had said. He hadn't even had the decency to look at him. Or to actually read the documents spread haphazardly on the desk before him, which he'd turned to with such concentrated gusto. He might have practiced what he panned, at least. For surely it was too much to ask that he bear in mind that he, the Provost, was no longer a soldier, no longer an executioner, his office was not the bringing of death, but the welfare of the prisoners. And if the laws themselves, laws he to the letter knew as well as Angelo himself, stated that extramarital fornication was an offence punishable by death only under most unfavourable circumstances, and that that clause had been retired by official decree nineteen years, four months, and sixteen days ago, he could hardly be held in peril of dishonour for questioning the judgement at hand.

And yet. Here he was. In peril of dishonour. For daring, horror of horrors, to question. To care. God forbid someone in this Godforsaken city deign to actually care.

But the tune was old, and Angelo sang it better than any. Naught more to do but bow his head, beg pardon like a puling dog, deference sitting like ash on his tongue. Ask after Juliet's care in hopes that the stone fish might warm just slightly towards a woman. As if he hadn't learned already that hope was the providence of fools.

Devilish mercy in the judge

Hector had always fancied himself rather good at knowing when and where he was unwanted, but of late he was beginning to weary of just how often that was proving to be the case. Duke Vincentio had rarely been opposed to the presence of his more trusted servants even in the most clandestine councils, and most of them had assumed that serving Lord Angelo in the same capacity would engender no great change to their habits. Hector had suspected otherwise, but had kept his suspicions to himself, to wanting to impose any rash judgement on the man. He'd since been proven right, of course; one could hardly expect anything else from a man who lived without even a valet and regarded secrecy as sanctity in the utmost. So the lot of them had had to grow accustomed, quite quickly, to being hounded out of any given room at any given turn if they failed to mark the irascible occupant's displeasure at their presence with sufficient alacrity.

At present, when he put in to announce the sister (and dubious friend) of the condemned man, the tension in the air was so thick a blind man with a blunt knife could have cut it with ease. Impatience was plainly writ in every taut line of Lord Angelo's body, from the sharp flick and curl of elegant fingers to the edged tapping of his shoes upon the parquet. That he was by nature an impatient man was, granted, common knowledge in the palace, but that day it seemed he'd woken with a thorn in his side that had since only dug itself deeper, fidgeting near-constantly with the rosary sequestered in his pocket and snapping answers to even the most innocuous questions. That sham trial hadn't helped, hardly (though privately Hector thought the histrionic stylings of Pompey the bawd and Elbow the bungler would have been too great a laugh to miss). As things stood, the glint in Lord Angelo's eye promised a merciless whipping to any who dared cross him too boldly: a promise that didn't seem to faze his interlocutor in the least. Though the Provost, in all Hector's dealings with him (and there were many, few of the others being bold enough to courier to the prison), had always struck him as a man too sure of his convictions and his place to b fazed by much of anything: a man of stormy countenance, but a habitually controlled, if brusquely-edged temper. Now the effort to maintain that control seemed a Herculean one; a muscle in his stubbled cheek twitched as his jaw clenched and unclenched, clenched and unclenched, and when he spun to watch Hector approach, something in his darkly shadowed eyes screamed violence like a cry for help.

Hector had no illusions, of course, that anything the lady said might sway Lord Angelo from seeing the execution through. Even in the mildest of moods, of which this was hardly one, he was ever set in his ways. The only mercy she could hope for was that he would make his intentions plain. Such was his wont, at least, no matter what those intentions were. To be frank Hector found it rather admirable, and thought that if Lord Angelo had prized mercy as highly as honesty, he'd unquestionably make a true saint. As it was he remained but a zealot still, more flagellant than templar as he sought to subdue the city's sickening heart to the tenor of his own, stone-crushed.

But a man crushed between stone might live yet to writhe, and writhe he did, some unguessable temptation levering at the weight of repressed desires until he maddened at the saccharine threat of release, the bitter reward of death.

He hadn't read the missive he'd been hastily (as he thought, fearfully) given, not even in the relative safety of the unlit streets. He hadn't wanted to, really. No amount of curiosity could overpower the chill that had filled him when he'd met Lord Angelo's too-pale, too-bright eyes, at once blank and gleaming with an almost vengeful light. Who, or what, he desired to avenge, Hector wouldn't dare guess. But it was plain to him that the missive boded ill. As he walked he was conscious only of a pressing urge, almost an itch, to walk faster; longed to glimpse the squat prison walls, if only to remove the offending article from his pocket, where he fancied it burned at his flesh.

It wasn't often he was dispatched here after midnight; he couldn't name the officers patrolling the perimeter, or the one who eventually came to the great double doors to fetch him in. But they were a stubborn lot, rather unreasonably so: barely convinced of his purpose even after he'd shown them Lord Angelo's seal on the letter and the Duke's own crest on his courier's pass. The next time, Hector thought, that he chanced to meet the Provost in one of the taverns they didn't quite make a habit of frequenting, he resolved to ask him whether impersonating a ducal messenger had become a common offense, that his officers were on such intense alert against it.

The Provost himself didn't seem at all pleased to see him. Granted, he rarely expressed anything resembling pleasure outright, but usually Hector could count on a marginally warmer reception. A word or two of greeting, at least. Tonight he said nothing at all; merely raised both brows in a manner more irritated than expectant (the cowled friar in the office with him quickly cast his gaze to the ground, as if embarrassed for his companion's rudeness). I know you bring ill news, that look seemed to say. Get on with it.

"My lord hath sent you this note," he began, passing the Provost the scroll and resisting the urge to wipe the sting of it from his hand, "and by me this further charge: that you swerve not from the smallest article of it, neither in time, manner, nor other circumstance." Lord Angelo's words to the letter, and Hector would rather have pondered a thousand other woes than their implications. He found he could no longer meet the other man's burning gaze, and glanced back towards the door instead. "Good morrow, for, as I take it, it is almost day." He scarcely waited for a faint nod of acknowledgement before turning tail and striding out. He had no desire to watch the inevitable disappointment warp that good man's careworn face, to bear witness to the deadly death throes of their shared shadow, stone-crushed and all too eager to die.

Wrench awe from fools

Thus fail not to do your office, as you shall answer it at your peril. Brittle parchment crunched in his fist. His hand struck the desk; sudden, stinging pain spiked behind his left eye, piercing the fog of blurring letters, the red haze of mounting rage. Something coiled tight, serpentine, in his chest; his breath came quick, shallow, stuck deep in his throat. A high, brittle whine filled his ears, he scarcely heard that wretched friar ask, bemusement blooming slow on his ghoulish face, after the news.

What news, he said. What news indeed. Read it your own damn self-but no, no, the Provost was a good little lackey, so please your honour, ask and ye shall receive! He would do more than that if more were needful! So with trembling hands he smoothed the crumpled paper; with trembling voice he began to read. And read. Read the bloody missive in its bloody entirety, in a stranger's bloody weak voice.

But if he'd spoken in his own, he might well have screamed. Can't have that. Too late for screams. Better to defer responsibility for once in his thrice-damned life.

This was hypocrisy. Worse than that. Lunacy. To rob a man of four hours of sleep was one thing. Perfectly excusable. It wasn't as though he'd have taken them anyway, and it wouldn't kill Abhorson to lose them for once. But to rob a man of four hours of life-only the devil could do such a thing so callously. It was sick, he felt. Fucking. Sick, the knot that had formed between his gut and his lungs over the past week clenching until breathing itself became a trial. Let it, then, didn't he deserve it? Why should he, who had taken more lives than Claudio had lived years on this earth-why should Barnardine, who had killed smiling-be so fortunate as to breathe, when Claudio was not? Claudio, who had never taken life, but created it? In what bloody unjust hellscape was it a crime to create life?

That's what he ought to ask the friar. The poor, put-out friar, whose fine brows knit in concern but whose too-dark, too-bright eyes flicked madly about his dim office, plucking plots from shadows. That's what he ought. Ask God's lackey why he let this happen: stood by and let his confessant spit in that God's face. And he opened his mouth to ask, but the pissant cut him off. Shut him up. Question after inane question after mad proposition-Barnardine, hesitation, heads-and he, fool he, had to sit mum. Play along. Honour-bound to answer, to obey. Honour-bound to the oath, the damned oath, sacrilegious and sacrosanct-where was the honour in a vow that bid him show justice unjust? His honour weighed against Claudio's life, which was worthier? Near enough the question that had deepened this damned mess to begin with. And in the dead of night he could only lower his heavy head into bloodied hands and wish he was a strong enough man to know the answer to that question.

Initially each character's POV was intended to stand as a discrete section, but after writing them all out (and making the inevitable edit/addition), I decided to restructure things a bit, ultimately splitting the Provost's narrative to act as a frame for the servant's contribution.

I have a bad habit of sneaking weird headcanons into my writing. Claudio's family name (Levasori della Motta, an obscure Austrian noble family with roots in Italy; apparently nobles in Austria's former sovereign states in northern Italy were allowed to keep their titles and holdings, which is how I'm justifying the abundance of Italian names in the text) is one of the more benign ones. Angelo being a monk (or postulant/novice, I didn't think it through) of Opus Dei is...honestly I have no idea where I got that idea, and I didn't write that portion of the story in the middle of the night, so I really have no excuse. On that note, feel free to guess which portions were written at like 1 AM. XD