This is one of the most serious fanfics I've ever written, it deals with addiction and self-harm, though not graphically. Please stop reading if this will be harmful to your mental health.
That being said, I feel like this story isn't entirely out of character for the Octavian I've concocted. It's just one of the possible versions of what happened to him. One alternate reality.
So maybe he wasn't a prophet. So maybe he was a mad man. He thought that he cut himself to see visions and he took aspirin to feel okay, but maybe he cut himself to feel okay and took aspirin to see visions. Both were power moves, his screw you to the universe to let them know that if he had any say he would be the one in control. That even though the gods used him as a post-it note and the romans thought he was a freak, he had a little bit of control over his life.
They weren't wrong though. He was a freak. It was his eyes, that look of intimidating passion. It was his power, the way the gods used him. It was his family, how they'd abandoned him. But more than that it was his addiction, the way he forced aspirin down his throat even though it made him physically ill. It made him feel better, it made him feel better, it made him feel better. No, the cutting made him feel better. And he took the aspirin because he was embarrassed about the cutting. Then he'd cut because he needed something to distract him from the symptoms of overdose. He didn't die, he never died, because the gods needed their message board, and he was an easy mark.
Not that Octavian was immortal, but people who could be augurs weren't born every day, and until they found another post-it, pills wouldn't be able to topple him. They just hoped the symptoms would make him stop trying so hard.
And to be fair, the symptoms did make him want to stop. The nausea and the wheezing and the drowsiness all made him question why he continued. But it had never really been the aspirin he was addicted to. It was the hallucinations. He took aspirin when he cut and when he took aspirin he hallucinated so he'd let himself think that because he cut he saw visions, saw the world remade how he'd wanted it- with parents who loved him, a camp who respected him, and that ever unattainable happiness. When he'd first found out about his abilities as augur, it had been because of spilled blood. But that had just been an introduction, an initial high that he'd been seeking since. A high he found not by blade but by bottle. A pill bottle that he couldn't seem to part with.
Reyna did her best. Made aspirin a locally administered thing. When he'd found aspirin, it was for the headaches he received in Jupiter's temple. But he'd made the drug into something else, something completely different. He'd made it into an extension of his powers. It was like how the siren's song was to some, how the song showed them what they most longed to see. That's what he got in his visions. More than just the gods' fuzzy inclinations, more even, than what was contained in the Sibylline books.
While what he saw probably wasn't even real, he was still so drawn to it. He needed it. He would deal with being painfully thin because he couldn't keep anything down when he took the aspirin. He would deal with feeling tired all of the time. He would deal with sometimes not being able to keep his balance. He would deal with anything his addiction threw at him, and it threw so much at him, anything for his perfect world.
They talked about him behind his back. He didn't always know what they were saying, but he could hear them mock him. He could feel their stares. What he did hear was mostly their speculation, the mockery of his habits and his flaws. It wasn't as if he didn't mock himself pretty consistently as well. He didn't mind throwing himself under the bus. He knew he sucked, and he knew that the things he did sucked, and that to anyone else the world he dreamt of sucked. But it still irked him how casually they dissed him and dissected him. It was like none of them had ever made a mistake before. What absolute bull. None of them had the right to throw a stone. Everyone was dealing with some different form of addiction. His didn't hurt him any more than theirs hurt them. Or maybe they did. Maybe his addiction was worse. He didn't know, he didn't think he could stop. He didn't really want to stop.
No one seemed to really want him to stop either. Most were content to just gossip and stare. He didn't have any friends, just reluctant followers who recognized his minimal command. If there was anyone who cared at all it was Praetor Reyna. Even Jason, who most people considered nice, treated him like a freak. Maybe not as much as the others, but he had heard Jason and Dakota snicker behind his back. Reyna never snickered. Reyna might not like him any more than anyone else, but at least she had the decency to treat him like a human being. She was the only one who saw a problem with their augur's aspirin addiction. He appreciated the fact that she cared enough to try to stop him, but she could never try hard enough.
And the gods, they saw, they knew, but they didn't really interfere. As long as he was incapable of killing himself they didn't care. He was their pawn. He cut and he swallowed so that he'd be in control of something, but Octavian was tangled up in the strings that they pulled. Then there was his family. Did they know he was an addict? No. Would they have cared? Also no. His father was an alcoholic and his mother was addicted to pretending to be perfect, pretending to be whole. That's why any mention of him was written out of the Christmas cards. That's why they'd had 2.0. Octavian had never met the guy, but he knew that his name was Caesar and that he didn't deserve such bad parents. He only saw his parent's attempts at a second Octavian in his visions. The ones that tempted him with a glorious future, and the ones that were not so bright.
That was the other thing. The other symptom. For every vision of the world he wanted to see, there was a vision of a world that drove him towards insanity. A world composed of nightmares. He knew, realistically, that both worlds couldn't exist, that one or both had to be a lie. But one world still haunted him and the other one comforted him and for both he'd swallow the pills. And every time he could never discern which one would become reality. But every day he saw the nightmares becoming more and more real.
He was never addicted to the aspirin, he was addicted to the hallucinations. And in the end it wasn't aspirin that killed him, it was the madness.