Chapter Text
Lucilla watched the arrow crawl through the air towards her unshielded chest, as if the gods had slowed down time so she could witness her destruction play out in minute detail.
The sun beating down on her blistering skin. The haze of the sand in the Colosseum air. The stench of spilling blood. The cries of all the men who fought and died around her - including her son. Her son! Sweet Lucius whom she hadn’t enclosed in her arms in sixteen years, since she'd hidden him in the aftermath of her brother’s death.
Her brother …
Hysterical laughter tried to claw its way up Lucilla's throat. All she had risked - all she had sacrificed - to protect her son from Commodus, to protect Rome and guide the city back to the ideal of her father’s dreams. All had led to this.
Rome at the mercy of Geta and Caracalla, twin emperors far more cruel and capricious than her brother had ever been, the culmination of years of civil war.
Her son a slave.
Herself disgraced and about to die, utterly powerless.
Not in her darkest nightmares would she have imagined this, the day both her brother and Maximus had bled out in the sands of the arena.
How quickly her father’s dreams of a Republic had collapsed under the machinations and personal ambitions of powerful politicians. How decisively her brother had been proven right, for all his madness.
The arrow closed in, just as she saw a Pretorian guard aim a blow at Lucius’s exposed neck. Her bonds drew blood where they dug into her desperately twisting flesh.
If only -