Chapter 20: What Are You?
Chapter 20: What Are You?
’Ping!’
The notification was there before Alex’s eyes were fully open.
Blurring his vision. Pulsing with the particular insistence of something that had been waiting patiently and had run out of patience.
Sands of Fate System
Missed Daily Tasks: 2
Points deducted: 60
Current points: 110/200
Alex stared at it.
He was lying face down on a straw bed in Gaius’s ward. His back felt like someone had redrawn it from scratch using only fire and poor judgment. His wrists had bruising where the chains had been. His ribs were aching like a bull had rammed into them. The morning light coming through the high window was the particular pale grey of very early, which meant he hadn’t slept long.
He looked at the notification again.
Sixty points deducted. While he was fighting for his life from being chained to a wall in a torture room, bleeding on the floor, being used as a demonstration of what happens when you refuse powerful women in front of witnesses.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
Opened them.
"I’m not even surprised." He said quietly. His voice came out rough and dry. "You heartless fuck."
The system said nothing. The notification pulsed once more, as if to confirm that it had heard him and simply didn’t give a fuck, then contracted back to its usual position at the corner of his vision.
Alex let his head settle back down onto the pillow and breathed through the general state of his body for a while.
Then he turned his head slightly, toward the sound of breathing that wasn’t his own.
Spartacus was on the stool to his left, back against the wall, arm folded, chin dropped to his chest. Asleep. His broken arm still wrapped in its linen, resting across his lap. His face in sleep was younger than it looked when he was awake — the sharp watchfulness gone, replaced by something quieter and more ordinary.
Oseka was on the stool to his right. Smaller, curled slightly sideways, his head tipped back against the stone wall at an angle that was going to be unpleasant when he woke up. His hands were loose in his lap. His breathing was slow and even.
Both of them had come to keep him company at some point of the night.
Alex looked at the two of them for a long moment.
Something moved in his chest that had nothing to do with his ribs. His beaming face, a result of that.
Just then, Spartacus’s eyes snapped open without warning. He just went from asleep to awake in one complete motion, the way soldiers did, and found Alex looking at him. It was so abrupt, it made Alex flinch in surprise.
"You’re up." Spartacus said. Loud enough that it bounced off the stone walls.
Oseka jerked awake so fast he nearly fell off the stool. His hands grabbed the edge of it, caught himself, and looked around wildly for whatever the emergency was, and then found Alex’s face.
"Albius!" He was off the stool before he’d finished the word, crossing the small distance between them, hands going to Alex’s shoulders before he remembered the state of Alex’s back and redirecting at the last second to his arm instead. "You’re awake. How do you feel? Are you—"
"I’m fine." Alex said. His voice still rough. Still dry. The words coming out a little slower than usual but getting there.
He tried to sit up.
Everything from his shoulders to his lower back filed a formal objection simultaneously.
"Ah!" Alex hissed.
The two lads moved at once — Spartacus’s hand under his arm, Oseka’s palm flat against his chest, steadying rather than pushing, the two of them working around each other without discussion until Alex was sitting upright on the edge of the bed, breathing carefully, waiting for his back to stop reminding him of the last twenty four hours.
"When did you get here?" Alex asked, when he trusted his voice again.
Oseka was the first to open his mouth. "We heard they’d taken you to Gaius." Oseka said. "We heard you’d been punished for rejecting some Noble’s offer —"
"It wasn’t just some noble." Spartacus said, stopping Oseka in his sentence, from Alex’s other side, with the particular tone of a man correcting a detail he considered important. "Aurellia Magna. House Aurellius." He looked at Alex steadily. "One of the most powerful houses in Rome. The kind of house that has had men killed for considerably less than what you did."
Alex looked at him.
"I know." He said.
"And you did it anyway."
"Regrettably." Alex sighed.
Spartacus was quiet for a moment.
"You have more nerve than I gave you credit for." He said finally. Something in his voice that wasn’t quite admiration but was sitting very close to it.
Alex let out a short, tired laugh. His back immediately reminded him that laughing was not currently free.
"I’m feeling the full weight of those nerves right now." He said, wincing.
Oseka made a sound that was trying not to be a laugh and mostly failing.
"We were having dinner, when we heard someone say you’d been brought here." He paused. "I was worried. We both were. So, we came running straight here."
Alex looked at the two of them. At Spartacus, who had sat on a hard stool through the night for someone he’d known less than a month. At Oseka, who had rushed from dinner the moment he heard, who had sat curled sideways against a stone wall until his neck would probably ache for days, who asked how Alex was feeling before he’d even fully registered where he was.
Something caught in his throat.
"Thank you." He said. Quiet. Direct. Looking at both of them. "I mean it. Both of you."
Oseka started to wave it off — the small self-effacing gesture of someone not used to being thanked — and Alex shook his head slightly, not letting him.
"I mean it." He said again.
The room held that for a moment.
Then the door opened.
Gaius walked in, clay bowl in hand, and stopped when he saw Alex sitting upright on the bed with two visitors flanking him like an informal guard of honor.
He looked at all three of them.
Then at Alex specifically, with the particular expression of a man who had stitched something back together the night before and was now doing a quiet inventory of whether it had held.
"You look like you could take more whips." He joked.
"I pray I don’t." Alex said, as he chuckled. His two friends joining in.
"Hm." Gaius said. He crossed to his table, set down his bowl, and turned back around with a cup of something brown already in hand. He held it out toward Alex without ceremony.
"Drink." He said. "Then everyone who isn’t my patient leaves." He glanced at Spartacus and Oseka. "That means you two."
Oseka stood immediately.
Spartacus took slightly longer, his eyes staying on Alex a beat past when they needed to, the same quiet assessment he’d been running since the shit pit.
Then he stood too.
"We’ll be outside." He said to Alex.
Alex nodded.
Gaius waited until the door closed behind them. Then he pulled up his stool, sat down in front of Alex, and looked at him with the expression of a man who had several things he was trying not to say yet.
"Is anything wrong?" Alex noticed.
"I’ve been doing this work for thirty years." Gaius said. "I’ve stitched wounds in battlefields, in dungeons, in the arena itself. I’ve seen men heal fast. I’ve seen men heal slow. I’ve never seen a wound close itself before my eyes."
He paused.
"Okay?" Alex said, his brows kneading in confusion.
Gaius hesitated for a beat.
"I’ll ask you once, and I won’t ask again." He said. "What are you?" He finally asked. Even to him, the question felt unsure.
Alex felt his stomach drop. Cold beads of sweat began to form on his forehead.
"I – I don’t think I understand what you’re talking about." Alex defended.
Gaius narrowed his gaze. He scanned Alex. From the beads of sweat forming on his face, to his averted gaze.
"Hmm." He finally said, after what felt like an eternity for Alex. "Very well. Rest up. Then you can go by noon."
Just as Gaius was about to stand, the door swung open revealing Akosa on the other end. "Ah. You’re finally up, brave one." His deep African accent resonating within the room.
"I–"
"The Lanista wants you in his office." Akosa said, not giving Alex room to talk.
As if on cue, two guards came in, picked Alex up by his pits, and dragged him towards the door.
"This is becoming a recurring sight." Gaius sighed.
Akosa turned, and slammed the door behind as he left the room.
"Break it down while you’re at it!" Gaius hissed. "Fool." He said, clicking his tongue.
---
"I bet you’re wondering why the Lanista has sent for you." Akosa snickered, as they climbed the stairs leading to Ignatius’s office. His face a mirror of the amusement in his voice. "Not to worry. Domina Aurellia isn’t here today." A wicked grin appeared on his face.
Alex balled his fist at the sight of that. He held Akosa’s gaze for a beat, then let his fist relax.
The climbed the last stairs, walked down the corridor, and were faced with a gold painted wooden door.
From outside, Alex could already smell the wine and lavender seeping through the doors.
’I already made my choices. Time to live with it.’ He thought, clenching his teeth.
And the doors were pushed open.
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