Work Text:
Dying takes far longer than he expected.
Death in the arena, while brutal and agonizing, was often short, a verdict delivered by the Roman cunts in the spectator box and then delivered. Death by blade or hammer or maul, it mattered not; once a gladiator had earned a thumb pointed towards hell from a Roman, his end would be swift and inglorious. Death on the battlefield has been much the same, violent and bloody, yes, but often coming quickly. The Romans have no mercy for slaves who dared to think of themselves as human beings, and take no prisoners, leave behind no bodies still able to draw breath. That, truly, is a blessing; most would rather die than go back to slavery, or would be cruelly used in some sick form of Roman entertainment. There had been whispers of Carnificia, of decimation, and for all that the Romans call them animals, barbarians, less than human, slaves, they are the ones who delight in the pain and suffering of others.
Yes, death comes swiftly for those who dare to dream beyond their station, but she hides her face from Agron, leaving him to suffer on the cross, suspended as amusement for those below.
The sun is hot, beating down on his face and chest, and Agron silently laments being brought to this accursed southern land, to being shackled and dragged south as a slave, to everything that has brought him to this point. Except he knows, even as he hangs on the cross, suspended by his arms, that that isn’t fair. He has known misery, and suffering, and pain like to rend him asunder, but he has also known great joy, experienced great beauty, and those are the memories he turns to, the ones he uses as shelter against the slow, suffocating agony of crucifixion. He remembers Spartacus, brilliant and golden and so powerful, and he prays silently, through cracked lips, to gods he no longer believes in, that Spartacus makes it over the Alps. He prays feverishly that Spartacus survives, that he leads his slave army to the soft, green lands of Gaul, and that those of his people who remain find their way back to the lands east of the Reine. He prays that Spartacus finds whatever he’s been seeking so desperately, that he finds a woman—even that useless Roman woman, Agron won’t even begrudge him his poor taste—someone who makes him happy and can ease the pain that constantly swims just behind Spartacus’ warrior mask. He prays that Crixus found his way to the shores of the afterlife, standing proud and tall, his chest out and his armor glittering, and was welcomed by all the great warriors who had come before him, other men and women with the hearts of gods and the frail, weak bodies of mortals. He prays, selfishly, that Naevia followed him, that the Romans wouldn’t be so cruel as to repeat what had been done to her when she’d been sold from the ludus, and that she and Crixus can reign over an army together in the next world, an army where no one ever dies and nights are spent drinking and celebrating great feats. The thought, though, of what Naevia would do now to any Roman foolish enough to try and force himself upon her is enough to stir a faint, ghostly smile across Agron’s face.
But mostly, he prays for Nasir. Beautiful, shining Nasir, tiny and fierce and swift, driving his way through Roman ranks like a miniature storm, always underestimated, always using that split moment assumption of weakness to his advantage. Nasir, trained under Agron’s own watchful tutelage; Nasir, who had grown into a warrior from the soft house slave he’d been when they’d found him; Nasir, who had loved him and been loved in return, who had ignited Agron’s passions the first time he’d laid eyes upon the man and then captured his heart, almost when he wasn’t looking. Nasir, who he’d left behind, who he’d driven away with Spartacus, silently bargaining to gods who never listen that if one of them had to fall, that it be him, on the road to Rome. He imagines Nasir east of the Reiner, where the forest grows thick and silencing, slipping between the trees like a tawny spirit, settling down and living a life free from war and slavery, learning a skill in something boring and safe with the same aptitude that he’d picked up killing, surrounded by friends and creating a family with their other brothers who had moved north. Though the thought is sharper than the pains that creak through his shoulders, that stab at him with every struggling breath he draws, Agron imagines Nasir with another man, someone who will love him and protect him, someone who will give him the security that Agron could not.
But not with Castus, that Sicilian fuck. He will clearly die crossing the mountains, slipping on ice and falling to his doom, and no one will mourn him.
~*~
The hours pass, feeling like years, and it’s only when Agron opens his one eye and notices the shadows are growing long across the ground that he realizes the day is drawing to a close. He lifts his head, ignoring the searing pain that shoots through his shoulders with the action, and blearily watches the setting sun, hanging low and red in the sky, sullen as it sinks from view. The air is immediately colder without it, and he starts to shiver, each spontaneous movement sending pain slamming down his arms from his hands. His broken, ruined hands, hands that will never again do the only thing they know how to do, hands destroyed by the arrogant fuck Caesar. Agron flexes one, as a test, and he can barely move his fingers before the pain glows so bright hot that it blurs his vision for a moment.
He hangs his head, the ground blurring before him, and waits to die.
~*~
During the cold, endless night, they come to him.
It starts quietly, so soft he almost misses it, as he shivers on his cross underneath the icy, unforgiving stars, long since resigned to the bolts of pain traveling all through his body. His left shoulder is an agony, a searing white fire embedded in his bones, and the only saving grace is that the chill of the night air has made his hand go numb.
They come to him, whispering to him, asking him to join them. His mother, dead long years and buried beneath a beech tree in the land of his ancestors, comes first, whispering in the soft, guttural language he learned on her breast, calling him to come home. For a moment, Agron is a child again, young and small and chubby, without the weight of years sagging his shoulders, and he lifts his head, trying to see her, trying to find his way back to her loving embrace. All his fading vision picks out is the flickering of Roman campfires, and he lowers his head with a groan, a man again, a broken, dying man, and his mother’s voice drifts away in the wind.
Duro comes next—brave, vain Duro, Duro who took a wound intended for Agron—and he speaks the common tongue, the language of gladiators, calling Agron from far away. His voice is soft, teasing, the same tone he’d once used to try and get Agron into trouble, the voice of a young man with the world at his feet and nothing to fear. He wants Agron to come with him, to join him, to run in the fields and forests of their youth once again, tracking game and running fleet as deer, free as swallows. Agron squeezes his eyes shut, shaking his head, and his fingers twitch involuntarily, without his noticing, as his breath grows shorter and shallower.
In the hour before dawn, when the stars slowly disappear from the sky and are replaced by a rosy red glow, before the Romans start to stir in their camp, Crixus calls to him, and his voice is so close that Agron looks up, startled, as though the Gaul had spoken directly into his ear. “Come now, you fucking savage, before hour grows much later,” and Crixus is speaking the language of the lands east of the Reine, and Agron wonders when he found time to learn it.
“Crixus?” he whispers, through cracked lips and dry tongue, and the movement breaks his skin and sends blood drooling down his chin.
“Always needing someone to tell you what to do, you great oaf.” Crixus is merry, his tone light and boisterous, something Agron has only heard once or twice before. “You follow to Rome but no further?”
“Yes.” Agron hangs his head again, and his chest heaves with a soundless sob. “Yes, I’ll follow, don’t leave…”
“Make haste, barbarian. Time grows very fucking short.” Crixus’ voice is getting further away, as though he’s walking somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and golden, without pain or slavery, somewhere where all those he helped free who fell along the way are waiting with open arms, somewhere with no Rome and no Gaul and no Sicily, somewhere where Duro and their mother and Oenomaus wait for them, and if he had any strength left, Agron would tear himself off this cross and follow.
But he has nothing left, all his great strength having deserted him, and he struggles feebly as the sound of Crixus’ ringing laughter grows further and further away. “Don’t leave…” He begs it, the words almost soundless, his breath pluming before him in the morning air. “Brother, don’t leave…”
Crixus is gone. The whispers are gone, broken apart by morning light, and with their departure, Agron ceases struggling. He drops his head to his chest, blood burbling from his lips and onto his chin, and begs, once, for death to find.
Only once, for even in his dying throes, he’s a proud man, a warrior, and doesn’t want to follow his loved ones into the afterlife a cringing wreck.
~*~
The afterlife is more painful than Agron would have thought, rushing towards him all at once, and tastes surprisingly of sand and sweat.
~*~
They wipe his face and give him water, and even Caesar him-fucking-self bandages Agron’s hands, though not before gleefully yanking the spikes out of them, unaware that they’d lost all feeling hours before. The true agony is holding his arms down, his chest muscles stretched beyond all endurance, and Agron twitches and writhes as a Roman legionnaire holds them flat at his sides so Caesar can wrap dirty cloth around his wounds.
“A hole fit to piss through,” Caesar laughs, but fortunately doesn’t try it. “I could sell you to slavers as a fine piece of ass, with four holes to fuck!”
Agron ignores him. Surely this can’t be the afterlife, unless he’s wandered astray and ended up in a Roman afterlife, a place for legionnaires to go after their deaths, full of slaves and fallen warriors to torture. But why? Why would Crixus not help him, not lead him to the crystal shores? Why would Duro not come back for him, not guide him where he needed to go, his last act in the old world and his first in the other falling into fearful symmetry? Why would he fall into Roman hands yet again?
Caesar shoves a finger through the hole in Agron’s right hand, and he throws his head back to scream, the entire right side of his body going up in flames. The Roman laughs as he draws it free, and Agron pants, struggling to breathe, as the Romans roar around him and tie filthy, used bandages on him.
~*~
He won’t recall much of the walk to meet Spartacus’ arm, leaning heavily on another man who he does not know and will not remember, his steps shuffling and stumbling, every breath a trial. The others give him wide berth; word spreads quickly between slaves, and they know what happened to him. Even those who don’t can see the rope scorch marks on his arms and the blood dripping, viscous and black, from his palms, and give him his space. Agron understands: no one wants to invite death to notice them by being close to one marked by it.
He keeps his head down, watching the ground in front of him through his one good eye, the other swollen tightly shut, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other one. It isn’t until he hears a familiar voice, lifted in a shout of joy, that he dares raise his gaze.
Nasir. Agron’s body, beaten and abused as it is, struggles to react, his arms twitching, trying desperately to lift and embrace, to press his love against him, to hold him as he’s meant to be held, but they’ve not the strength. Agron manages to let go of the man supporting him and take a staggering step forward on his own, and the benevolent stranger melts into the crowd before he has time to thank him. It matters not, not when Nasir is returned to him, and Agron thought he’d never again see his dark, beloved face.
Nasir touches him, burbling something about knowing he’d come back to him, and Agron wishes, with all the strength he has left to wish, that Nasir was somewhere far away, beyond his reach and beyond the reach of Rome. He knows now that there’s only one way this can all end, and when Nasir cradles his face, Agron can’t meet his eyes.
~*~
Nasir tends his wounds, his hands tender and sweet, and as he wipes clean the burns left by rope, Agron lets him mind drift, remembering happier days, when Nasir’s touch was enough to light a fire in his belly and drive him near mad with lust. He remembers the first time they’d kissed, Nasir shy and hesitant, still thinking himself beneath the gladiator warriors who had liberated his villa, and how Agron had had to coax him into his bed. He remembers how lying together had awoken passions in them both long since forgotten, and how they’d danced on their bedrolls, their bodies joined as one.
It all seems very far away now, as though it had happened to another man.
Nasir hisses when he sees the wounds on Agron’s hands, and when Agron turns to look at him, he sees bright tears standing out in Nasir’s eyes. “The monsters,” his love whispers, and cradles Agron’s hand in both of his, lifting it gently to his lips to press kisses against the backs of his knuckles. “The beasts, how could they, they’re monsters…”
Nasir keeps talking, but Agron turns his head away. He can’t bear the sight of his sympathetic tears, and the knowledge that he can’t protect Nasir any longer. No more than he’d been able to protect Duro, no more than he’d been able to protect Crixus or Naevia.
~*~
They burn Crixus’ head that night, all the Romans had seen fit to return of him. Agron doesn’t want to go, but wiser heads prevail, and Nasir gently persuades, cajoles, and finally bullies him into standing and going. He has to lean heavily on the smaller man, and it takes a long time for them to get there, but Nasir holds his head high, his arm around Agron’s waist the whole time, and finds them a place down on the sands. Agron can’t look at the white-wrapped lump on the pyre, all that remains of a great man, all that remains of a reluctant brotherhood, and instead focuses on the sand before them.
Naevia speaks, and Agron looks up at her as she raises the torch high above her head, thinking that she looks like one of the creatures they used to talk about in his village, like a fierce, vengeful goddess, and he’s selfishly glad that she didn’t follow Crixus into the dark. She proclaims the revolution for Crixus, the moment weighing heavy and solemn, and then Gannicus’ voice rings out, pure and strong, and Agron realizes that he hadn’t realized the other man was still alive.
“For Oenomaus!”
Other voices join in, hesitant at first, naming others lost and fallen, and Agron licks his lips before opening his mouth to speak for the first time since returning.
“For Duro.”
Nasir turns to look at him, his eyes wide and shining, but Agron doesn’t look back. He can’t; not yet. For now, he listens, listens as the list of the dead grows, as the names of all those they’ve lost swirl around him, and watches the sparks for Crixus’ funeral pyre rise and dance into the sky, saying a silent prayer in his heart that Nasir’s name will not be among those rising towards the heavens.
But all slaves know that the gods don’t listen.