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Acacius asks her for her hand because there’s no one left of her family he could be asking, and Lucilla wonders if he hates the power it gives her. He signs his life away, pledges loyalty to Septimius Severus, and to his sons, to make it happen. She wonders if he hates her for that, too.
She certainly has enough to hate him for.
“Walk with me?” she asks, and it is not what she wants to be saying.
Kill them.
Bring my child back.
Bring Maximus back.
But while Acacius is a lot of things, and a very skilled and powerful man, he isn’t a god, and it would be unfair, and cruel, to ask these things of him, and so she presses his fingers - calloused, rough, so different from Commodus’s soft hands that she could cry - to her lips.
“Please,” she says. “Just walk with me.”
-
“You deserve the world,” Acacius tells her, and she thinks she could cry, and rage, and break things and call him names.
Why didn’t he seize the power. Why didn’t he take the crown. Why did he allow the Severus family to steal everything from her. Why wasn’t he enough of a man to ensure that she wouldn’t have to send her heir to barbarian lands to save his life. Why is he alive, when her father isn’t.
When Maximus isn’t.
“You are enough,” she replies, and she thinks, in a different world, it would almost be the truth.
-
“I wish I could stay,” he says, and they both know it isn’t a lie but it isn’t the truth either.
They both know Lucilla would run, too, if she could. They both know that Acacius would do anything to ensure she could accompany him, to ensure she could taste freedom on her own lips.
They both know it kills him, waging the war in the name of the twins, every lost life of his soldier a cut into his heart.
They both know he would go insane locked away in Rome.
“Bring me something nice,” she tells him, instead of telling him it is alright, because she owes him more than empty lies, sometimes. “The emerald necklace from Egypt is beautiful.”
She hates emeralds. But he thought of her, and brought her the necklace, and that’s more than she deserves.
He kisses her palm. “As my lady wishes,” he answers.
-
“I’d do anything for you,” Acacius says, watching her get ready for the party, and it is a lie.
He never raised a sword against his purple-clad masters, after all.
“You know that, right?”
“I know,” she answers, and she puts on the emerald necklace, because in a different life, she could love him, and because they both lost everything in that one battle in Colosseum, and because he is all she has left, and her words and the necklace both make him happy and she wants him to be happy almost as much as she wants him to be someone else.
-
“It’s over for me,” he tells her, and Lucilla has never wanted him to die for her, and she hates him a little for that, and why cannot he be the man she wanted him to be at least once?
It’s fortunate, really, that she follows him to the afterlife so soon. She doesn’t think she’s going to like what Lucius will do with Rome (and why do all men in her life have to end up disappointing her?), and she doesn’t think she could spend another lifetime hating herself for another death, anyway.