Vesuvius

Chapter XXI Felix #2

Loren’s olive skin glowed in the fading sun, lit from within, and Felix could live off this ichor.

He’d make himself the god of easy gestures and spend his immortal hours cataloguing every dip and knob of Loren’s spine, the curve of his throat and the way his tunic bunched up his thighs.

The mole below his jaw. The arch of his back.

He’d map the press of Loren’s body against his, where he was soft and where he wasn’t.

Discover constellations in his freckles, chart the stars anew.

How he breathed. How he trembled, and met Felix kiss for kiss, and tangled with him in the field, and nothing else mattered.

Tomorrow didn’t matter. History didn’t matter.

This was a boy worth remembering. Felix wouldn’t let this memory disappear .

‘You are,’ he said, forehead against Loren’s shoulder, chest heaving, ‘unreal.’

‘That wasn’t a curse word.’ A fine-boned finger tilted Felix’s chin up.

For once, Felix didn’t feel like amending himself. Instead, he smoothed Loren’s hair, still damp, away from his face, then ran his thumb over his cheekbone.

‘You kiss like a virgin,’ Felix said.

This time, Loren didn’t blush. ‘You like it.’

He grinned, soft and open, and Felix’s heart cracked.

‘When will I lose you?’ Loren asked sometime later. They sat in the tall grass now, and he’d shifted to straddle Felix’s lap. In the starlight, his cinnamon eyes were fathomless.

Holding his gaze ached too much to bear. Felix broke it, hiding in Loren’s collarbone. ‘That’s an odd question.’

‘A valid one, all the same.’

Coaxing a shiver from Loren was too simple. Felix did it again, skating his fingers across ribs, just because he could. ‘Why are you so sure I’ll leave?’

‘That isn’t what I asked.’

‘Another vision?’

‘Not quite.’ Loren ducked when Felix leaned up for a kiss. ‘You’re trying to distract me.’

Felix grunted. ‘It isn’t working.’

‘It’s working.’ Loren pulled back, disentangling their limbs to sit apart. The vacancy hit Felix immediately, the loss of warmth, weight. ‘I want to believe you speak the truth. That you wouldn’t lie. Not you.’

‘I lie to everyone. It’s— ’

‘How you survive. So you’ve said.’ Loren tore a handful of grass, braided the strands with nimble fingers. His hair fell over his shoulder, creating a curtain that blocked Felix from reading his face. ‘What if there’s more to this than survival? We could run away together. Find a new town.’

Furious, frantic weaving, but his hands shook so badly that the grass snapped. Felix stilled him with a palm. ‘You? Leave Pompeii? The place means too much to you.’

‘I find meaning in anything. I’m sentimental that way.’

‘Enough, Loren,’ Felix whispered. ‘You hardly know me.’

Wide eyes met his. ‘But I know enough to see you want it, too.’

‘I want you.’ Simple, honest, no promises. A gods-damned easy gesture. Fitting that Felix only caught on to those at the end.

‘You have me. My worry is I don’t have you in return.’

‘Come here.’

Loren did, crawled closer, and Felix tipped him back into the grass and kissed his neck and shoulders and chest, and stars wheeled overhead in silent cacophony, and insects buzzed and hummed nearby. And the leaves of the olive trees were still. And the world was still.

And Felix could pretend he had it all, for one moonless night.

Dawn broke too soon, lighting the sky in grey and purple, sun hovering below the horizon behind Vesuvius to the east. Felix woke, sticky and sore, and knew Loren would be more so. But he still slept, face softened by the early-morning gloom. Felix dared to kiss his temple.

Their last.

Standing, careful not to jostle Loren, Felix dressed, tunic stiff with salt. Water from the lapping sea cleared his senses when he splashed his face. He ate a heel of bread from Loren’s satchel, slowly, crust first and then the middle, as if drawing out this moment would somehow preserve it.

He tugged on his sandals, gathered the helmet and disappeared into the mist.

A spell of silence cast a net over the road to Pompeii, as if all that once lived had fled.

No birds gathered in the trees. No lizards crossed his path.

No idle chatter from a friend to fill the spaces.

Only his shadow kept him company, a phantom at his side.

Tighter and tighter wound that relentless hum of pressure building, waiting for an excuse to burst.

The quiet offered too much time to plan. To consider the terms of the deal he meant to strike.

Fog crept among the tombs outside the city gate. The guards from yesterday were absent, a sure sign the city had lost faith in catching the helmet thief. Ironic, considering what Felix carried slung over his shoulder.

Alone amidst the mausoleums and markers, Aurelia drifted like a ghost, hem of her white nightdress catching on aloe spines and dragging over dead grass. When she spotted Felix’s approach, her pensive frown didn’t shift. Almost like she knew to expect him out here.

‘Can’t sleep?’ Felix said.

Her face was too empty for a girl her age. ‘You spoiled everything by coming here, do you know that?’

‘So I’ve gathered.’

Felix considered Aurelia, compiling his evidence collected over the past days: her episode in the alley.

Take his hand . That scraped chalk drawing of Felix’s face, framed by the same wings on the helmet he held.

The collapse she shared with Loren at the festival, and his frenzied warning in the Forum afterwards.

Pieces were falling into place, tiles in a misfit mosaic.

Conclusion drawn, he said, ‘His visions. You have them, too. You knew I would meet you here. What else do you know? ’

Aurelia glared and kicked listlessly at a grave marker.

When she spoke, it wasn’t to Felix at all.

‘Pappa thought I’d gone mad when I begged him not to leave.

He and Mamma wrote it off as fussing from a worried little girl.

Until the other soldiers brought back his belongings.

His blanket. His sword. If he’d listened, he wouldn’t have gone.

He promised he’d return, but I knew – I knew. Now it’s happening all over again.’

‘With Loren.’ When her face only pinched, sourness spread across Felix’s tongue, threatening to bring up the scrap of bread. Confirmation. ‘Aurelia, he thinks he’s stopped it, whatever is about to happen. The destruction. The end.’

‘He’s wrong,’ she whispered.

‘I believe you,’ Felix said.

‘Of course you do.’ Aurelia cast him a scathing look. Then she snarled, yanking her hair. ‘It isn’t fair . I never asked to see these things, I never asked to know. Why can’t – why can’t I be normal? Like Celsi, or the others. I don’t want to live like this anymore.’

Stuffing her fist in her mouth, she muffled a furious sob. Her chest heaved. Her outburst, as most things did, died quietly. She screwed her eyes tight and slumped against a tomb, burying her face in her knees.

Awkwardness settled, thick as the surrounding mist. Felix was no good at this comforting business.

He didn’t have the experience, and opportunities to practise were hard to come by when he avoided attachment for exactly this reason.

So he did all he could think to do. He sat beside her.

She seized when their shoulders bumped, but she didn’t flee. A small victory.

‘Most days, I feel closer to the dead than the living,’ Felix said.

Confessing this to her felt both strange and appropriate, like Aurelia alone in the world would understand him.

‘In every town I pass through, no one sees me, but I see everyone. The shops they run, the friends they share meals with, parents and children and families. I can’t fathom how they manage it.

How it comes so naturally when it never has for me.

That maybe I forgot how to be a person, or maybe I never learned at all. All I know is how to run. Restless.’

She sniffled. After a time, she lifted her head to pick at a hole in her dress. ‘Like you’re missing something, but you can’t find the piece you lack. No matter how hard you look, finding is beyond your control.’

‘It’s shit, isn’t it?’ Felix snorted. ‘If all that separates people from objects, or the dead from those alive, is that we can control ourselves, what does it mean if you can’t? What does that make you?’

‘I don’t want to find out,’ Aurelia admitted.

‘That might not be up to us.’ Felix knocked his knee against hers, then rose, shouldering the laundry bag. ‘I have an errand. If you come with, I’ll give you a ride.’

That was the thing of it. For all that Aurelia existed beyond her time, aged prematurely by visions of futures not yet lived, she was still a child.

And although she hesitated when Felix leaned down, she scrambled onto his back, clinging tight around his neck.

In an odd way, it wasn’t so bad, having someone holding on to him. Trusting him not to let her fall.

Together, he and Aurelia entered the tomb-still city.

Aurelia rested her chin on his shoulder and slipped into a quiet ramble, filling him in on all he’d missed in the city since yesterday.

Much, from the sound of it: a fight breaking out in a council meeting, Nonna tripping over a loose brick and hurting her hip, another well gone dry.

Seemed Aurelia had eyes and ears all over Pompeii.

‘I haven’t seen Celsi since our marble game,’ she said as they turned onto a street of houses. ‘Do you think he’s upset with me?’

Felix hadn’t thought about him in days, but Aurelia’s concern stirred a memory from the festival, of Celsi being dragged away by a man who looked to be his father. No one had intervened, not Camilia, not Felix. He’d watched and done nothing and that still sat out of place in his gut .

‘I bet he’s busy.’ Felix kept his tone light, forcing back a surge of shame.

‘I suppose,’ Aurelia replied, but she didn’t sound convinced.

At an intersection not far from his destination, Felix elbowed Aurelia until she slid from his back. She glanced around, eyes narrowed, at the new bricks, the even cobblestones, the freshly painted exteriors.

‘This is where the rich tourists stay,’ she said. ‘What’s your business here?’

‘I told you. I have an errand.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘You can’t,’ Felix said. Aurelia hit him with a scowl.

He understood the frustration of being told no without an adequate explanation, but his task was for him alone.

‘Aurelia, I’m going to fix this. You, Loren, your mother.

I’ll get you out of the city, but you must promise to do exactly as I say, and neither can find out what I’m about to do. Understand?’

She wavered, softening a fraction. ‘For Loren?’

‘For you, too.’ He pushed at her. ‘Go home. I’ll find you later.’

With one last calculating look, Aurelia took off. Felix watched until she rounded the corner and her curls disappeared. Some new brand of resolve settled on his shoulders in her place.

For the third time, though he doubted that number would bring him luck any more than his name had lately, Felix entered the house of Senator Servius.

The building was as void of life as Julia’s estate, but the telltale sound of a stylus scratching drew Felix to the study.

The door stood ajar. Servius hunched over his writing table, dressed immaculately as ever, gloves tight and hawk crest fixed, despite the early hour.

Even at the sound of Felix’s footsteps nearing the desk, Servius didn’t budge from his work.

‘Awfully quick,’ Servius said. ‘Umbrius must have made it easy. ’

Felix waited. He pinpointed the precise moment Servius realised it wasn’t Darius standing before him. His hand stilled. Bland eyes flicked up. Amusement tugged his mouth.

Servius propped his stylus in its holder, still dripping ink. ‘You thieves keep me on my toes, don’t you? Forgive my mention of Umbrius.’

‘Don’t care,’ Felix said. ‘I don’t get involved in politics.’

‘And yet.’

Gods, Servius and Julia were cut from the same cloth.

It rankled Felix no end, these petty disputes of the rich.

The issues patricians and politicians fought over never mattered.

Ultimately, they were each on their own self-serving side, with far more in common than either would admit.

What a waste of breath. To Loren’s credit, he at least attempted to argue issues that regular folks cared about.

Things that made a difference, however slight.

This was all distraction. He willed his focus back to the details that mattered, shut out what didn’t.

Now or never. He didn’t want to give it up, this one thing that proved he was worth more than the flesh on his back, the only power he’d ever held.

But he remembered starry kisses. A pinch at the corner of a familiar mouth. Those details mattered.

From the laundry bag, he withdrew Mercury’s helmet and slammed it on Servius’s desk.

Servius’s gloved hands rose, and he jerked back a fraction. But his surprise quickly smoothed over, as though he’d suspected this might happen all along. Bastard. He relaxed in his seat, a satisfied sprawl. ‘You decided you want the horse after all.’

‘No,’ corrected Felix. ‘I want two.’

A smile spread. ‘An expensive demand for a helmet I can’t touch. Surely we can find more favourable terms.’

Familiar tightness in Felix’s ribs screamed at him to flee.

Staying would carry the heaviest consequences he had ever faced.

He knew what came next, and it boiled down to an impossible choice – one he shouldn’t hesitate to make.

Flee, or lose. Flee, or be used. The last thing his father said to him was run . Felix hadn’t looked back since.

But his rules stopped mattering days ago, the same instant a bowl crashed over his head.

Gods, if only his da’ could see him now.

Felix inhaled a final breath on his own terms, then dragged a chair to the bargaining table.