sixthiterationlogs | † iis sicis, quas ipse se proiecisse in forum

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† iis sicis, quas ipse se proiecisse in forum

WHO: Gaius Gracchus
WHERE: The fountain park
WHEN: 19 December
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: Suicide references in thread with Kylo Ren. Violence, murder, politics, shouty Roman man, and lots of Latin. ALL DIALOGUE IN LATIN UNLESS OTHERWISE MENTIONED (since he also speaks Greek) but I am too lazy and bad at composition to write it all in actual Latin.
STATUS: Open!

There were screams. Screams, as arrows showered into the crowd, arrows turned against the Roman people by the Senate that was supposed to protect them. Screams, and shouts, and blood on the streets as Opimius brought slaughter to his victims. The crowd had scattered, Fulvius and his son fleeing in one direction and Gaius in another, seeking the protection of Diana's temple as a pious man seeking shelter from great impiety.

He never makes it to the temple: Gaius jolts awake to water, water all around him.

The first thing he thinks is that it's the Tiber, final resting place of traitors, tyrants, and opponents of the senate. This morning, his wife had begged him not to go out lest he wind up dead and flung in the river like his brother, and the river would claim him. But he's not dead: they must have miscalculated.

The second thing he thinks is that the Tiber, even in winter, is not this cold. By then, his body has taken over where his mind is lagging behind, swimming up, up, up, towards light and air and the ability to breathe. When he breaks the surface, he gasps, turning on the spot, eyes darting all around for a sign of his enemies.

It's not the Tiber. It's a fountain. He's been left for dead to drown in a fountain.

"Vos Romae patres esse dices," he shouts, swimming to the edge, so he can haul himself out, and pausing for a few wild breaths in the middle of the sentence, "qui Graecos saggittarios mittas qui Romanos filios occidant?"

Gaius staggers out of the fountain, reaching for his dagger. He hadn't wanted to see Roman blood shed on this day, but blood has been shed, and not by his followers. By the consul, and the consul's men, because the Senate has given him dictatorial power that should never be in their power to give.

And Opimius accuses him, and his brother, of seeking regal power.

The dagger is gone. They've taken it, stripped him of his clothing and left him in ... what, trousers? Like some barbarian tribesman? He turns, shouting into the parkland around him, a swell of fury replacing the fear and despondency he'd felt as he waited for the Senate to make their move.

"You think to throw me in the water and do away with me like you did my brother? Not satisfied that the forum is drenched in his blood, you would drench the Aventine in mine? The gods' curse on you and the consul, but I will die like a Roman!"

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"Oh Jesus," Kira mutters, watching the silhouette down the path lift an arm and hearing the voice lift against the wind. It doesn't take a psychic to figure out the guy is pissed, though one might help decipher what the fuck he's saying.

It doesn't take a psychic, or having taken a dip in the fountain four days ago, to figure out it's fucking freezing and no amount of shouting at the sky is going to help. Now that he isn't the one freezing and shouting at things, it's an intimidating thing to watch, and he looks back at the inn, then down the branching paths, wondering if there's someone else to drag the guy inside.

He looks again, scratching his nail on the bark of the tree he'd been standing beside, just in case someone decides to show up.

With a sigh, he pushes away from the trunk and walks down the path toward the figure, slightly less enthusiastic about watching someone freeze to death than he is to approach. "Hey," he calls ahead, careful not to rush the figure: "there's shelter over this way!"

He doesn't remember a blow to the head, but he wouldn't, necessarily. More surprising is that he doesn't feel the aftereffects of one. It's what he's imagined for so many years, the last thing his brother knew before his death: the strike of clubs on flesh and bone, and it's what he'd feared from today, after the Senate's resolution.

Most alarming is that he doesn't recognize this place. He doesn't know these clothes, strange, barbarian things, not the white and purple he's accustomed to as the equestrian son of a censor. And there's snow on the ground, when surely there's no snow lying this thickly anywhere closer to Rome than the Appenines.

It's enough that when someone approaches him, calling out in the tone of one sharing information, that Gaius stops staring around him at the trees (what sort of trees are they, even?) and turns his attention to the young man.

Who is speaking some unintelligible language that sounds hard and harsh to his Roman ears.

"Cives Romana sum!"

It's been a long time since he's had to say that, to mark himself out in that way, but here he is, without any of the signs of that key status.

The boy doesn't look like anyone Gaius has ever seen in Rome, or in Italy, or even in Spain or Africa. Nor does his language sound like anything he knows.

"Where is this place? What has been done to me?"

This is already past the point where Kira would usually hunker down in his coat and avoid eye contact with the guy, leaving him to shout in his corner of the subway platform. Ty was the one who always had money for them, then didn't understand why they nearly followed them onto the train. This is why my mom makes me walk you home, he'd said, watching the doors close on a man who had been frothing at the mouth, slamming the bills in his fist against the window.

Makes you, Ty had asked, and Kira had looked out the opposite door, staring at the tiled walls as they started to blur with the movement of the train.

But the crazies weren't usually out of doors, soaking wet, and he's seen enough bodies in the snow to last him. "Yeah," he says, drawing close enough to stop shouting at each other: "I didn't take Latin in high school, so either you're crazy and the cold will get you in here, or you really don't know English and this is going to get interesting."

Motioning down his own body with one arm, he tries to indicate his dry clothes, his thick coat. "It's back this way," he says, lifting the arm again to arc it in a long motion toward the inn, pointing up the path. "Fire?" Does English even have any words that sound like Latin? "Pyro?"

There aren't many words in the man's speech that Gaius can recognize. Latin is one of them, but it's not said with any sort of recognition in his voice. Most of the rest of the words sound foreign, barbarian, even, at least to Roman ears.

That is, until the man says one other thing that sounds familiar. Purós or something like it: fire. It's poor Greek, pronounced badly, but Gaius' Greek is excellent, thanks to his mother's assiduous education.

"Tó pur," he repeats. A fire. A gesture towards a building in the distance, and that, too, is something Gaius recognizes. Even the people who hate him talk about him as an innovator in the use of gesture in speechmaking in Rome. It's not a hard gesture to understand.

Fire and shelter: basic necessities, but shelter could be a danger to him, if he is still pursued. And yet, there is no sound of the tumult of danger that caused the people to scatter before the consul's arms.

Perhaps he'll find somebody who can explain. Perhaps he'll find enemies, but he knows that cold, too, can be an enemy. So Gaius holds out one arm in a gesture that mimics the other man's, and turns in the direction of that building to show that he understands.

[ HOPEFULLY that all makes sense. Let me know if I need to edit anything! ]

"Sure," Kira sighs, dropping his arm and returning both hands to his pockets. "Whatever you say." He knows enough about English and its roots not to end the dismissal with psycho, but only just. This place keeps amping up the strange, as if being trapped with strangers isn't enough. Now they shout Latin at the trees.

"Asking your name seems pointless, but I'm Kira," he offers conversationally, despite all hope of conversation suffering the obvious. It helps him feel less on edge walking naext to someone whose mood feels as mercurial at the back of his head as it looks to his fucking eyes and sounds to his ears. The fountain isn't fun, especially in this cold, but his own instincts weren't to come out swinging.

"Nobody's going to hurt you, as far as I know," he says, hoping something in his tone helps the atmosphere between them. "Least of all me. And someone around here might translate, though I have no idea who." He keeps his tone light, his voice already a soft, warm thing, trained for an audience who expects to be entranced and guided through foreign mysticisms.

The shouting is unusual, and that in itself has always been odd to Ren. The man, dressed in all black, with black hair and dark eyes, stands out sharply amid the snow. He approaches the screaming man by the fountain, with the long metal curtain rod in one hand, and the other ready should he need to call on the force.

"Stop your shouting." His tone is irritated, his posture ready for a fight, but he stops short of the Roman by several long strides. The man is speaking in some language he has never heard. It definitely isn't basic, and it's nothing he can understand, but the fury- that he recognizes clearly.

He keeps his weapon down and at his side, setting one end in the snow like a walking stick, and fixes the man with an unflinching stare and a commanding voice.

"Stand down."

Gaius had known from the time he chose to enter politics that he might end this way. He'd seen his dead brother's shade in a dream, and Tiberius had spoken to him of the destined fate that they shared, to die in the service of the people. That hadn't meant he'd wanted things to turn out this way. He hadn't. He didn't want to share his brother's inglorious death, to be unburied and unmourned by decree of his enemies.

That, though, is what it's come to, and when he sees the man dressed all in some form of barbarian mourning garb and carrying a weapon, it seems to him that the Senate has sent more assassins than just the archers that had shot into the crowd gathered on the Aventine and scattered Gaius's supporters with blossoms of blood.

He can't understand the man's words, but the tone he knows well enough. Imperious, commanding, like a general speaking to his troops, or a senator to a plebeian who displeases him.

Gaius' gaze doesn't falter under the dark glare of the barbarian, and his tone is more careful now that the stranger's interruption has reminded him of his dignity.

"They have sent you to find me after their archers failed. They will find me a braver man in the face of death than they in the face of the people."

He'd been running, and moments ago, he'd have expected himself to run again from the fate his brother prophesied. But he's suddenly tired of avoiding it. Tired of running, of trying to fend off what was surely inevitable from the moment his supporters killed the consul's attendant.

There was something about the man, his face or his posture, whatever it was, it put Ren off and into a mood. His lip twisted in a slight sneer at the alien language repeating. It was so unfamiliar and it helped nothing, setting them against one another by default because Ren was far from a trusting man and this man seemed no more so. For a moment he considered digging into the man's mind for answers or some thread of his language. Or just knocking him down and forcing him to submit to a more powerful authority. The alien was like a wet bantha. He was unruly, loud, and defiant.

He didn't miss the tone or Gaius' expressions. Nearly every knee jerk reaction and emotion in his head told him to knock the man down. An older, more diplomatic heritage, however, held him back. He was getting no where in the village with the tactics that had served him well in the First Order, and he needed to attempt a better approach. With effort, he straightened his back, rising up to his proper height, and dropped the curtain rod to the ground. He could have it back in his hand with enough focus on the force. He had learned he was not so weak as to fail in such a simple task. But the man before him had no need of knowing that.

Unarmed, he drew on Ben Solo's old schooling and lessons, and he forced a more neutral expression on his face. Gaius might feel a faint pressure in his skull when Ren tested whether or not the man had any mental walls up in his mind to stop him. How much training did the alien before him have?

Instead of shouting further nonsense at the stranger, he pointed toward the inn, where smoke was rising from a fire meant to keep the building warm. Then he slipped the waterproof pack off his other shoulder, dropping it to the ground so the flame insignia was obvious, pointing first to it, and the to Gaius, who should have had a similar pack.

Gaius knows contempt when he sees it. He should: he's become very familiar with receiving contempt from his enemies, from his brother's enemies, from the enemies of the people he would wish to protect. Even from his colleagues, who'd let cowardice keep them from doing what they were elected to do: serve and protect the plebs Romana, who so badly needed their tribunes to do their duty.

The contempt in the man's expression is apparent. It's like the look of the more reactionary of the patricians responding to the simple requests of the people and the programmes of their tribunes. As he's watching the man, ready to react to whatever his movement will be -- to kill him? And if it is, what then would Gaius do? He'd been considering throwing himself onto his dagger instead of fleeing before he'd found himself here.

But it seems that is not the stranger's intention, for the man lets the staff he's holding drop to the ground, the clearest expression of I will not harm you that's possible without speaking each other's languages. For a moment, his head feels heavy, as though the pressures of the day are pushing at his skull, and he wonders for a moment if he'd been unknowingly hit by something during the archers' attack.

It clears, though, and the next moment his thoughts are as clear as ever, and he sees that the man is trying something else: gesturing to a large, multi-storeyed building a short distance away from poorly-cared-for garden they're in. Smoke is rising from the roof, clearly from some sort of fire, and Gaius smiles in thanks, holding out his hands. It is cold, cold water and colder air that makes him shiver from the wet hair and wet clothes clinging to his skin. But the man does something more, putting some sort of bag from his back onto the ground and pointing at Gaius, then the bag.

There is some sort of weight on Gaius' back, and he reaches behind him to find some sort of stiff fabric bag there. It takes a few moments to slide out of the unfamiliar straps, but Gaius places it on the ground, just in front of his feet, so that he mirrors the other man. It's soft, and there are some sort of fastenings on it that he's never seen before. But there are some little tabs attached to something ridged that runs around the edge of the bag, and when he tugs on the tab, the bag makes a buzzing sound as it opens.

The first thing he sees is a bundle of some sort of black wool. As he takes it out, he realises it's some sort of garment, completely strange in design, but looking at the man, he sees he has something similar on, worn like some sort of cloak with sleeves, and when Gaius holds it up, he works out how to shrug into it.

"Gratias te ago." It's a simple statement: I give my thanks to you.

The man may have looked at him like a haughty aristocrat, but the thanks is deserved: the wool is warm, and Gaius knows well the value of warm clothing in the cold.

Helen checked the fountain a few times per day because it was bloody cold out and there was always the risk that someone would show up and, luckily she had, because there was a man shouting in Latin in the fountain at the moment. She spoke it, yes, but it was something that it took her a moment to adjust to.

"Hold on a moment! You're not cursed, you've just been brought to a new place," she said, holding up her hands to stall his shouting. "I'm Helen, one of the people who lives here. You've been brought here like the rest of us. I don't know how or why, exactly. I just know we all come up through this fountain, all right?"

He's not expecting to hear a woman's voice. Even less is he expecting to see a woman dressed so strangely. No matronly mantle, no tunic, nothing that he would expect from a Roman woman. Her Latin, too, is accented strangely, not like an Italian or an African or a Spaniard or a Sardinian.

He does, though, stop shouting to listen to her. It takes a moment, after that surprise, to really hear what she's saying. A new place. Brought here.

His expression grows more and more confused as he listens to what she says. Which, really, is very little.

"Brought here? Brought by whom? Where are we, this surely cannot be Rome?" he asks. Brought. Brought. He'd been a tribune, is an equestrian, a son of noble ancestors, nobody has the right to bring him anywhere. Nor to strip him of his toga, his tunic, the dagger he'd carried with him for protection against the fate his brother met. Of even his ring, the simplest marks of citizenship or status.

"Is this some form of exile?"

If this man was a Roman citizen, exile would be one of the greatest forms of embarrassment and pain for him. Helen didn't want to be the one to bear that news for him but she had no other way to really explain it to him in terms that he could understand.

"It is, in a way. Let me take you somewhere warm, at least, and explain it a bit further? I would be happy to do that for you. My name is Helen."

Exile is one of the worst fates a Roman can suffer. To be cut off from your people, your clan, your friends and family, but most of all, your city and everything that represents, is to be stripped of meaning. He'd corresponded with some of his brother's followers from their exiles, after they'd been banished from the city for no crime but attempting to serve the people, and he'd read the loss in their words. What is a man to be if not a leader in his city, particularly the last surviving son of a man who was twice consul, twice triumphator, and censor?

He hadn't even been able to stay in self-imposed exile from politics. He'd tried, tried to keep quiet and away from it all, tried to avoid his brother's fate, but between the people and his friends and his own desires and ambitions, he hadn't been able to stay in leisurely retirement. And that had been in Rome, itself.

It hadn't been exile that he'd feared, though.

"I had expected death."

It's said with more calm resignation than anything else he's said so far, a little of the reasoned sincerity that had so marked Tiberius' style apparent, for now, in the manner of his brother.

"I am Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, son of Tiberius, and I thank you for your kindness. I would appreciate that."

"My pleasure, Gaius. I never mind helping someone who needs my aid. Tell me, are you ill or injured? I am a doctor."

He did not appear to be, based upon what little she could just see of him standing there but there were always ills that a further examination would need to tease out.

"I want to be sure you're all right."

Ever since she'd been here long enough to grasp how lucky it was that Thorfinn already knew some English, Kate had been worried about this. Sometimes, only a little; others, keenly so. It is hard enough to explain all of this using the Queen's English, but another language entirely?

Impossible. And how frightened must that person be, and thus how potentially dangerous.

So she's not sure how to take this man. Swarthy and gesturing with his hands, speaking something that sounds like and unlike Italian as his dark eyes seem to shine with emotion. But at least he's stopped shouting, for the moment.

"Excuse me?" Kate says, carefully and clearly, to catch his attention. She's carrying a tray with a bowl of pottage (rabbit, today, as the meat), a bulrush patty on the side, a cup of tea and a mug of water. She's careful how she stands, too. Respectful, but not meek or hesitant. She's not a target for anyone's rage, no matter how understandable.

Gaius is not a man accustomed to allowing himself to feel vulnerable. For him, in particular, politics is not a pursuit that allows of any doubt or any weakness. Any such would be, has been, exploited by his brother's enemies, and then his own.

Any man who did let himself feel that way, though, would, in this place that makes no sense, with these people who can't understand him and whom he, in turn, cannot understand. An inn, at least, is something he understands, though many of them are not places that a man of his class would choose to use: that is what a good network of friends and relatives across Italia is for.

An approach from the innkeeper's wife is another thing he can understand, and the laden tray would be a welcome sight if he had any way to compensate her for it. As it is, all he can do is hold up a hand in a regretful gesture, his expression apologetic.

"I have no way to pay you."

She wishes that there was somewhere for them to communicate. A book, maybe, of English and... Italian? For them to look at, try and fumble through words and meaning until they can understand each other.

Not that mime is unknown to her. She's mimed well enough when the Chinese workers sought to buy something from her, or her from there, when their more fluent brethren were elsewhere. But even then, they tended to know at least a couple words. Here, the man is holding up a hand for what she thinks is refusal, she's not sure how much he'll understand.

She has to try.

"Food," Kate says, and puts the tray down on his table, in front of him. Pointedly. "You," and here she points at him, "eat." Another point, this time at the food.

She pauses, and then runs through the motions again. "You, eat." This time, she adds another moment, as if she were picking up a spoon and holding it to her mouth.

He's not an idiot just because he cannot understand her, she knows that. And she will say this for her years on the stage, it's helped her mime out actions without treating the other person like a fool.

Credence had thought he was the strange one.

No--that's unfair, that's completely unfair and he wants to take that back. Credence is strange, he always has been, from school to the streets to his family. It's just that this man is completely different sort, a type of strange that Credence had yet to discover exists.

He watches him like a scientist, though he isn't one--he peers around corners when the other arrives, the shouting initially completely scaring him off like a frightened rabbit. He's wary, keeping his distance until Kate settles things with him. He knows two things: one, the man doesn't speak English, and two, he carries himself like some sort of king. Maybe he's the president?

Regardless, there's not much to do besides speculate. So he sweeps, and he cleans, and he helps cook, and he watches.

It's when the man is alone that he decides to take the leap. The inn is quieter, now, and besides--if Credence doesn't gain some sort of confidence now he'll just spend all of his time not helping in the inn squirreled away in his room.

He clears his throat as the other is by the fire, soft and trying to get his attention without being obtrusive.

"Hello," he says, and then realizes he might not know what 'hello' means. He offers a hand, instead.

"Credence."

To a man not used to the Roman upper classes, it may well seem that Gaius holds himself like a king, though no Roman would ever stand to hear that description. Least of all Gaius, whose brother died in a flurry of accusations of regal ambitions, clubbed down in the forum, his tribunician sacrosanctity violated for the crime of seeking to serve the people who elected him their protector.

Gaius is no king, no consul. Not even a tribune any more, a lowly ex-magistrate who'd tried to protect his laws from the consul's destructive arrogance. And here, he has no purple-bordered tunic to mark him as an equestrian, nobody to recognize that he is the son of a twice-consular censor, grandson of the man who saved Rome from Hannibal.

Here, he is a newcomer, unknown, not greeted by the jeers of those who'd turned against him or the welcoming crowd of his followers and supporters. Here, people look at him with curiosity. Like the young man in the inn. He looks so beaten-down that Gaius at first assumes he is a slave, but then he approaches, holding out a hand in greeting.

'Hello', Gaius doesn't know, but 'credens', he does, though it makes no sense just spoken like that: it means to offer a loan, or to entrust something to someone, and Gaius wonders if the man is using broken Latin to try to offer some sort of loan to allow him to pay for his room and food.

"I would not be able to pay," he says, in Latin. "I have nothing to support such a loan."

He was a wealthy man before he came here, but he doubts there will be much left to his name in Rome now.

Edited 2016-12-26 16:05 (UTC)

"Um."

This isn't exactly what he was expecting. He's not sure what he was expecting, beyond 'maybe something will magically happen for the best and everyone will understand each other,' but he suddenly feels foolish. Of course he doesn't know what he's saying, Credence has literally heard him talking with strange words, words he's heard wizards and witches use but in completely different contexts.

Maybe, he thinks, this man is a wizard. A great and powerful wizard, speaking in a language forgotten to mere No-majs.

He tries again, finding his made up scenario comforting enough, and he points to his heart.

"Credence. Credence Barebone." He points to the other, lips thin as his index finger hovers near his heart. "You?"

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† iis sicis, quas ipse se proiecisse in forum

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timed to after his arrival at the Inn

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inn;

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