Work Text:
Rome stopped counting the executions he witnesses sometime in the third century of his existence, which means he has been not-counting them for longer than most civilisations have existed at all. He knows what to expect by now: a crowd that has assembled to watch a death, neither entirely sorrowful nor entirely celebratory but suspended between the two. He knows the smell of it. He knows the sound of it. He knows what his own face does during these things and he knows how to keep it doing that - steady and present, the face of authority.
He's so tired.
This is not new. It has been building imperceptibly but continuously, eroding him like water erodes the stones in a river, smoothing their surfaces and making them unrecognizable.
He stands on the hill and watches the soldiers work and does not feel the things he is supposed to feel.
The man has asked to be hung upside down, but that doesn't particularly impress him - he has heard and granted stranger requests, some have been refused and it had been almost comical seeing the desperation the refusal of that last request would cause.
But the silence that follows it new. The man says nothing more, doesn't explain himself, doesn't offer reasoning or seems to feel that the reasoning requires an audience. He simply accepts the compliance of the soldiers with the same expression he has worn since the empire first became aware of him - since the this man's name began appearing in reports from the eastern provinces with bizarre insistence. A fisherman, a follower of a carpenter that was dealt with Tiberius, thirty years ago. The one who was supposed to be the end of it.
This doesn't make sense: there's no defiance, no despair; there's only a strange peace that sometimes comes over condemned men in the final hours, that is really just the body's surrender, but this is not that.
The man's face is not peaceful, resting: it's the face of a determined man, resolved to fullfill his mission till the very end.
Below the hill, the city; Roman Empire feels the million-bodied thing that is Rome moving through its afternoon, the bakers and the senators and the slaves and the children and the priests tending the fires that have not gone out in more centuries than most of those priests can count.
The fires. He thinks of the fires, of standing at the altar when he was younger feeling the warmth of it, the sense of being part of a circuit, of energy moving through him from something vast and receiving and present. He has spoken the names his whole life. He learned the names before he learned anything else, knew them, like he knew how to call the parts of his own body.
He speaks the names still. Every morning, every sacrifice, every procession through the Forum with the smoke rising straight up in good weather and sideways in bad, the augurs reading the will of the gods in the direction of birds and the texture of entrails, the whole elaborate language of it that he has spoken fluently for a centuries.
He speaks it and hears it land in silence the way a stone lands in deep water: the sound of entry, and then nothing. No echo. No answer.
He doesn't know when this began. He has been afraid to identify the moment, because it would make it real in a way that not-identifying it has allowed him to defer.
He is Rome. He is the most powerful thing in the world as the world is currently constituted. He has no vocabulary for the specific desolation of feeling the gods go quiet, nothing in his vocabulary was built to accommodate the possibility.
A fisherman from the wrong province should not be the thing that has this in common with him.
Rome looks back at the hill.
The man has not looked at him. Most people, in Rome's experience, cannot help looking at him - there is something about his presence that compels it, the same thing that makes people look at fires and at the sea, the deep mammalian recognition of something larger than themselves that might, depending on its mood, either warm them or consume them. Generals look at him. Emperors look at him. Even the ones who believe they are not looking at him are looking at him, in the way that everyone inside an empire is perpetually oriented toward its centre whether they mean to be or not.
The man on the cross looks at the sky, with the focused patience of someone waiting for something that will come in its own time and cannot be hurried and does not need to be. Rome has seen people look at the sky during executions before, seen the desperate upward look of people trying to locate, in the last available minutes, some evidence of divine attention, some sign that the vast indifferent vault above them is not simply what it appears to be.
This is not that look.
Rome cannot explain the difference and it bothers him. This is not like him: he has built explanations into law, into marble, into the straight lines of roads to claim the world as comprehensible, therefore showing the possibility of its submission to his power.
He watches the man die and feels the silence in the altars, and the tiredness that is older than any tiredness he has a name for.
Something is ending.
Not him, not yet, it's not about his concrete ending. The roads will stand. The law will persist, transformed but recognisable, copied and re-copied into languages he hasn't learned yet. The walls of his city will be built and rebuilt and built again.
But something is ending.
The gods who answered him - or the thing he called the gods - something in that is ending, has been ending, is perhaps already over and he is only now catching up to the fact of it. And in its place... He cannot see what is in its place. He can feel the space where the old thing was, the shape of the absence, the outline left in the air by a presence that has shifted. He cannot see what is filling it.
He looks at the man on the cross.
The man, as though he can feel the looking turns his head. Their eyes meet.
Rome expects something. He always expects something in these moments: challenge, or fear, or the particular expression of the newly powerful, of someone who knows they are about to win and cannot entirely conceal the knowledge. He has seen that expression on enough barbarian generals and upstart emperors to know it immediately. He braces for it.
The man looks at him like he has nothing to prove and knows it, and says nothing.
That is all.
That is everything.
Rome stands in that gaze for a long moment and in it he feels the very old and very quiet feeling of being seen, actually seen, not observed or assessed or feared, the way he has not felt seen since the gods began to feel like beautiful furniture in a house where the inhabitants had moved away.
He doesn't know what to do with this, so he looks away first.
He does not stay until the end.
He walks back down the hill into the city, into the sound of it, into the smell of bread and horses and the Tiber on a warm afternoon, into the ordinary enormous fact of being Rome going about its business. He walks the streets he has walked ten thousand times and they are the same streets and they are completely different streets and he cannot explain the difference.
He goes in the temple of the goddess Vesta. He stands before the sacred fire for a long time, watch it burn. Above him the sky has settled into the blue of a Roman evening.
He does not know the new name. He does not know if there is a new name, or if it is the old name he never had, or if names are the wrong instrument entirely for the thing he is reaching toward.
He is Rome. He thinks in roads and laws and administered distances, he doesn't know how to think in the vocabulary of a fisherman from the provinces who dies upside down on a cross in the full confidence of something Rome cannot see.
But the fire burns.
He waits.