Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.
That was one of his.
Rome, feeling so old now, stared at his small boys, and wondered what kind of countries they would create, when they grew older. Would they be great? Would they fall, and leave his last gift to them, his warrior's blood, dripping out of them on some foreign soil?
He did not mind, really. He didn't. Dying on your own soil, as it slowly became someone else's, picked apart by the neighbouring vultures, that was something he would not want on his boys, not in a thousand years. Better it be something heroic. Something to be remembered by.
Rome tried to remember if anyone had ever told him this, or if he had just figured it out on his own. He couldn't recall. His memory was not as it used to be. There was once a time where all roads led to him, but he was no longer such a centre for the world.
Sometime, during the task of being the world's heart, he had lost his own. And now that his country no longer held that position, his chest hurt. It fucking hurt. Like it was empty.
Rome sat in his home and watched his grandchildren, his legacy, learn to paint and cook and laugh and scowl, and did not lift a hand to help them, as much as he wanted to. Because yes, he was an artisan. But more than anything, Rome was an empire. He got that by fighting, not by painting. Everything he touched turned to fighting. And he no longer looked to his grandchildren to inherit his fighting spirit. In fact, he prayed they didn't. The problem with empires is that they never stayed that way.
Rome was no longer even a fighter. He was just a legend. It was time for him to act like one, Germania said. What did legends do? They were bigger than life. That he was. But legends were stories. One couldn't actually see them. And eventually, legends just faded away.
Fading was not something he wanted to do. He was hardly a patient man, after all. If he was fading, he could travel, couldn't he? Leave pieces of him everywhere, so that he would never really be gone. Wouldn't that make Germania mad? That familiar, reckless smile spreads across his face, and he felt his shoulders straighten. Having a goal, a plan, was a good idea. Because dead things did not plan. They simply sat and waited to rot.
He glanced over, one last time, at his boys. A bit older now. A bit stronger. They would be fine. They had his blood in their veins. Fighter blood. The blood of wild things, creatures at one point not quite human. That is what he was, what they were.
He was Rome. He was a Roman. He was the conqueror of civilizations, the founder of culture, the ghost of how great this world once was. He was the closest thing to a god on this earth, and in his rare quiet moments, long ago, he had heard them congratulating him.
He was Rome.
He was an old man, pondering the secrets of humanity, imagining himself as something that was once bigger.
He was scrawled lines drawn in wax, letters of his making.
It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.
