[Fanfic] Vincere III
May. 16th, 2010 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hellzabethTitle: Vincere III
Characters: Albion, Cymru, Rome, Alba, Eire
Rating: 15
Warnings: General depressingness, horrific implications, dysfunctional families, Latin swears?
Summary: What are you meant to do if even your family can't keep a promise to save you?
Albion is watching from a distance as stones are piled high. He doesn't dare to get any closer. This is much too close as it is.
Rome says the wall is to protect him. Usually, he'll believe it, as his Angry days whittle down into flashes of temper that last mere minuets. But now, as he forces himself not to shake or quiver or run away, he's not quite so sure.
He's always less sure about Rome when Cymru's around.
"I wonder why he didn't give me a wall?" his older brother ponders aloud. Cymru stands away from the youngest of their family, if only because Albion pushed him to do so.
"He's not scared of you." Albion replies, and it's still so odd to speak Gaelic again. The languages of his mother fade and wither under the heavy weight of Rome's Latin.
Cymru looks insulted. "He should be. He couldn't get fire breathing right because he has no magic in him. Not like us."
"No, not like us." Albion's voice is quiet, nearly drowned out by the calls and grunts of men hefting stone after stone into piles, cementing the outer casing in place from the bottom up with rigidly square bricks. "Rome is bigger and stronger than us even without magic."
He misses the look that Cymru gives him for that.
----
Time passes quickly, and Albion has stopped growing. He is only ten to the eyes of mortals, though he knows himself to be nearly 200. Cymru, older still, remains the same as Albion.
-----
Albion has taken to wandering his lands by the new roads that Rome gave him. More often than not, he does this alone when Cymru is off having a rebellion. The roads are straighter than his own, cutting through forests and over hillsides without care for obstacles. Like most things that get in the way of the Empire, they are cut down.
There's no running. What's the point; if he tried to run away from Rome he would only hit ocean, or enemy. It's like there are lead weights on his legs, attached to chains that bind him to the empire.
He stops before the Wall and finds something unexpected.
Alba is stealing the stones.
For a long time Albion can do nothing but stand rooted to the ground by terror and surprise. Alba and a few of his women are simply lifting the stones from the crumbling mortar, walking away with baskets of them. Most likely this is going on all the way to the other side of the wall, one coast to another.
He is forced to move once his brother throws a brick at him.
"Mornin' traitor!" he calls with false cheer. Oddly, the language they once shared has started to warp. Alba's accent has always been different, as his northern tribes', but now the words change. Albion grasps the meaning with uncertainty. "Ta for the bricks!"
The only times Albion finds he is able to run is when it is back to Rome.
-----
It's funny how quickly it's changed from being Albion's wall to being Alba's Wall.
Rome looks mildly irritable about the fact he's had to rebuild nearly the whole thing. Or maybe more put out that all the nice bricks he'd made have been stolen by those "Britunculi". Albion still doesn't know enough Latin to understand what that means, but the way Rome's men have been spitting it, he knows it's not a name to be proud of.
"Geez, every time I give you something nice he has to go and take it away. What a mean brother you have." Rome shakes his head, arms folded as he surveys the construction. The new wall is higher than before, better built.
"I can't pick my family." Albion replies.
Rome laughs.
----
"Are your governors killing each other again?" Cymru asks one dinner time, when the two of them have been sent outside to eat so as not to disturb the bickering officials at the table.
"He's our governor, and yes." The carrots haven't been boiled all the way and the pork is burnt, but beggars can't be choosers and when Rome isn't around that's all they are.
Cymru sets his plate down on the grass, the summer sun setting in a haze of red. "Let's run while we can. While they're confused."
Albion bites his lip and grips his plate tightly. "I can't."
His hand is grabbed and he's pulled to his feet so fast that he nearly drops the plate. "Yes you can! You can run, and you can dance with the fae, and you can eat dinner with dragons, and you can summon the tree spirits and the water spirits to celebrate the rising of the sun!" Cymru nearly yells at him. "Don't you ever, ever lose that!"
He's in such a daze that by the time he realises he's running with Cymru he's halfway across his brother's border.
-----
They reach the ocean, waves breaking over pebbled beaches like gaping jaws of some watery beast trying and failing to swallow the land. Albion's been out of breath since Deva and it's not coming back to him easily now. Cymru tucks the single strand of long hair, that Rome couldn't cut no matter what he did, behind his ear.
"I hope you're ready to swim." he grins, elated that his brother would go with him, no doubt. Only, there's a problem with that.
"No."
The two stare at each other. Water washes around Cymru's ankles.
"What?" he asks, mouth hanging open after he says it. Albion tries to keep his breath long enough to say what he needs to.
"What do you see around you, Cymru?" the little boy gestures. His brother folds his arms and sets his face in that determined, stubborn way.
"Sky, land, sea, and that faerie that's going to knot your hair." He smirks when Albion jerks away from nothing, watching him scowl. "You shouldn't have cut your braids off."
"You did too, save that one." Albion defends, then shakes his head. "No, I mean, look over there, you see that?"
On the edge of a rocky outcrop into the ocean, a castle, a fort stood against the darkening sky, lights in the windows not quite far away enough to masquerade as stars. Smoke, most likely from the fires needed to keep the soldiers encamped nearby warm for the night when they had only tents to shelter them, curled up and caught the moonlight, turning it to silvery streams.
"That is a castle. That is Rome's mark on you. That is a sign that he can own you if he wants to. The fact you can still run on your own means that he doesn't. Yet." Albion steps back, closer to the land and further from the sea. "You would bring him to Eire?"
"No!" Cymru says, wide eyed. Albion shakes his head.
"If we go across there he'll find us, and then he'll find her." though a part of him wants Rome to find and enslave and hurt the sister who abandoned him so completely that he hasn't seen her over 150 years. "You're the one that wants to resist him."
Cymru stares at the castle on his shores like it was some kind of infected blight. "And I will."
-----
Albion wakes in the middle of the night to a roar that rumbles the earth.
He's out of bed in a flash, runs from the tent as fast at his legs can carry him, because that is not an unfamiliar noise to him as it is to the Roman soldiers in the camp with him, or the lowly peasants in the town nearby.
He barely makes it out of the encampment when the dragon torches the whole thing like so much tinder. The cries of dying men being burned alive are ignored as the little Nation tries to escape the White Dragon.
What had he done to piss Cymru off anyway? His brother was the only one with access to Eryri, where the dragons should be sleeping.
Ah, was this because he hadn't crossed the sea?
He trips and falls, cursing on the way down as he had picked up from the soldiers. The dragon heard him, glowing eyes like hot coals turning to gaze on him, a child no bigger than it's front claw in comparison. Maybe he'll get a swift death. Maybe mother will wait for him in the ether. He's not sure if he starts crying from fear or the thought of seeing his mother again.
It stops mattering when the dragon lets out a piercing shriek, enough to make one's eardrums burst. Albion screws his eyes shut against it, but doesn't miss the sound of metal on dragon hide.
By the time he opens his eyes again, the dragon has fallen, and a man drenched in the stinking blood of the great beast heaves gasping breaths. The sword in his hand glows brighter silver than it should.
"Are you alright?" he asks, and it's Latin. Where a Roman had gotten the dragon slaying sword from, England didn't know. He found he didn't care either.
Because his brother was going to kill him for this.
-----
Alba has grown.
And it seems he's taken the wall as a personal challenge, charging down the hills in a flurry of blue and orange and flashing spears and screaming voices. He's starting to come into adulthood, and his voice occasionally breaks when he yells and stabs grown men in the eyes and racks up a higher body count than any of his men would dream of.
Green eyes spark fire when he looks up at his brothers on the wall, at Rome standing there, unafraid of the Pictish armies. His words are more painful than his spears ever would be.
"Slut."
He knows Cymru is there to hold him back, so Albion yells "bastard son!" back, though this only makes Alba laugh at the irony.
It's a hollow victory when he leaves.
His shoulders are much broader than before.
-----
Eire has grown.
She is 14 or so in appearance, and his sister is starting to look more like a woman, curves forming where there was only childish smoothness before. She looks more like mother than Albion cares to think. He tells himself he's not sure what mother looked like any more, so he couldn't tell in the first place and his mind is playing tricks on him.
It doesn't make him feel any better when he watches her ride in to battle of a chariot with her leader, spear raised high. His heart hangs heavy in his chest with the realisation that now, everyone in his family hates him. They may not have even loved him before.
The fury in her eyes makes him wonder.
Would mother look at him like that too?
-----
Albion wanders the battlefield, the decimated corpses of people that were only trying to help him, to free him, and takes their heads.
It's a bad habit, says Rome, but it's one he can't kick.
He has to make it up to mother somehow.
-----
Notes:
- Hadrian's wall used to mark the edge of the Roman empire in Britain. Though there were many attempts to colonise the north, each time they were beaten out, until eventually the wall was constructed in 122AD.
- I am not kidding, they stole the stones from the first wall. Alba's just awesome like that. Julius Severus (and yes, I did also imagine Snape when I read that name) had to rebuild it in 208AD. His one was bigger.
- In 287AD there was a revolt by Carausius, current governor of Britain, but he was killed by one of his fellow rebels, who took his place in 293AD. Basically sets the scene for every monarch of Britain since, eh?
- At some point in the 300s, St George killed "the last dragon in Britain", though that's not strictly true. Y Ddraig Goch, the Red Dragon of Wales, is still sleeping under Snowdonia (Eryri). But it's been there for so long it may as well be dead.
- 360AD, and the Irish and the Picts had had just about enough of Rome occupying their neighbours and charged in to reclaim everything. It didn't work, obviously. The Roman generals beat them out again.
- As a translation note: "Britunculi" was a racial slur used by Romans to refer to those from the British isles. Didn't care which side of the Wall they were on.
- You know those stories about how the Mongolian Empire would leave pyramids of human skulls in their wake, wherever they went? The Celts got there first. It was tradition to take the heads of those you killed, both as proof you did it and therefore bragging rights, but also so that their spirits would stay and be turned into guards to protect your home. Widdly Albion only wants to make mama proud. ;o;
Chapter IV
Characters: Albion, Cymru, Rome, Alba, Eire
Rating: 15
Warnings: General depressingness, horrific implications, dysfunctional families, Latin swears?
Summary: What are you meant to do if even your family can't keep a promise to save you?
Albion is watching from a distance as stones are piled high. He doesn't dare to get any closer. This is much too close as it is.
Rome says the wall is to protect him. Usually, he'll believe it, as his Angry days whittle down into flashes of temper that last mere minuets. But now, as he forces himself not to shake or quiver or run away, he's not quite so sure.
He's always less sure about Rome when Cymru's around.
"I wonder why he didn't give me a wall?" his older brother ponders aloud. Cymru stands away from the youngest of their family, if only because Albion pushed him to do so.
"He's not scared of you." Albion replies, and it's still so odd to speak Gaelic again. The languages of his mother fade and wither under the heavy weight of Rome's Latin.
Cymru looks insulted. "He should be. He couldn't get fire breathing right because he has no magic in him. Not like us."
"No, not like us." Albion's voice is quiet, nearly drowned out by the calls and grunts of men hefting stone after stone into piles, cementing the outer casing in place from the bottom up with rigidly square bricks. "Rome is bigger and stronger than us even without magic."
He misses the look that Cymru gives him for that.
----
Time passes quickly, and Albion has stopped growing. He is only ten to the eyes of mortals, though he knows himself to be nearly 200. Cymru, older still, remains the same as Albion.
-----
Albion has taken to wandering his lands by the new roads that Rome gave him. More often than not, he does this alone when Cymru is off having a rebellion. The roads are straighter than his own, cutting through forests and over hillsides without care for obstacles. Like most things that get in the way of the Empire, they are cut down.
There's no running. What's the point; if he tried to run away from Rome he would only hit ocean, or enemy. It's like there are lead weights on his legs, attached to chains that bind him to the empire.
He stops before the Wall and finds something unexpected.
Alba is stealing the stones.
For a long time Albion can do nothing but stand rooted to the ground by terror and surprise. Alba and a few of his women are simply lifting the stones from the crumbling mortar, walking away with baskets of them. Most likely this is going on all the way to the other side of the wall, one coast to another.
He is forced to move once his brother throws a brick at him.
"Mornin' traitor!" he calls with false cheer. Oddly, the language they once shared has started to warp. Alba's accent has always been different, as his northern tribes', but now the words change. Albion grasps the meaning with uncertainty. "Ta for the bricks!"
The only times Albion finds he is able to run is when it is back to Rome.
-----
It's funny how quickly it's changed from being Albion's wall to being Alba's Wall.
Rome looks mildly irritable about the fact he's had to rebuild nearly the whole thing. Or maybe more put out that all the nice bricks he'd made have been stolen by those "Britunculi". Albion still doesn't know enough Latin to understand what that means, but the way Rome's men have been spitting it, he knows it's not a name to be proud of.
"Geez, every time I give you something nice he has to go and take it away. What a mean brother you have." Rome shakes his head, arms folded as he surveys the construction. The new wall is higher than before, better built.
"I can't pick my family." Albion replies.
Rome laughs.
----
"Are your governors killing each other again?" Cymru asks one dinner time, when the two of them have been sent outside to eat so as not to disturb the bickering officials at the table.
"He's our governor, and yes." The carrots haven't been boiled all the way and the pork is burnt, but beggars can't be choosers and when Rome isn't around that's all they are.
Cymru sets his plate down on the grass, the summer sun setting in a haze of red. "Let's run while we can. While they're confused."
Albion bites his lip and grips his plate tightly. "I can't."
His hand is grabbed and he's pulled to his feet so fast that he nearly drops the plate. "Yes you can! You can run, and you can dance with the fae, and you can eat dinner with dragons, and you can summon the tree spirits and the water spirits to celebrate the rising of the sun!" Cymru nearly yells at him. "Don't you ever, ever lose that!"
He's in such a daze that by the time he realises he's running with Cymru he's halfway across his brother's border.
-----
They reach the ocean, waves breaking over pebbled beaches like gaping jaws of some watery beast trying and failing to swallow the land. Albion's been out of breath since Deva and it's not coming back to him easily now. Cymru tucks the single strand of long hair, that Rome couldn't cut no matter what he did, behind his ear.
"I hope you're ready to swim." he grins, elated that his brother would go with him, no doubt. Only, there's a problem with that.
"No."
The two stare at each other. Water washes around Cymru's ankles.
"What?" he asks, mouth hanging open after he says it. Albion tries to keep his breath long enough to say what he needs to.
"What do you see around you, Cymru?" the little boy gestures. His brother folds his arms and sets his face in that determined, stubborn way.
"Sky, land, sea, and that faerie that's going to knot your hair." He smirks when Albion jerks away from nothing, watching him scowl. "You shouldn't have cut your braids off."
"You did too, save that one." Albion defends, then shakes his head. "No, I mean, look over there, you see that?"
On the edge of a rocky outcrop into the ocean, a castle, a fort stood against the darkening sky, lights in the windows not quite far away enough to masquerade as stars. Smoke, most likely from the fires needed to keep the soldiers encamped nearby warm for the night when they had only tents to shelter them, curled up and caught the moonlight, turning it to silvery streams.
"That is a castle. That is Rome's mark on you. That is a sign that he can own you if he wants to. The fact you can still run on your own means that he doesn't. Yet." Albion steps back, closer to the land and further from the sea. "You would bring him to Eire?"
"No!" Cymru says, wide eyed. Albion shakes his head.
"If we go across there he'll find us, and then he'll find her." though a part of him wants Rome to find and enslave and hurt the sister who abandoned him so completely that he hasn't seen her over 150 years. "You're the one that wants to resist him."
Cymru stares at the castle on his shores like it was some kind of infected blight. "And I will."
-----
Albion wakes in the middle of the night to a roar that rumbles the earth.
He's out of bed in a flash, runs from the tent as fast at his legs can carry him, because that is not an unfamiliar noise to him as it is to the Roman soldiers in the camp with him, or the lowly peasants in the town nearby.
He barely makes it out of the encampment when the dragon torches the whole thing like so much tinder. The cries of dying men being burned alive are ignored as the little Nation tries to escape the White Dragon.
What had he done to piss Cymru off anyway? His brother was the only one with access to Eryri, where the dragons should be sleeping.
Ah, was this because he hadn't crossed the sea?
He trips and falls, cursing on the way down as he had picked up from the soldiers. The dragon heard him, glowing eyes like hot coals turning to gaze on him, a child no bigger than it's front claw in comparison. Maybe he'll get a swift death. Maybe mother will wait for him in the ether. He's not sure if he starts crying from fear or the thought of seeing his mother again.
It stops mattering when the dragon lets out a piercing shriek, enough to make one's eardrums burst. Albion screws his eyes shut against it, but doesn't miss the sound of metal on dragon hide.
By the time he opens his eyes again, the dragon has fallen, and a man drenched in the stinking blood of the great beast heaves gasping breaths. The sword in his hand glows brighter silver than it should.
"Are you alright?" he asks, and it's Latin. Where a Roman had gotten the dragon slaying sword from, England didn't know. He found he didn't care either.
Because his brother was going to kill him for this.
-----
Alba has grown.
And it seems he's taken the wall as a personal challenge, charging down the hills in a flurry of blue and orange and flashing spears and screaming voices. He's starting to come into adulthood, and his voice occasionally breaks when he yells and stabs grown men in the eyes and racks up a higher body count than any of his men would dream of.
Green eyes spark fire when he looks up at his brothers on the wall, at Rome standing there, unafraid of the Pictish armies. His words are more painful than his spears ever would be.
"Slut."
He knows Cymru is there to hold him back, so Albion yells "bastard son!" back, though this only makes Alba laugh at the irony.
It's a hollow victory when he leaves.
His shoulders are much broader than before.
-----
Eire has grown.
She is 14 or so in appearance, and his sister is starting to look more like a woman, curves forming where there was only childish smoothness before. She looks more like mother than Albion cares to think. He tells himself he's not sure what mother looked like any more, so he couldn't tell in the first place and his mind is playing tricks on him.
It doesn't make him feel any better when he watches her ride in to battle of a chariot with her leader, spear raised high. His heart hangs heavy in his chest with the realisation that now, everyone in his family hates him. They may not have even loved him before.
The fury in her eyes makes him wonder.
Would mother look at him like that too?
-----
Albion wanders the battlefield, the decimated corpses of people that were only trying to help him, to free him, and takes their heads.
It's a bad habit, says Rome, but it's one he can't kick.
He has to make it up to mother somehow.
-----
Notes:
- Hadrian's wall used to mark the edge of the Roman empire in Britain. Though there were many attempts to colonise the north, each time they were beaten out, until eventually the wall was constructed in 122AD.
- I am not kidding, they stole the stones from the first wall. Alba's just awesome like that. Julius Severus (and yes, I did also imagine Snape when I read that name) had to rebuild it in 208AD. His one was bigger.
- In 287AD there was a revolt by Carausius, current governor of Britain, but he was killed by one of his fellow rebels, who took his place in 293AD. Basically sets the scene for every monarch of Britain since, eh?
- At some point in the 300s, St George killed "the last dragon in Britain", though that's not strictly true. Y Ddraig Goch, the Red Dragon of Wales, is still sleeping under Snowdonia (Eryri). But it's been there for so long it may as well be dead.
- 360AD, and the Irish and the Picts had had just about enough of Rome occupying their neighbours and charged in to reclaim everything. It didn't work, obviously. The Roman generals beat them out again.
- As a translation note: "Britunculi" was a racial slur used by Romans to refer to those from the British isles. Didn't care which side of the Wall they were on.
- You know those stories about how the Mongolian Empire would leave pyramids of human skulls in their wake, wherever they went? The Celts got there first. It was tradition to take the heads of those you killed, both as proof you did it and therefore bragging rights, but also so that their spirits would stay and be turned into guards to protect your home. Widdly Albion only wants to make mama proud. ;o;
Chapter IV
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 10:31 pm (UTC)But I love you ♥
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 10:37 pm (UTC)I'll be fantasying about this the whole day~
Date: 2010-05-16 10:48 pm (UTC)Does the fact that Rome cut their braids has anything to do with France cutting England's hair?
Haha I was doing that too, all day at work.
Date: 2010-05-16 10:50 pm (UTC)I've always to say that
Date: 2010-05-16 10:58 pm (UTC)'wanted to say', Thank you xx
Date: 2010-05-16 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 02:15 am (UTC):c
no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 04:08 pm (UTC)Wait.
I'm sympathising with the wrong person here.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-08 07:58 am (UTC)I wish they kept those names though, I like 'Cymru' better than 'Wales'. XDDD
no subject
Date: 2010-08-08 10:50 am (UTC)Well technically, Wales is still called Cymru. Since... Wales in Welsh is "Cymru". I just used "Cymru" as a name because the area which is now Wales had no single name back then.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-19 12:29 am (UTC)Well, dysfunctional family is dysfunctional, but you know the phrase, better late than never.