Comfort.
He lingers unnecessarily, one hand holding a cup of wine filled with the sleeping drought, lest he forget. Before him Crixus is feverish and weak, and does not know he has a visitor. In his drugged sleep he mumbles things, halfwords and little gasps for breath as if his body cannot find the air around him. If this were Thrace, likely he would have been given to the gods by now, to end his suffering. The fever rages through him. His wounds beneath the strange poultices appear too deep to heal. But the Romans have strange methods and stranger beliefs, and Crixus' body is not his own. Before he finds his own comfort he must feed his masters, and they are ever hungry.
For a moment Spartacus feels pity for him. He knows what it is to be injured alone among wolves who care nothing for his life outside its monetary value, without wife or friend to treat wounds tenderly, to wash blood from his face and hold his hand so that the fever dreams fall away. Instead there is the medicus, who gives him herbs and drugged, unhelpful sleep and leaves him in the cloying, sickening warmth of the little sickroom, to be visited by no one. To be thought of by no one. How hard it must be to be abandoned when one's whole life centres around the screaming adoration of the crowds.
For a moment he thinks to put the cup down and take Crixus' hand instead, if only because he feels pity for a man who fought beside him, however unwillingly. A drizzle of wine across his lips might give him sweeter dreams, the warmth of a body might remind him of better times. Perhaps it is time that someone wiped the blood off him. With neglect it has hardened and begun to pull at the skin.
But there is a lesson to be learned here and Spartacus would have his one-time opponent learn it as he learned his own-- the hard way. Crixus will see, he thinks, finally, that the arena is meaningless. The glory to be found there fleeting, useless when inevitably it is taken away. That it will cheat him every time, leave him with less than nothing. That it is not a thing that should ever drive a man's life. There are better things, more necessary things. Perhaps if he survives Crixus will learn to see his captivity for what it really is, and seek to end it.
And if he does not survive, then Spartacus will not have grown attached to yet another person that he'd failed to save.
He gathers his own cup, and departs the sick room, hoping that tomorrow Sura's touch will erase its memory.
End.