† equipped for oratory with every advantage of nature or training

[ad_dicendum]

WHO: Gaius Gracchus
WHERE: The Inn and around the village
WHEN: January 30
OPEN TO: Everyone!
WARNINGS: None so far
STATUS: Open!

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Even after what must be a month or so here, Gaius has not yet grown used to being so completely unable to express himself to most people in this place. He'd been raised from childhood to be a man who would sweep the people of Rome before him with education, eloquence, argument. Even the men who'd hated him had admitted he was the finest speaker in Rome. Even when the people had turned from him to his enemies, it was because they had out-promised him, never because they had outspoken him.

Yet here, every morning he wakes into a world in which the barest handful of people can understand the slightest thing he says. Many of them have never even been introduced, because neither of them knows how to do so, save by baldly stating their names, which is hardly much of an introduction.

He's expecting it to be the same today when he dons his strange blue clothes and goes downstairs to the main room of the Inn for breakfast.

Except that when he hears someone call out a greeting, he understands that it means salve.

Gaius pauses, mid-step, and turns, his hand pressed to one side of his chest where the sweep of a toga would be, and listens. And finds that he can understand every word of English as though it were perfect Latin.

When he next sees one of the residents, he pauses, nods, and says, "Good morning."

The words sound strange in his voice, and he doesn't sound like the others, his accent thick and rolling, but he can speak English.

When he goes out, later that day, the black wool not-quite-cloak wrapped around him, he pauses to greet the people he passes on his way through the village. Not just with a nod, which has been usual for him up to now, but with the greeting of their own people in their own language.

He's got a lot of lost time getting to know these people to make up for.

Comments

[bit_fairytale]

It's strange, sure, but it's not like it's the kind of strange that's outside the realm of fact and possibility. After all, for years of her life, she had an automatic translator in her head thanks to the TARDIS, which apparently had switched itself off when she'd got here. "I won't lie, it's easier to talk to you this way, but it does take away from the whole mystery man intrigue of the Latin," she says, in a flirtatious way that's absolutely the furthest thing from harmful, seeing as she doesn't actually mean it.

"So, what? Is it just English? Parlez-vous francais?" she asks, in an abysmal accent.

[ad_dicendum]

Mystery and intrigue are not usually traits people would associate with him. He'd tried, once, to keep himself out of the eye of the public, to retire after his brother's death in the face of the opposition he would face simply because of his family.

"It is a relief to be able to be understood. Mystery does little good if it stops me communicating with the people here."

It would have helped, for example, if he'd been able to speak to Amy when they'd first met, and he could have told her when and where he'd seen Rory.

He barely has to think before he can answer her question.

"Oui, je parle francais. I had not even heard of French before today, and it seems that now I can speak it."

[bit_fairytale]

That's about all the French that she actually knows, mainly because she had the TARDIS to do this all for her, until recently, so she's sort of out of luck when it comes to talking to other people. Still, the whole 'magically being able to talk English' thing shouts of alien tech to her, which makes her suspicious.

"So, what? All of a sudden, you woke up and you understood English?" she wonders. "You're telling me there wasn't something that helped? Some sort of alien machine or special button you pressed?"

[ad_dicendum]

"I have never experienced anything like it. I came down from my room, and I knew what people were saying to me."

Amy seems puzzled by this, but less so than he would have expected. He understands what her questions mean, but not why she's asking them. He doesn't know what any sort of foreign technology would have to do with this, so he pauses a moment, considers her questions even though he doesn't know why the answer should matter.

"There was nothing that I can remember. I learned Greek as a child, but that took much hard work and studying, not like this."

[bit_fairytale]

"I went from speaking only English and passable French one day to understanding every language in the universe," Amy shares, seeing as he's also talking about suddenly waking up and understanding and speaking whatever she came across. "But I had an alien spaceship that translated everything for me, sort of in my brain," she says, gesturing to her head like it could make sense.

"That went away here, though," she admits. "You didn't have anything like that happen to you? You weren't in a pod or something, something that dialled into your head and helped you out?"

[ad_dicendum]

"Nothing similar to what you describe happened. I lived a normal day yesterday. Today, I woke to this."

He frowns, deeply, in thought about what she's said. Although there are many more details to consider, much miraculous that she says, there is one thing that is particularly strange, a word that he understands in its strictest sense, but not in its implication, or full meaning.

"What is a spaceship? Do you sail in space, is it possible?"

There are so very many strange things he's heard since he came here that a ship passing through the stars almost seems that it could be something that they know here. More, though, like a gift of the gods than something to discuss as openly as Amy does. Though he holds the beliefs of the Romans in their gods, he little believes that their sons or daughters could walk among them in these ages, not even in this strange place.

[bit_fairytale]

"I mean, I wouldn't call it sailing," Amy admits, wondering if there's still some language to get through, seeing as she can't imagine that suddenly speaking English means he's also gonna get all the idioms and the phrases down pat all of a sudden, but she does like the image of the TARDIS sailing around. "I think it mostly spun, but yeah," she agrees fondly.

"Yeah, we travelled around in time and space," she says. "That's how I met the Romans," she shares. "Not real, actually, plastic Romans, but I'm counting them," she insists, seeing as she never got around to actual Romans after that, not counting Rory.

[ad_dicendum]

'Sailing' is the only context he has for a ship, but he's also becoming increasingly aware in this place that there are many people in this place who do not share his expectations and understanding, though he's a little surprised to find that Amy is one of them. Yes, there'd been something strange in her husband's description of himself and where he came from, but Amy's reply hints at something far stranger than he'd imagined.

A ship, spinning its way through the stars.

"It sounds like something out of legend," he tells her. "A gift from the gods to reward and adventurer."

There are stories of the sort. The ship of Jason, sailing through the night sky, the charioteer sent to the sky as a reward for his invention by Athena, heroes who after their deaths were elevated to the heavens.

"What is a plastic Roman?"

He has to ask, for all her tale has taken an air of the mythological, because Amy speaks not as a storyteller, but as one recounting her own experiences, and he's not sure about what the word plastic means. It has no counterpart in his experience.

[bit_fairytale]

Complicated, is what it is. Honestly, Amy's not even entirely sure how to describe the whole situation, but she feels like she owes Gaius at least a touch of reality and the actual story instead of a bunch of lies, but at the same time, she feels like he's going to think she's insane. "I don't know if it was a gift or anything, but after I waited as long as I did, it definitely felt like a reward," she promises with a mild huff, still irritated at fourteen long years spent waiting, going through psychiatrists because she kept biting them.

"Anyway, it's probably more Rory's story to tell than mine, but he spent about two thousand years being a plastic Roman because a bunch of aliens probed my memories to construct a trap," she says, which does sound crazy out loud.

No wonder she had so many psychiatrists. No wonder she kept biting them.

[ad_dicendum]

"Then perhaps that is what matters." Gift, reward, whatever it is, it still sounds like a story of the gods.

For all that's been said about him by his enemies in the Senate and the men who try to claim that he's only interested in power, he's a man of ideals, and though he can't understand or visualize what it is she's talking about, that story is a way to come close enough that he can get an idea.

It does make Rory sound like a hero, particularly when she goes on to explain that he'd spent two thousand years doing something that isn't particularly clear. That is something that sounds more like a divine punishment than anything else.

"He was a Roman for two thousand years because of a trap? Was he caught in it?"

[bit_fairytale]

"No," Amy says, so fiercely proud of her Rory and it shines in the way she beams as she thinks about it, not to mention her words. "He was able to escape his programming." To be fair, he did murder her just a little, but he also protected her to ensure that little Amy could revive her, so that balances out, in the end. "When we got the universe restarted, he was back to being Rory Williams, my Rory," she says, so proud and as in love with him as ever.

"He lies, sometimes," she admits, "says he doesn't remember. I'm the lucky one. I was unconscious in the Pandorica, couldn't remember a thing. He didn't even sleep," she says. "Sometimes, I don't know how I've earned that man's love, but I'm too selfish to give it up."

[ad_dicendum]

The more she speaks, the more she sounds like the heroine of a legend, rescued now from an eternal sleep by the vigilance of a man who was inspired by her love. She doesn't tell the story particularly well, not with the skill of a Homer or Hesiod or one of the great Greek dramatists, but it's so personal that it has an appeal that Gracchus, whose life has been dedicated to the art of rhetoric and argument, can recognize.

"The poets would make a beautiful work of your love," he tells her, and it makes him think of loves won and lost, of the ignored pleas of his own wife that last day in Rome as he'd set out from their home. Where would Licinia be now, he wondered? Would she have turned to her brother Crassus, thinking herself widowed by the unrest in Rome? No grand tale of Rory's loyal vigilance for her.

"How did these things come to happen to you? They sound like tales of the clash of the gods, such as most men could never be involved in."

[bit_fairytale]

"I think I saw some once, in the British Museum, only they didn't know that anyone was in the Pandorica, so it got a bit weird," Amy admits, making a face because reading about your Roman Centurion husband having longing affections for an old Roman cube isn't exactly something a girl wants to read when the universe is collapsing in on itself. "They happened because when I was a little girl, an alien crash landed in my backyard," she says, fondly, as you do.

"It gets a bit complicated from there, but all you need to know is that he's my best friend and he had a box that could travel in time and space," she says, her smile tinged with sadness. "Rory and I, though, we were separated from him just before we turned up here. Still, ten years of adventures is pretty good," she says, trying to convince herself of that as much as she's trying to convince Gracchus.