fic: Five things that Rome has done
Guys, I saw the gayest slavefic this weekend. Like, so gay. Just the gayest. I hope that the next time they film a Billy Elliott/Step Up crossover AU they do some actual makeouts instead of just eyefucking, tho. NOTE TO CHANNING TATUM: We all know your dick has not totally scalded off, so pls to use it on Jamie Bell, who loves you.
ANYWAY. I wrote something terrible that takes itself way too seriously, in honor of the movie's absolute terribleness and self-seriousness. But pornier, soooooo.
fandom: The Eagle, movieverse (sry, Rosemary)
pairing: Aquila/Esca
warnings: porrrrrrrn.
words: 2831
I. Rome has murdered your family
In the night, after the fire had sputtered out in the dirt and the dew had settled in the folds of their cloaks, Esca came to Aquila. He settled there, snug against him, nudging at him, moving with intention.
If Aquila, wrapped in a half-dream fog, managed to greet him, he was ignored. Esca's hands snaked through the woolen layers between them, rubbing cold fingers over the warm skin of his belly, then his hipbone.
Esca's breath in Aquila's ear was steady and wordless as he worked.
And Aquila, led along like a horse in halter, was not even certain he was awake before he tensed, and choked off his cry.
Esca withdrew his hand. And Aquila, who had started to rise to his elbows with the intent of finding Esca's mouth with his own, was startled by a shove into the dirt that cracked his teeth together in his skull.
Then Esca was on top of him, stripping away layers of clothing while Aquila gawked. He also, with a dissatisfied sound, knocked Aquila back into the ground twice more, before hooking one of his arms around an inconvenient leg and pushing himself, warm and slick, into Aquila with a purposefulness and a blackness of gaze that made Aquila look away rather than see it.
It hurt. Pain ran like panic up Aquila's spine and he twisted, like he might somehow get away from it.
Esca held him firm. He was moving slowly. It did not help.
Aquila gasped, tried to contain himself, gasped again. Esca had never complained. Why had he never complained? Aquila had never guessed, or asked. He had always just taken.
Esca pushed. Aquila's thoughts disintegrated.
That evening from across the firepit, Esca had spoken of his family. He had said, "She knelt before him and he slit her throat so Rome could not have her."
And now it seemed Esca thought he might take something back from Rome. Aquila could hear it in the sounds that burnt out of his throat. Want.
He recognized the sound. He knew it well. But he did not know what he could give that might satisfy.
All he could hear was the coarse sounds that he was making himself. The pain that had liquefied his spine was in his blood, now, burning through him.
It didn't just hurt. It wasn't just pain.
Esca, who had discarded Aquila's leg and now leaned over him, palms on shoulders, like the day they had learned each other's names. That day, when Esca had pinned him to the surgeon's table and looked into his eyes and watched what lay there while they pincered away at his knee. Esca's whole, half-starved weight on his chest, forcing the air out of his lungs so he might not draw breath to scream when the knife re-opened his rotten wound.
Esca wore the same look on his face, now. Black curiosity. Satisfaction. A hunger that would swallow everything that passed through the spectrum of the visible, and take it, and keep it.
Exactly the same. Except for how this time, Esca also held the blade to twist and turn as he liked.
Except for how this time, the more Aquila hurt the more he wanted.
Arched in the dirt, his hands scrabbled through rough stones and trampled grass, his body convulsing at the slightest variation of Esca's measured movements. Aquila felt shame.
Not for crying out, nor shying away, nor even for liking the way his slave was using him. He was shamed, because he could hold back nothing. Esca was watching it all pass through his eyes.
Esca's hands on his shoulders. Esca pinning him in the dirt. Esca watching him grope for his honor and fail.
II. Rome has enslaved you
At the villa, Esca had been a substandard body slave. Stephanos had attempted to train him, but Esca had faced each lesson with the same stubborn countenance with which he had met the gladiator in the ring.
His silence was not deferential, but defiant. His obedience was a form of resistance.
More unsettling, he had no sense of where it was proper for a slave to put his eyes.
Long after Aquila was fully healed, he would feel Esca's gaze on him from across the room. And when he turned to meet it, Esca would not glance down, much less bow his head or melt away. He would stare back until Aquila, unwilling to look away himself, was forced to invent an excuse to send him out.
Esca was nothing like the docile city slaves of Rome, bred for pliability and grace and shrewd bargaining at market, the violence of their warrior ancestors swaddled in steady food and good sandals, the names of their wounds and homelands long forgotten. He could not be suborned. He could not forget.
Yet the notion of hiring a slavebreaker was never entertained. Aquila attributed that to his uncle's lax provincial mentality finally rubbing off on him. Or perhaps the fact that Esca looked, with his jutting ribs and bludgeoned face, like he might be too easily broken, mulish glances or no.
After his knee was re-opened, Aquila spent a month in his bed.
Esca, forever crouched in one corner or another, would occasionally come forward to scrape off sweat or change the bandages or replace the bedclothes. In those unending hours of sore joints and confused dreams, Esca's hands, blunt and unhesitating, were welcome points of reality.
The meat smell of the wound worsened, then faded. But Aquila's fever dreams, the ones that skipped back and forth in time, the ones that had nearly sentenced him to the life of an augur, never faded.
Esca's hands shredded those dreams. They were fearless, and Esca's wordless mouth, Aquila learned, was a font of vast experience.
Had he been asleep the first time? What had he been dreaming - thrashing, maybe, muttering - that drew Esca to him in the night? It was unclear to him how those cool hands had come to fold away the linens and untangle his twisted limbs, and stayed to stroke his hot skin.
Aquila never knew. Nor did he awaken fully until he had Esca's mouth on his own, Esca somehow tumbled beneath him, hands everywhere, narrow body slippery and urgent.
He had seen the slave in the ring and marked him for his carriage, his proud eye. But the strength in that ragged frame he had not anticipated. He suspected that Esca did not truly resist him, though. He pushed and then retreated, got his way then gave it up. Growled, and went quiet as a fawn.
All his energies were spent fighting himself.
Fortunate, for Aquila was weaker than he was accustomed to, wet with fever still. Yet Esca let himself be ground facedown into the linens on the straw mattress. He made barely a noise though his breath came hard and quick when Aquila, slick with oil and sweat, pushed his way in.
Esca, tight and brittle and hot as glass underneath him, nonetheless moved with him when Aquila's strength ran out. Aquila felt his arms give, and draped himself over Esca's back. His mouth at Esca's ear, each tiny movement seeming massive and overwhelming.
He could not stop himself from bucking hard, harder than he meant to, as he finished.
Esca gave no sign of caring.
After, he slunk away from the bed and did not return till morning.
Esca's hands in the daylight: rude and quick and cold as they stripped off Aquila's garments or bathed him with oil. Aquila did his best to not catch at them or pull them to him or even watch them too closely.
It was not as difficult as it might seem. For Esca's eyes in daylight offered nothing but the scornful glare of a slave facing his death in the ring.
III. Rome has scattered and broken your people
Once they were among the seal people, Esca would still come at night. Often with a cooked strip of fish or two. Never with any words. He'd stand in the edges of the firelight where the warriors could see his back, and toss the food and give a long stare before he returned to the warmth of fire and chatter and food, leaving Aquila to crouch alone in the periphery of that strange society.
Only once did Esca come to him as master.
In the village on the seashore, Aquila slept in his own hut. It was more an overhang built in with rocks, far away from the women and children who were his equals, far away from the painted warriors who were Esca's. His own hut at the edge of the village, unguarded, ignored. He realized that it meant no one, including Esca, considered him capable of running away.
Aquila discovered that, without the eagle he had come for, he was good as chained.
The night Esca came, it was raining and the sea was lashing itself up the pebbled shoreline in a fury of ice and noise.
He did not need to demand quiet. He crouched on the threshold for a long moment while Aquila decided whether or not he would murder this man who had betrayed and humiliated him.
But before Aquila could decide, Esca came in, and they kissed as gently as lovers.
IV. Rome has turned you traitor
For a while, in the highlands while the horses grazed on drenched grasses and moss, Aquila thought that Esca might actually murder him. An oath seemed an insignificant thing in this vast land that could swallow them both with a flick of bad weather or a slip of sliding stones.
Aquila, who had the time to weigh the matter with a linear precision his childhood tutor would have praised, decided that the rules of honor were inconclusive on whether killing your captor and returning to what was left of your people to lead them in revolt was acceptable, given the circumstances.
He suspected that were it his honor in question, he would arise looking as morose as Esca did every morning.
But Esca did not murder him. He merely attempted to smash his face in once or twice. Perhaps the gift of his father's dagger did not preclude that. Or perhaps Aquila's comments warranted it.
Or perhaps, every time they stumbled through the grass with each other's fists in their faces and hands on their throats, they ended up rutting against each other like wild beasts, instead.
Aquila, unsettled by the endless waves of alien landscape, would sometimes succumb to the urge to talk idly. Of the Roman presence in Gaul and the nuances of agriculture there, or of exotic foods he had tasted on campaign in Africa, or of the auguries he had witnessed in the temple of Zeus that had foretold the plenitude and length of the new Emperor's reign. He would talk of these things supposing Esca held a curiosity for his new homeland, or an interest in the treatment he could expect for his people.
But then, Aquila knew also that Esca held no such curiosity. Only scorn.
So he'd ramble on, never looking at Esca's face, knowing that he sat his horse tense as a stretched bow and that eventually, inevitably, the string would snap and Esca would be on him.
He did not mind that, nor seek much to avoid it.
But for all his talk, the gray and golden land beyond the Wall made Aquila feel detached from himself, from the tutors and drills of his youth. Here, he was beyond Rome. And instead of waiting for the cover of darkness to run a palm over the line of Esca's hip, he could pull Esca to him when they paused to water the horses. He could kiss him instead of kindling the evening cookfire with dried lichen and twisted branches. He could stop their march mid-afternoon and use the best of the daylight to map scars left by the slaver's whip or the centurion's blade.
This land was not his, and he was not Rome's, but Esca was his.
Esca, who looked at the shadowy glens and the bright lines of the bucking horizon with muted eyes, and was sometimes acquiescent, sometimes rigid with spite.
But still his slave. Always, his. The thought comforted Aquila.
One night Aquila, belly full of fish and feet warm by the fire, leaned back to look at the stars and said, "When I lay the eagle before the Emperor, perhaps he will realize that this land is rightfully Rome's. Perhaps he will order me to lead the Ninth back here to reclaim it."
Esca, across the fire. Esca with his eyes full of black hate.
But also: Esca under the sun. Esca washed clean in sea air, with his pale skin flushed, and his grin sudden and wide, and his blue eyes wiped clean of every sad or savage thought his heart has ever cradled.
V. Rome has set you free and given you her favorite son to do with as you will
But how could they stay in Rome while the Atii and the Aurelii and the Julii held dinners and sent gifts? How could they stay when there were so many slaves in his mother's house holding messages from Tribunes, from Senators, from matriarchs and augurs? And when there were so many puppet shows portraying their victories and when there was talk of a Triumph and talk of the Emperor's pleasure and talk of a hundred other flatteries and fleeting half-truths that would all be forgotten in a month?
Marcus Aquila was no longer sure he was a soldier or even a Roman when he woke up to find Esca curled tight, asleep across his bedroom door. Guarding against what? Romans. Here they slept in a city peopled with Esca's oldest enemies, and Aquila couldn't point to one true friend.
Aquila was no longer certain that either of them were free men here.
He came to this conclusion during a dinner that Placidus, that purebred sycophant, held to honor them.
Esca would not go. Not even for politeness' sake. There was nothing Roman that appealed to him besides the public baths. And only those if he did not have to speak to any Romans while bathing.
So Aquila went alone. And Placidus, whose house was crowded with venomous serpents of his exact persuasion, presented Aquila with a living tortoise whose shell was chased in gold. One medallion in particular Placidus pointed out, and when Aquila lifted it from the beast's back, it read in worked script: With great admiration, in hope you will forgive my careless offenses.
Leech.
Placidus fed him, plied him with opiates, and offered him his sister, then himself.
Aquila fled.
Nonetheless, the tortoise was waiting like a nightmare in his mother's house when he arrived at the gate.
"I won't stay here anymore," he told his mother, finding her sitting with her body slave, eating figs and reading poetry. He presented her the tortoise, whose shell was so heavy with metal and jewels the creature could barely lift itself to walk.
His mother moved an eyebrow at the animal, which cast its gaping mouth about in search of food or air or an explanation for its sudden paralysis.
"You will be missed," she said to him, offering the tortoise a fig.
Aquila doubted that.
Seeking his bed, he nearly tripped over Esca, asleep again in the doorway.
"Come to bed," he commanded, as he passed.
Esca stretched, but did not move from the floor. His hair shone in the lamplight. "No," he said, the word affording him no subtle pleasure.
Aquila paused and looked back at him. Sometimes it was strange to see him scrubbed so clean. Someone had attempted to make his hair lie flat in the Roman style, and failed.
"I am returning to Calleva," Aquila said. And then, "Will you ride with me?"
Esca, pulling himself from the floor, paused. He seemed to consider. Then he shrugged. "No."
Aquila blinked. Surely Esca did not intend to return to the Wall, surely even he would prefer Roman rule over a traitor's death. "No?" Aquila repeated.
Esca's small smile was no answer.
"Where, then?" Aquila asked, trying to hold his voice back from outright demand.
Again, a pause. Esca's eyes traced the room: its dyed fabrics and carved wood and beaten metal. Alien as lichen-covered rocks and skin painted death's own grey, no doubt.
"Egypt, I think." Esca glanced sideways at him. "And you are welcome to join me."
Bewildered, Aquila stared.
With a smirk, Esca curled back up on the floor.
And eventually, after tangling in his sheets and suffocating in his pillows, just as Esca had warned, Aquila joined him there, to wake in the morning sprawled like hunting dogs.
The next day, they were outside the city by noon.
ANYWAY. I wrote something terrible that takes itself way too seriously, in honor of the movie's absolute terribleness and self-seriousness. But pornier, soooooo.
fandom: The Eagle, movieverse (sry, Rosemary)
pairing: Aquila/Esca
warnings: porrrrrrrn.
words: 2831
I. Rome has murdered your family
In the night, after the fire had sputtered out in the dirt and the dew had settled in the folds of their cloaks, Esca came to Aquila. He settled there, snug against him, nudging at him, moving with intention.
If Aquila, wrapped in a half-dream fog, managed to greet him, he was ignored. Esca's hands snaked through the woolen layers between them, rubbing cold fingers over the warm skin of his belly, then his hipbone.
Esca's breath in Aquila's ear was steady and wordless as he worked.
And Aquila, led along like a horse in halter, was not even certain he was awake before he tensed, and choked off his cry.
Esca withdrew his hand. And Aquila, who had started to rise to his elbows with the intent of finding Esca's mouth with his own, was startled by a shove into the dirt that cracked his teeth together in his skull.
Then Esca was on top of him, stripping away layers of clothing while Aquila gawked. He also, with a dissatisfied sound, knocked Aquila back into the ground twice more, before hooking one of his arms around an inconvenient leg and pushing himself, warm and slick, into Aquila with a purposefulness and a blackness of gaze that made Aquila look away rather than see it.
It hurt. Pain ran like panic up Aquila's spine and he twisted, like he might somehow get away from it.
Esca held him firm. He was moving slowly. It did not help.
Aquila gasped, tried to contain himself, gasped again. Esca had never complained. Why had he never complained? Aquila had never guessed, or asked. He had always just taken.
Esca pushed. Aquila's thoughts disintegrated.
That evening from across the firepit, Esca had spoken of his family. He had said, "She knelt before him and he slit her throat so Rome could not have her."
And now it seemed Esca thought he might take something back from Rome. Aquila could hear it in the sounds that burnt out of his throat. Want.
He recognized the sound. He knew it well. But he did not know what he could give that might satisfy.
All he could hear was the coarse sounds that he was making himself. The pain that had liquefied his spine was in his blood, now, burning through him.
It didn't just hurt. It wasn't just pain.
Esca, who had discarded Aquila's leg and now leaned over him, palms on shoulders, like the day they had learned each other's names. That day, when Esca had pinned him to the surgeon's table and looked into his eyes and watched what lay there while they pincered away at his knee. Esca's whole, half-starved weight on his chest, forcing the air out of his lungs so he might not draw breath to scream when the knife re-opened his rotten wound.
Esca wore the same look on his face, now. Black curiosity. Satisfaction. A hunger that would swallow everything that passed through the spectrum of the visible, and take it, and keep it.
Exactly the same. Except for how this time, Esca also held the blade to twist and turn as he liked.
Except for how this time, the more Aquila hurt the more he wanted.
Arched in the dirt, his hands scrabbled through rough stones and trampled grass, his body convulsing at the slightest variation of Esca's measured movements. Aquila felt shame.
Not for crying out, nor shying away, nor even for liking the way his slave was using him. He was shamed, because he could hold back nothing. Esca was watching it all pass through his eyes.
Esca's hands on his shoulders. Esca pinning him in the dirt. Esca watching him grope for his honor and fail.
II. Rome has enslaved you
At the villa, Esca had been a substandard body slave. Stephanos had attempted to train him, but Esca had faced each lesson with the same stubborn countenance with which he had met the gladiator in the ring.
His silence was not deferential, but defiant. His obedience was a form of resistance.
More unsettling, he had no sense of where it was proper for a slave to put his eyes.
Long after Aquila was fully healed, he would feel Esca's gaze on him from across the room. And when he turned to meet it, Esca would not glance down, much less bow his head or melt away. He would stare back until Aquila, unwilling to look away himself, was forced to invent an excuse to send him out.
Esca was nothing like the docile city slaves of Rome, bred for pliability and grace and shrewd bargaining at market, the violence of their warrior ancestors swaddled in steady food and good sandals, the names of their wounds and homelands long forgotten. He could not be suborned. He could not forget.
Yet the notion of hiring a slavebreaker was never entertained. Aquila attributed that to his uncle's lax provincial mentality finally rubbing off on him. Or perhaps the fact that Esca looked, with his jutting ribs and bludgeoned face, like he might be too easily broken, mulish glances or no.
After his knee was re-opened, Aquila spent a month in his bed.
Esca, forever crouched in one corner or another, would occasionally come forward to scrape off sweat or change the bandages or replace the bedclothes. In those unending hours of sore joints and confused dreams, Esca's hands, blunt and unhesitating, were welcome points of reality.
The meat smell of the wound worsened, then faded. But Aquila's fever dreams, the ones that skipped back and forth in time, the ones that had nearly sentenced him to the life of an augur, never faded.
Esca's hands shredded those dreams. They were fearless, and Esca's wordless mouth, Aquila learned, was a font of vast experience.
Had he been asleep the first time? What had he been dreaming - thrashing, maybe, muttering - that drew Esca to him in the night? It was unclear to him how those cool hands had come to fold away the linens and untangle his twisted limbs, and stayed to stroke his hot skin.
Aquila never knew. Nor did he awaken fully until he had Esca's mouth on his own, Esca somehow tumbled beneath him, hands everywhere, narrow body slippery and urgent.
He had seen the slave in the ring and marked him for his carriage, his proud eye. But the strength in that ragged frame he had not anticipated. He suspected that Esca did not truly resist him, though. He pushed and then retreated, got his way then gave it up. Growled, and went quiet as a fawn.
All his energies were spent fighting himself.
Fortunate, for Aquila was weaker than he was accustomed to, wet with fever still. Yet Esca let himself be ground facedown into the linens on the straw mattress. He made barely a noise though his breath came hard and quick when Aquila, slick with oil and sweat, pushed his way in.
Esca, tight and brittle and hot as glass underneath him, nonetheless moved with him when Aquila's strength ran out. Aquila felt his arms give, and draped himself over Esca's back. His mouth at Esca's ear, each tiny movement seeming massive and overwhelming.
He could not stop himself from bucking hard, harder than he meant to, as he finished.
Esca gave no sign of caring.
After, he slunk away from the bed and did not return till morning.
Esca's hands in the daylight: rude and quick and cold as they stripped off Aquila's garments or bathed him with oil. Aquila did his best to not catch at them or pull them to him or even watch them too closely.
It was not as difficult as it might seem. For Esca's eyes in daylight offered nothing but the scornful glare of a slave facing his death in the ring.
III. Rome has scattered and broken your people
Once they were among the seal people, Esca would still come at night. Often with a cooked strip of fish or two. Never with any words. He'd stand in the edges of the firelight where the warriors could see his back, and toss the food and give a long stare before he returned to the warmth of fire and chatter and food, leaving Aquila to crouch alone in the periphery of that strange society.
Only once did Esca come to him as master.
In the village on the seashore, Aquila slept in his own hut. It was more an overhang built in with rocks, far away from the women and children who were his equals, far away from the painted warriors who were Esca's. His own hut at the edge of the village, unguarded, ignored. He realized that it meant no one, including Esca, considered him capable of running away.
Aquila discovered that, without the eagle he had come for, he was good as chained.
The night Esca came, it was raining and the sea was lashing itself up the pebbled shoreline in a fury of ice and noise.
He did not need to demand quiet. He crouched on the threshold for a long moment while Aquila decided whether or not he would murder this man who had betrayed and humiliated him.
But before Aquila could decide, Esca came in, and they kissed as gently as lovers.
IV. Rome has turned you traitor
For a while, in the highlands while the horses grazed on drenched grasses and moss, Aquila thought that Esca might actually murder him. An oath seemed an insignificant thing in this vast land that could swallow them both with a flick of bad weather or a slip of sliding stones.
Aquila, who had the time to weigh the matter with a linear precision his childhood tutor would have praised, decided that the rules of honor were inconclusive on whether killing your captor and returning to what was left of your people to lead them in revolt was acceptable, given the circumstances.
He suspected that were it his honor in question, he would arise looking as morose as Esca did every morning.
But Esca did not murder him. He merely attempted to smash his face in once or twice. Perhaps the gift of his father's dagger did not preclude that. Or perhaps Aquila's comments warranted it.
Or perhaps, every time they stumbled through the grass with each other's fists in their faces and hands on their throats, they ended up rutting against each other like wild beasts, instead.
Aquila, unsettled by the endless waves of alien landscape, would sometimes succumb to the urge to talk idly. Of the Roman presence in Gaul and the nuances of agriculture there, or of exotic foods he had tasted on campaign in Africa, or of the auguries he had witnessed in the temple of Zeus that had foretold the plenitude and length of the new Emperor's reign. He would talk of these things supposing Esca held a curiosity for his new homeland, or an interest in the treatment he could expect for his people.
But then, Aquila knew also that Esca held no such curiosity. Only scorn.
So he'd ramble on, never looking at Esca's face, knowing that he sat his horse tense as a stretched bow and that eventually, inevitably, the string would snap and Esca would be on him.
He did not mind that, nor seek much to avoid it.
But for all his talk, the gray and golden land beyond the Wall made Aquila feel detached from himself, from the tutors and drills of his youth. Here, he was beyond Rome. And instead of waiting for the cover of darkness to run a palm over the line of Esca's hip, he could pull Esca to him when they paused to water the horses. He could kiss him instead of kindling the evening cookfire with dried lichen and twisted branches. He could stop their march mid-afternoon and use the best of the daylight to map scars left by the slaver's whip or the centurion's blade.
This land was not his, and he was not Rome's, but Esca was his.
Esca, who looked at the shadowy glens and the bright lines of the bucking horizon with muted eyes, and was sometimes acquiescent, sometimes rigid with spite.
But still his slave. Always, his. The thought comforted Aquila.
One night Aquila, belly full of fish and feet warm by the fire, leaned back to look at the stars and said, "When I lay the eagle before the Emperor, perhaps he will realize that this land is rightfully Rome's. Perhaps he will order me to lead the Ninth back here to reclaim it."
Esca, across the fire. Esca with his eyes full of black hate.
But also: Esca under the sun. Esca washed clean in sea air, with his pale skin flushed, and his grin sudden and wide, and his blue eyes wiped clean of every sad or savage thought his heart has ever cradled.
V. Rome has set you free and given you her favorite son to do with as you will
But how could they stay in Rome while the Atii and the Aurelii and the Julii held dinners and sent gifts? How could they stay when there were so many slaves in his mother's house holding messages from Tribunes, from Senators, from matriarchs and augurs? And when there were so many puppet shows portraying their victories and when there was talk of a Triumph and talk of the Emperor's pleasure and talk of a hundred other flatteries and fleeting half-truths that would all be forgotten in a month?
Marcus Aquila was no longer sure he was a soldier or even a Roman when he woke up to find Esca curled tight, asleep across his bedroom door. Guarding against what? Romans. Here they slept in a city peopled with Esca's oldest enemies, and Aquila couldn't point to one true friend.
Aquila was no longer certain that either of them were free men here.
He came to this conclusion during a dinner that Placidus, that purebred sycophant, held to honor them.
Esca would not go. Not even for politeness' sake. There was nothing Roman that appealed to him besides the public baths. And only those if he did not have to speak to any Romans while bathing.
So Aquila went alone. And Placidus, whose house was crowded with venomous serpents of his exact persuasion, presented Aquila with a living tortoise whose shell was chased in gold. One medallion in particular Placidus pointed out, and when Aquila lifted it from the beast's back, it read in worked script: With great admiration, in hope you will forgive my careless offenses.
Leech.
Placidus fed him, plied him with opiates, and offered him his sister, then himself.
Aquila fled.
Nonetheless, the tortoise was waiting like a nightmare in his mother's house when he arrived at the gate.
"I won't stay here anymore," he told his mother, finding her sitting with her body slave, eating figs and reading poetry. He presented her the tortoise, whose shell was so heavy with metal and jewels the creature could barely lift itself to walk.
His mother moved an eyebrow at the animal, which cast its gaping mouth about in search of food or air or an explanation for its sudden paralysis.
"You will be missed," she said to him, offering the tortoise a fig.
Aquila doubted that.
Seeking his bed, he nearly tripped over Esca, asleep again in the doorway.
"Come to bed," he commanded, as he passed.
Esca stretched, but did not move from the floor. His hair shone in the lamplight. "No," he said, the word affording him no subtle pleasure.
Aquila paused and looked back at him. Sometimes it was strange to see him scrubbed so clean. Someone had attempted to make his hair lie flat in the Roman style, and failed.
"I am returning to Calleva," Aquila said. And then, "Will you ride with me?"
Esca, pulling himself from the floor, paused. He seemed to consider. Then he shrugged. "No."
Aquila blinked. Surely Esca did not intend to return to the Wall, surely even he would prefer Roman rule over a traitor's death. "No?" Aquila repeated.
Esca's small smile was no answer.
"Where, then?" Aquila asked, trying to hold his voice back from outright demand.
Again, a pause. Esca's eyes traced the room: its dyed fabrics and carved wood and beaten metal. Alien as lichen-covered rocks and skin painted death's own grey, no doubt.
"Egypt, I think." Esca glanced sideways at him. "And you are welcome to join me."
Bewildered, Aquila stared.
With a smirk, Esca curled back up on the floor.
And eventually, after tangling in his sheets and suffocating in his pillows, just as Esca had warned, Aquila joined him there, to wake in the morning sprawled like hunting dogs.
The next day, they were outside the city by noon.