Storm Chasing: Mater Punica
Title: Storm Chasing: Mater Punica
Author: clodia_metelli.
Rating: K+
Characters: OC, War.
Summary: War's really getting into the swing of this nostalgia thing. My thanks to the_chloroplast for suggesting dreams.
Disclaimer: I do not own Good Omens and I make nothing from this except my own entertainment.
Word Count: 544
Italy, Pyrrhus, Carthage (x3), Macedon (x2), Antiochus | Pyrrhic Victories |
~ mater punica ~
It’s a miserable morning. Rain puddles in the roadworks and batters at the lecture hall’s lead-latticed windows, not that Professor Plum knows this, since he slept in and left the lecture to a colleague with an interest in Phoenicians. He’s still huddled under his covers now, eyes shut as tight as the curtains and drifting uncertainly through a dream-maze wallpapered with early drafts of his current research. Here’s the odd problem student, there the odder problem colleague, all wrapped up in a slowly cohering rhubarbrhubarbrhubarb of agrarian issues and citizen birthrates and the importance of shipping and the clan of the Fabii everywhere, forerunners of the Illuminati. And through it all a thread of words, a purr unrolling into his unwoken mind like Ariadne’s ball, if Ariadne had spun in bronze and sharpened her spinning so that it unravelled as one long edge...
... sure, they always were Black’s favourites, but we still had a hell of a time...
Colonies and grain shipments and political dynasties. Professor Plum pursues the receding Fabii manically through a morass of marking. Claudian names echo in every corner. There’s a man making speeches somewhere, old and blind and standing right in the middle of an unending road, and Professor Plum’s almost disappointed that it’s not paved yellow.
... went out sailing sometimes, you should’ve seen the Romans’ faces...
The air shimmers; a police phone box appears on the Via Appia, complete with sign and blue flashing light. Professor Plum makes a sound very much like some dignified academic suppressing a very loud squee. Papers covered in spider-scrawls of unintelligible Greek homework go everywhere as he lumbers towards it -
- through it -
- stands bewildered in blue mist, that bronze purr still twining ruminatively around everything and nothing, which is to say everything.
... learned, of course, that’s what comes of flat-pack ships... and then Xanthippus with his elephants, he got lucky there. Yeah. Always good for a laugh, elephants. Regulus wasn’t laughing much, mind...
Fabii, thinks the disappointed Professor Plum, furiously. Not elephants, not ravens, not Spartan mercenaries or Roman consuls captured on the plains of Carthage. Agricultural land and Mediterranean trade routes and Gallic issues and maps unscrolling across acres of interactive whiteboards. Not the metal of this woman’s voice, her scarlet grin stretching deep into his thinning dreams.
He squeezes his eyes more tightly shut and concentrates on amber traded through the Alps from Denmark. On safe harbours in the Adriatic. On a precise translation for fides.
... some chaps sneer at mercenary armies, but I say double the fun. Pay ’em to turn up, pay ’em to go away, hell, you’d be surprised how many people’ll try not to pay ’em at all, and guess where that gets you...
Professor Plum gives up.
He opens his eyes. When he draws back the curtains, he’ll discover it’s still raining outside and be momentarily depressed, at least until he remembers it’s autumn in the north and recovers his normal state of permanent depression. Right now, he’s going to take a moment to shake off the queasiness of his uneasy dreams. That and the edges of the woman’s whisper still scraping in his ear: you’ll have to ask Black about the babies, mind. Too small to hit each other, they’re no concern of mine...
On to Catch Up Over Coffee
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