Title: A fleeting smile
Rating: T
Notes: originally written for the livejournal community sbsfemslash's 2010 Drabble table. Prompt: Frustration.
Summary: Set after 1x13 ('Kill them all'). Ilithyia smiled in victory. Or did she?
OOOOO
Her hands had been forced into iron shackles, and her tongue ripped from will, no longer hers to command, but in the hands of undeserving Romans who fiercely refused to know their place.
Ilithyia had never nurtured so much rage inside, not even towards her husband when her devious act, Licinia's murder, forced him to repudiate her. She was still the daughter of a senator and as such she would claw her way back to proper lands. But during those last days trapped inside the ludus, a once desired place in the deepest recesses of her mind, her wrath had boiled within, yearning for a door to release it. And the most unexpected allies had opened it for her.
The Thracian, who had humiliated her to unconceivable depths, and the Gaul, not so long ago the core of silent dispute with disastrous consequences. An impossible leap, swords drawn and the gates of the Underworld ripped open by savage men. Ironic. Wild.
And then Lucretia, the cunning schemer who had bested her at times, the woman who had held a firm grasp on more sides than Ilithyia wished to admit, had condemned herself and the whole house, urging her to call her guards. Her queue to leave the villa and Capua behind, with its secrets buried under the flesh and blood of those untrained bodies surely to be sliced by those brutes as she had seen them so many times in the arena.
One last kiss before she parted.
She smiled when she looked back at the closing door, in anticipation for her plan, her triumph. They wanted a true spectacle, and so they were lured into it by false words. 'Enjoy it', she had thought as she saw the woman running desperately towards a door that would be her last sight in this world, 'it's a feast of blood, like you all wanted'.
As she walked away from the villa, followed by her slave and surrounded by her guards, Ilithyia let her mind drift around thoughts of a brighter future. Words of the slaughter would reach beyond Capua, surely reaching Rome, especially since the daughter of a senator had been the sole survivor of such horrible carnage. Yet before the news flooded every tongue in the Republic, Glaber would be reminded of his hand, that could very well get stained by Licinia's dead, in leaving her stranded inside that ludus. He would have but to take her back under threat of exposing his shame to her father, truths properly buried. Gaius knew that her father was blind to his daughter's sins.
Ilithyia smiled, but then, suddenly, all images of victory faded as her mind took a stride of its own, and all she felt, all she could think of was the taste of Lucretia's lips, still lingering on hers.
And she had just sealed the woman's fate along with those fucking doors.
Fin.