When she comes to him in his dreams, she is ever accompanied by the rain. The scent of her in his every breath, as close as her kisses and her body had once been. As different to him now as the smells he encounters every day, of sweat and blood and the gods-damned countryside he roamed with his fellow slaves, making the Roman dogs pay for their crimes. Every soul he sends to the afterlife is for her, every slave-trader, every whore-master, every Roman who ever put shackle to neck or wrist or foot, payment for Naevia. Payment for the one who had wept for him.

In turn, those masters weep too, as the chattel they thought so loyal strip their villas of any riches they find and escape into the countryside. The point of Crixus' sword convince most to pronounce them free. The tears flow more freely when they realize mere words would not spare them. And like any slaver, they still seek to buy him. Silver. Gold. Women. Villa. Status. Some their wives and children. All things that could be taken as easily as they were given. Crixus knows this all too well, and tells them so. Mercy, they cry. Mercy.

But tears no longer move Crixus. Since he had spilled his own and tasted Naevia's, none ever would.

They march during the day, their slave army growing by the score. Small numbers of slaves who heard of Spartacus' fight for freedom and were willing to accept the threat of death. For what was slavery, but to die every morning you awoke to the whims of a master? Arrogant masters thought themselves protected at night by those they subjugated, but during the day, drove and abused as beasts. And so they attack during those hours when masters are least at their guard, their servants at the gates they open to Crixus' army.

Crixus asks them of Naevia, searching for her in the face of every body slave, every whore they free. He knows the lot of a whore, knows – fears - the fate of a woman in bondage. He remembers with shame the feeling that your body is not your own. Nor that of your loved ones. They are of a mind, these women and men, all quite ready to give him what information they can: a woman with bronze skin in servitude at a local Merchant's house; the marking on the shoulder once seen at a whorehouse at the edge of the market.

But none are were her. None held the softness of rain in their eyes.

At night, they hide in villas, in the fields, in arbors of cypress and myrtle. Some leave in the darkness with whatever riches they find, others sneaking into their ranks to join their cause. Many staying to fight, fueled by their own desires, for vengeance or blood or riches, he does not know.

In dreams, he does not care. In dreams, she comes to him, tears and rain on her face, mingling with his own. Naevia would merely lie beside him sometimes, content to hold him in her delicate arms, tracing his scars with her fingertips as she always did. Sometimes she appears to him as she had the last time, eyes locked with his, his soul dragged away through the ludus gates with her.

Each day he searches but does not find, he cursed himself. Each day, he drives himself and his men to search and plunder, kill and destroy. Each day he feels his hatred grow a little more.

Each night he prays to the gods to feel the rain in his dreams.