Posse etiam sub malis principibus magnos viros esse

Even under evil rulers, there can be great men

(Tacitus, Agricola 42.4)

Running was useless.

He couldn’t go on for much longer anyway. And even if he could run for some more miles, it didn’t really matter: the bluish light pulsing underneath the skin of his forearm kept him there as good as if he were chained to a wall. He should just find the guts to do it, and quickly. There were no other options, and any advantage that he had against them in the beginning was already running out. The circuit under his skin was still emitting its signal, and it wasn’t going to stop. Every breath he took, every step, they got closer. Of course they did.

The forest was unknown ground for him. He didn’t venture outside of the villa often, one could say. But the dirt was soft and wet under his feet, and running had started to become difficult. He had found his way out of Latia’s narrow lanes and alleyways, but the forest was different. Trees all look the same, and exhaustion crept on him heavy and damp, shivering cold, slowing him down. Already he had stumbled on the terrain once, leaving him to smell the ferrous scent of the Vreeni earth, and to feel its scratchy texture under his cheek. Lucky enough he hadn’t hurt himself seriously, so eventually he stood up. Even if he wished he could have stayed there, laying on the ground for one more second.

Even this far inside the forest, he could still hear them: drones and scrapers were buzzing in the cloudy night-sky like insects trapped in a jar, angry and frustrated. The noise wasn’t a tell for how close the damned things were really: in the eeriness of the forest, everything clanged. But the sun was about to rise, and that was another way to say he was fucked. Thoroughly fucked. So stop wasting your fucking time, Aeneas. You have to do it. The first cave you see will have to do.

He found one that was nothing more than a wide crevice between two rocks, but it provided some cover now that the dawn was closing up on him. Resting his back on the stone wall, he collapsed on the ground. Breathing sharply, the air was so wet and cold it hurt his lungs when he inhaled, but damn it felt nice finally to catch his breath. One full breath, deep inside him. Looking inside the bag Melitta had thrown at him, he found some water and a knife. Perhaps she wanted him to survive at the end of this, or at least she’d tried to provide him with a fair chance at making it. Of course, she knew there was only one way: hence the knife. He could only hope it wasn’t dull.

Aeneas’ eyes weren’t much good in the darkness, but they’ve had time to grow used to the murk of the forest, and the shade inside the cave now made little difference. He needed a clearer vision of what he was about to do, but waiting for the sun was just too risky, out of the question. So he tore off a strip of fabric from the bottom of his tunic, dirty with dry mud and blood. There wasn’t a spot on him that wasn’t caked in filth, and he splashed some of the water on the torn strip of cloth so he could rinse it out, but it didn’t really change anything, and gods, he was dead anyway, so why bother. The blade in his hand was clean, though. Clean and shiny, stark silver against his bloody, muddy skin. Pertinax blood was everywhere, not just on Aeneas’ hands. It drenched his tunic, his hair, now matted on his head and heavy with the smell of it. When fear hit him like a punch, a rush of sickness came to his throat hard to keep down, his head spinning. He wasn’t afraid before. Not at all. He had hit him and hit him and hit him until nothing was left of him between his hands, nothing that reminded him of the man before. The first consul’s pain had been great, and Aeneas had lived through all of it. Deep through his skin, through the warmth of the master’s blood soaking him. Even though he’d wanted to scream, he hadn’t. And even if it was painful, the rush had been better.

The blue flash of light would be a useful guide for the cut, he thought. And when he first sunk the blade in his forearm, it hurt. But the cut was straight and deep, inflicted with a kind of precision he wasn’t really expecting from himself, not in those conditions, tired over his mind and shivering. Still, the first step was made. Clenching his teeth, he let the knife fall to the ground, and its metallic clang on the stone ached in his ears inside the still, empty silence of the cave. Don’t scream. Don’t scream, you can’t. He wished for something to bite, he really did. Something like the piece of wood the so-called doctor of the slave camp had shoved in his mouth before resetting his arm, and back then, that kindness had somehow felt like he could hope to survive. The memory was enough to make him shudder. Or maybe he was just freezing, and worn out, and he was afraid, he realised. So he forced his eyes open. He had to. And digging his own fingers into the bleeding cut he felt it, placed between his tendons and in his muscles, the slippery metallic edges of the chip in his arm. So now it was either easing it out slowly, or not. Well, the pain would be the same. The little thing was connected directly to his pain receptors after all. But no, no way he could bring himself to die slowly or go into shock. If he had to, it had to be quick. An heart attack. Rip it off. If you die, it will only last a moment.

Instead of dying, he screamed.

Are you free now?

***

“Aeneas”. Claudius’ surprise welcomed him on the doorstep. His old friend appeared sleepy and confused, standing there half-naked and barefoot. Aeneas had casually run into Claudius in Farnum’s market some months before, on one lucky day when he’d been brought along because Melitta had asked for additional help from the house with the menu for that evening. The master was out of the villa, and he hadn’t seen outside its borders in more than a year: it was the cook herself to suggest he tag along. When a strange man approached him cautiously as if he wanted to say hello, she hadn’t meddled. Six months later, he still remembered the address Claudius had given him on that day, and in good chance, he hadn’t moved.

Claudius had been living in that ground-floor insula for a long time, apparently. The building stood not too tall, on a side road on the outskirts of Farnum. A chaotic, messy place to live in: even in the middle of the night, suburban Farnum didn’t really go to sleep, no. It heaved with food stalls, unauthorised Eufex dealers, customers and buyers, people carrying their business out and about even that late for their own reasons. Many people roamed the streets, and when Aeneas knocked on Claudius’ door, nobody cared for him. He went unnoticed, as swift and sneaky as he could.

“Come in”. His friend invited him in without adding anything else. Closing the door behind his back, Aeneas looked around suspiciously, still too riled up to lower his guard: the room was bare, the light only dim, but no one else appeared to be inside but them. Claudius pointed out a couple of wooden chairs around a mismatched metal table. Sitting down first, he poured a glass of water out of half empty jug already there, and handed it out to him, carefully leaving it on the table for him to take instead of handing it over.

When he held out his hand to reach for it, Aeneas realised he was still shaking.

“So it’s true, what they are saying”.

“What are they saying?”. He was well aware of the answer, of course. But he asked anyway, studying Claudius’ questioning glance the best he could. He’d lived with humans for almost twenty years, and still they were so easy to misunderstand for him. And so unpredictable. Claudius wasn’t fully human, no. But he was the next best thing: his mother was only half Noxi herself, and Claudius looked fully like a human. At least, if one didn’t look too intently, searching for little signs in the way his skin reflected light, far more brilliant than others, there was no chance of mistaking him for anything else than human.

“They’re saying that a slave killed the first consul. Cut his throat in cold blood, slaughtered him like an animal. And that the slave managed to escape”. Claudius was whispering like somebody could hear him, but he lived in a no-com zone, too poor and irrelevant of a neighbourhood to deserve that kind of surveillance in Farnum.  So there were no ears in the area, no metallic ones at least.

“Can I?” Claudius asked, eyeing Aeneas’ hand resting on the table. He nodded, even though he wasn’t sure, not entirely. With Claudius, contact had always been quiet: the Noxi part of him perhaps smothered it a bit, making his friend’s skin easy on Aeneas, like he was always wearing gloves. In this sense, Aeneas wasn’t worried about what he might feel when Claudius brushed his fingers over the top of his hand. After all those years apart, Claudius still knew this was the best way of communicating with him. Perhaps once you were exposed to something like this at such a young age as he had been all that time ago, it was like learning a new language.

Closing his eyes, Aeneas leaned into the touch a little, turning his hand over and grasping at Claudius’ fingers. In his distant, almost gloved skin, Claudius was concerned. And it was his fault, of course. He’d brought a danger unimaginable straight onto his doorstep.

“Was it true, then?” Claudius nudged him, gently.

“Something like that”. He nodded and kept his eyes down. He wasn’t ashamed, no, he couldn’t be. He could have been proud. It was in theory a feeling he was capable of. But had he ever, really? He wasn’t even sure he would recognise how pride was supposed to feel.

“But Pertinax is dead! And there have been scrapers roaming in the sky since yesterday! And you…”.

Claudius glanced over him for a moment, took in the miserable view Aeneas must represent. “You’re covered in blood”.

“Some of it is mine”.

“That doesn’t make me feel better” he said, and his sadness seeped through his hand. They’d known each other for how long, seventeen years? Something like that. Claudius had been his first friend, his only friend in Tiberius’ house. He made Aeneas feel lucky: friendship was a luxury many of them were not allowed. The masters discouraged it, sometimes even plainly forbidding it, as it carried so many unprecedented risks. Imagine all the divided loyalties it could create. And you don’t really want a slave to care about anything, let alone about someone. “What happened, Aeneas? For real”.

“It’s a long story”.

“You can clean up. And then you can start talking”.

“I’ve disengaged my chip, you know”.

“What? How?”. Claudius grabbed his left arm, finally noticing his makeshift bandage almost hiding among the mud and the caked blood. Gods, he was filthy.

“With a knife”.

Claudius was tired, Aeneas knew that in his hands. He sighed while he sat in front of Aeneas, and untied the knot that held the strip of Aeneas’ tunic firm on his arm. Aeneas let him, couldn’t have stopped him even if he tried, the gentleness of the gesture was too overpowering, too much, too rare onto his skin, even through the familiar detachment of his friend’s unique brand of mixed species. Before, in a different time, that kindness had been part of his life. And now it overwhelmed him, making him shudder visibly from head to toes. Claudius shook his head while examining the cut Aeneas had inflicted on himself. It was probably ugly, not that he cared. But it was still bleeding.

“Wash now. I’ll stitch that up later”.

He let Claudius heat a large pot of water on his fireplace, silent and quiet like he always had been in servitude. Some spells were hard to break, he guessed. When the water temperature was deemed acceptable, Claudius poured it into a tin tub he had stowed away somewhere and had appeared out of nowhere in the room. He helped Aeneas untie his sandals, as his hands were still shaking so much. Then, Aeneas shed his tunic away in a few clumsy movements and straight away Claudius threw it into the same fireplace, where the synthetic fibres of the fabric ignited the ambers of a colour so alive it felt almost right.

Aeneas couldn’t help but moan when he sank into the water. He was exhausted, plain and simple. In over two days, he hadn’t slept a moment, had not eaten anything, and had run for miles: first through the city, then the forest and the city again, with Claudius’ house in mind. He closed his eyes while Claudius washed his hair. Each vibration on his scalp was so familiar, so safe. So safe that relief hit him fiercely, and he couldn’t hold on to a sob, a strangled and pathetic little sob in his throat.

“I didn’t have a choice” he blurted, while Claudius was trying to comb his wet dark curls.

“You don’t owe me an explanation”.

He didn’t know what to answer to that. So he let Claudius finish his task, and then he was helped out of the tub wrapping himself in a long, clean towel. Claudius brought Aeneas’ injured arm into the light of his lamp, leaning it on the table. Blood still seeped through the uneven edges of the cut, gliding away mixing with the water still on his skin. Starting to stitch the wound, Claudius’ eyes were focused and attentive and his hands precise and experienced, and there was only calm and care in his fingers. It wasn’t the first time for them. His first master had been Claudius’ master as well, once. And the lord censor had only ever hit Aeneas that one time, but because of that single occurrence, he still had a small scar on his temple, hidden by his hair. Claudius had learnt from his mother how to tend to small wounds and cuts and scrapes, those that didn’t deserve the attention of a proper doctor, whether because they weren’t serious enough or because the people they were inflicted upon weren’t valuable enough. That day, the master had sent for him to stitch Aeneas up immediately after the fact. He was sorry he had hit the boy, he had said, but he has given me no choice.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“You remember, right? The first time you stitched me up?” Aeneas whispered. Claudius averted his eyes from his work, stopped the needle in its trail for a second, and nodded.

“Sure I do”. He moved his own hair away from his face with blood-stained fingers and smiled. “He adored you” he said. “The most beautiful, the fiercest foal in the seven Moons, Claudius”. He was good at mimicking the voice they still could recall so well. “He will make you believe you’ve tamed him, but you know deep down it’s the opposite”.

Aeneas smiled, a genuine, nostalgic smile while Claudius tied the knot on the thread in his wound. There probably had been a time in his life when every chain felt worse than dying, worse than anything. But it wasn’t like that anymore, not that he could remember at least. Those ten years in Tiberius’ house, together with Claudius and his mother Claudia and Andronicus the teacher, they had been the happiest he had ever known. Pain was only a temporary condition back then. Suffering came with an ending he could foresee.

“Look at you, Aeneas” Claudius said, and his voice stumbled in his throat. “You are still untamed”. He caressed his hand, looking him in the eyes, his skin always distant, hard as it were as scaly as his mother’s. It was a weird compromise that, between Gards and humans, even hybrid ones like Claudius. Humans talked with their eyes, they felt so much through them. For Aeneas, eyes were still difficult, even after all these years. So he let the humans touch him, and he touched them. But this time he pulled back his hand after a while. The sadness in Claudius’ finger was deep, deep and sorrowful. He had been free for years, but the memories of his time in Tiberius’ house still made him miserable. Those were Aeneas’ best memories, the ones he held on to, selected and carefully crafted into his own personal idea of happiness. Sure, he remembered the reason why Tiberius had hit him that one time. A kind master that had lost his patience when his boy kept kicking and scratching that first time in his bed. But the memory of that scared child had faded into nothing already many years ago, thin and evanescent like a smoke trail. Claudius understood his sudden skittishness. He didn’t comment and took onto bandaging his arm. He’d become better at that, Aeneas noticed. And in his good rights. Since Tiberius had freed him, Claudius had served as a medic for the working community living in that suburban district of Latia, he had told him.

“You should sleep now. You can have the mat”.

He laid down and his head spun before he could hit the pillow on the ground. Everything, all that had happened in those two days, pressed heavily on his chest. He couldn’t bear to be awake anymore.

“We’ll think of something tomorrow”.

Aeneas didn’t answer. He couldn’t, the little energy he had, he’d spent it crawling to Claudius’, and now he laid there, useless and quiet. But in his silence, he heard them. The scrapers were still in the sky.

***

They served the feast in the great triclinium, the larger room of the entire villa. Tiberius had designed it himself, deciding for those warm tones to paint the walls and for each image making up the mosaics on the flooring. The ceiling was clear but for the bearing beams, entirely wrapped up in climbing vines and a scattering of small but bright lights. The table in the centre of the room was crafted in fine, dark wood in Moori fashion, rectangular with tall legs. The six men dining around it, sitting in their chairs, talked and laughed and minded no business to the slaves around them. They were so used to their silent presence in a room, that the slaves’ comings and goings went unnoticed, invisible. On his part, Aeneas wasn’t used to being invisible. He’d been something to display his entire life, and now he’d grown to belong in the background. Perhaps it was in the natural order of things. But together with his new role in the house, he had to learn new skills. Plates, and cutlery, and Qil, all the fine things in life he never cared so much about.

Names, that was something he was good at. Of the six men in the room, he was familiar with the two other censors already, his master’s peers. He had been instructed about the others, names and titles, were he to speak for some reason, he should have the means to address the humans properly. His master was careful about these things: his slaves had to be perfectly behaved, representative of the dignity of his household. Well, behaving wasn’t Aeneas’ best feature. But he learned fast about anything else, so tonight, serving the Qil was his duty. A few of the men were bordering drunk already. The master liked his beverages strong, and it showed on his guests, reclining more on their chairs, talking louder. Aeneas just had to pour, holding the long neck of the glass bottle.

But a couple of them were indeed still sober. His master, who didn’t like to indulge himself when hosting, was one. Another, the lord consul of Moor, who in fact outranked his master, was known to abstain from drinking. He hadn’t accepted a single drop of Qil, so Aeneas skipped over him altogether, gently avoiding him the disturbance of having to say no after the first refusal.

“The Noxis are not going to sell for that price, and you know that”. Aeneas heard their conversation like it was spoken in a language he didn’t understand. The tone of voice of the lord censor of Vreen was high-pitched, annoyed.

His master replied swiftly. “Perhaps our friend doesn’t care” he said, in a conciliatory manner.

“I don’t, not really”. The lord first consul of Vreen, the third and last apparently sober man at the table, smirked. He’d been drinking during the night, only the Qil just didn’t seem to hold the same power over him. “With the situation as it is, they can’t refuse me. They’ll accept to sell, if they want to gain at least something out of this situation they’ve put themselves in”.

He talked with collected, poised confidence, and a thick Vreeni accent to glaze over his words. Aeneas approached slowly behind his chair to refill his Qil glass like he had done before, holding the fragile neck of the bottle with one hand, and inclining it with the other delicately.

Usually, the guests didn’t move. Most of the time, the humans were so deep in conversation they didn’t even realise their glass had been filled. If they were already drunk, it must have seemed like magic. But the first consul of Vreen wasn’t drunk. And he didn’t care much for the conversation, that was clear. So he did something the others had not.

“Here”.

Exactly while Aeneas was holding at the bottle, moving it towards the empty glass, he raised the glass itself, his entire hand around the goblet, and his knuckles clumsily bumped into the back of Aeneas’ hand.

It lasted just a moment. A second. And already Aeneas couldn’t contain that something rising deep from inside him, forcing itself out. Just a brush of knuckles. But nevertheless, it had been enough. Something was born there on his skin just to delve deep into his mind, trailing down at the bottom of his spine, tingling and burning like just the brush of hands shouldn’t. Sure, he was deprived, he was aware of that much. His master hadn’t touched him in what, two years? Perhaps it was even longer, by now. Claudius was gone, and nobody was close enough to him, not even as chastely as Claudius had been. Slaves avoided touching him if not necessary. But his master didn’t want him anymore. He’d been left to whiter, and his unproportioned reaction to that brief contact had to be exacerbated by the state of unnatural abstinence he had been forced into. Yes. That was it. Plus, his gasp hadn’t been loud enough for the diners to hear. It was fine.

But no, Aeneas was mistaken. He’d heard it. And he slowly turned his head, raising his gaze to meet Aeneas’ eyes.

And he smiled, the fucker.

When he grabbed at Aeneas’ wrist, fast and greedy, he didn’t let go. This time, everyone in the room heard Aeneas moan. But he had no control over his reaction. Shuddering, keeping his eyes on the floor, he bit his lips down violently to force any sound in. The weight of the sudden silence in the room was on him, as was the focus of all those human eyes.

“I didn’t notice your table server was Gard” the Moori consul said, chuckling. “Bit of a waste, isn’t it?”.

His master answered with his kind voice, the one he used to discipline the little boys in his house. “Aeneas served me well in the past”.

“How old now?”.

“He’s just turned twenty”. The nostalgia in his master’s words cut through haze in his head. It was growing stronger, so much perhaps the fingers of the Vreeni consul would leave a burn mark on his skin. His grasp was still tight, his eyes knowing. Even if Aeneas wouldn’t dare to look back at him, he felt their weight. The voices of the other guests smoothed together into a background buzz: he didn’t care he’d become their new conversation topic. He wasn’t listening, they weren’t touching him. But the man who was, he wasn’t speaking. The first consul of Vreen was as quiet as he was, locked in the same long, drawn-out moment. Aeneas’ skin was burning with the human excitement of the other, filling him and pulling at him from the inside, threatening almost. The feeling hit strong and raging, and Aeneas shuddered, albeit unwillingly, because of the snake running under his skin, in his blood. The human… desired him in a way Tiberius had never, hot and brutal and violent, so different and unexpected from the calm façade the man showed. It was all for him, this gut-wrenching pleasure.  Aeneas could drink from it, revel in it, even under the shrewd eyes of the man studying his reactions. It was long since he’d gone on his knees for somebody. He only needed a hint, he realised. A change in the pressure of the fingers still clenching at his wrist, or a movement of the chair in which the consul was seating. Even with his master in the room, even if he wasn’t supposed to, he would do it. Dropping on the floor, crawling under the table like a dog, he wanted it, just to feel whether the consul’s skin tasted as terrifying as his touch, as exhilarating. It took all of his willpower to resist. But resist he did, his knees weak and trembling.

“What does it feel like?”.

The first consul’s voice was huskier, different from before, when he was still preoccupied talking about the mines of whatever the place. And his question was so odd, so misplaced. Nobody had ever asked Aeneas that. The lord censor didn’t care, and why should he. But the master was smirking now, observing the scene in front of his eyes, his esteemed guest entertaining himself and all of them with one of his treasured possessions. Well, at least Aeneas had been treasured before. Now he could accept to be just that, entertaining.

“Answer” the master ordered. He wanted to. But he didn’t know how. Human words eluded him, he was a creature made of more primal urges than those of abstraction.

“Aeneas, answer”.

He whimpered, instead. And the human’s lust only growled louder.

“It’s my fault, Lucius” said his master, talking to the first consul. “I’ve neglected him recently”.

The first consul shook his head, grasped tighter. “Such a waste”.

“If that’s the case, we can take care of him” somebody suggested. “Strip him down, lay him on the table”.

Yes. Please. It’s just been too long.

If he could feel any shame, were he actually capable of it, that was probably a thought worthy of it. But he had to force it out of his head immediately. “No, no” his master said, seriously. “I’m quite protective of him, you know” he chuckled in a raspy sound. Aeneas didn’t expect to feel relieved by his master’s denial, but he was. At least, the rational part of him was, the one that wasn’t at the mercy of his insatiable, greedy nature.

“Is he allowed to look at me?” the Vreeni consul asked, picking up on Tiberius’ cues. His master said yes, he was allowed to look, that was, if the Vreeni consul felt brave enough.

He did, of course.

First, the human let go of him, eliminating any distraction between them. Trying to keep steady on his feet, Aeneas quietly suppressed another little gasp. How long had it been? Five minutes, one hour? He’d lost track of time through the first consul’s touch. And now that he was allowed to go back to reality, he just wanted to leave, so he could put himself together. But he was ordered to look, so look he had to.

The human was younger than his master, at least by twenty years, and his eyes were dark, almost like his own, but his skin was fair, fairer than humans usually were. To his credit, the human stared into his Gard eyes for a couple of seconds, but then he blinked, and looked away. He was curious, they always were. In the consul there was also that natural reticence, the inexplicable attraction and repulsion that their species felt creeping inside when looking a Gard in the eyes. Even Tiberius had not liked Aeneas’ eyes, when he first brought him into his house. Deep, soulless wells, the humans called them. You can never know what they’re thinking.

“How much for him?”. The human spoke with the self-assurance that came with authority, an air of confidence over him that looked well on his face, handsome and relaxed like he was playing a mildly entertaining game not too worth his time. But Aeneas had felt his interest before, and that had been real. The entire room of observers gasped at the daring, bold question. One just doesn’t do that, it was impolite at best. “If the lord censor would be so kind as to sell the Gard, I’ll take him”.

And it was fucking terrifying.

Because his master was going to answer. Aeneas knew it immediately, in the moment of hesitation that preceded the sound of the master’s voice. He was going to name a price. The lord censor didn’t want him anymore. A slave was worth keeping only when he was of some use, wasn’t he?

“30.000” his master stated.

“He’s used already”.

Tiberius scoffed. “You wouldn’t find a shiny new Gard anywhere in the galaxy. And he’s well behaved, so eager. You’ve seen him, squirming like a bitch in heat”.

So much for protectiveness. But he supposed that was exactly what he was, and there was no denying that.

“Come on, Tiberius. You’ve said it yourself; you’ve got no use in your bed for a twenty-year-old Gard. 25.000”.

The human smiled, a strange reaction to decipher for Aeneas, not when he was so tired, so strung out. But as soon as he heard his master sigh, in the fear that punched him in the stomach fiercely, he knew. He didn’t need to listen any further. He just knew.

Well, at least he hadn’t come cheap.

***

A strange dream haunted him that night. He relived an episode he was never part of, but which Claudius had relayed in detail many times over.

It was that day on the riverbank.

he river surrounded Tiberius’ property, one of the largest in the Messe valley, and its tide was powerful and fast. Only, in Aeneas’ dream, instead of the lord censor, he had seen Lucius Pertinax gasp and flounder, water covering him, sweeping him away. The first consul was there, defenceless against the current. From the riverbank Aeneas had watched him fumble, trying to keep his head up, grasping in vain for something to hold on to. I beg you, he thought he heard Pertinax gasp. A scream muffled by water. I beg you. But the consul’s drowning voice had turned into something else, the screaming and crying in pain and that… feeling, the astonished betrayal Aeneas’ had touched in the consul’s skin. After a while, his dream fell silent. The human had drowned, and Aeneas had looked down at his hands. They were dripping blood.

He woke up startled and disoriented, a hammering headache in his temples and every other kind of pain in his limbs. He was drenched in sweat, short of breath as he’d just finished a race.

“Are you alright?”. Claudius’ sleepy voice only reached him at a distance. But his friend was next to him, lying on another mat at a couple of feet of distance. Aeneas held out his hand, please, he wanted to say, but didn’t manage to. Claudius understood him all the same. He grabbed Aeneas’ hand, firm and strong, and his calmness, even the echo of his half-decent night sleep reverberated inside Aeneas’ body like the same tide that had swept his master away.

“I was dreaming of that day. At the river. But it was me on the riverbank, not you. And it was the lord consul in the water”.

“Did you save him?”. Of course, Claudius would ask him that. Claudius had saved the lord censor, Tiberius. That day he had fallen into the river, and Claudius had dived straight in just it to pull him out of the water.

“No. I’m not like that. Like you”. Aeneas didn’t even know what he meant by that. He only knew that anger inside him, and the sharp, burning pain he hadn’t even begun to consider in his life. Maybe the dream wanted to show him he felt guilty, somehow. That he should have been like Claudius, and instead he had chosen to be the exact opposite, a killer more than a saviour.

“You know I didn’t save him for love. Or loyalty, for what matters”.

Claudius couldn’t explain to himself why he had done what he’d done, afterward. Why risk his own life to save the one of a man he didn’t hate, but he had never cared for. He had recounted the story to Aeneas multiple times, step by step, and never found in it an answer that didn’t make him ashamed. Because it had been fear to compel him, Claudius had realised. Fear that the death of the lord censor could only mean the dissolution of the household and losing everything he held dear. His mother, Aeneas himself. His life as he knew it. And he had got all of that in freedom anyway.

“You were brave, Aeneas” Claudius said suddenly. Perhaps he was thinking about the same things Aeneas was.

“I would have planned an escape, in that case. Instead, I just ran away”. Thing is, it wasn’t just his escape that went unplanned. Everything had been just a brutal, morbid fantasy until he found the knife in his hands.

“I might have a plan, though” Claudius whispered. “Still needs work. It’s only an idea”.

He thanked Rah for that, quietly. Aeneas never prayed, but that’s what Eumaeus would have done. And maybe Eumaeus’ goddess was watching over Aeneas now, and she had him blessed with such a cunning, generous friend.