A/N:Sorry about my poor updating practices on here. I do try to get around to updating the story on , but I have been more active on AO3 as of late. 'Hypatikar' is my user on there, if any of you were curious to know, or wanted to stay more up to date. I will try harder to remember to update on here.

Well the drunken clown's still hanging around,

But it's plain the laughter's all died down

The tears you tried so hard to hide are flowing

And a blind man with his knife in hand

Has convinced himself that he understands,

I wish him well, Miss Carousel

But I got to be going.

- "Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel", by Townes Van Zandt

The human mind is famed for its ability to cope with any amount of atrocity it's faced with, regardless of the rhetoric of those who've survived atrocities. It's known, but denied in the same breath, that trauma can and will bring forward a copious variety of interesting, and dangerous, abnormalities in the mind. Any human who studies these abnormalities not as an organic disease, but as a reaction to atrocity, will agree. Abnormalities that come about after that special moment, are not afflictions in the sense that palsy or other degenerative diseases are, but preventative measures designed to provide advantageous boons in some areas, while instilling severe deficits in others.

She doesn't feel like herself anymore, and is experiencing great trouble reconciling 'Eris' with 'me'. The earth feels as though its axis has been meddled with, but that doesn't sound accurate, either. Really, she is aware that her experience, the experience that occurred some hours ago, is decidedly not abnormal in the wasteland. These things happen everyday, but somehow, she'd convinced herself that they did not happen to her. Mounting evidence had shown that the same treatment to other wastelanders can be afforded to her, also, but she'd ignored that, too.

On her tongue, she could still taste it. No amount of water could wash it away, for these things lingered. There is nothing she has experienced yet, that has ever shocked her so, than what had happened. If she contemplates it, she can convince herself that maybe it had not happened before. The act itself could be diminished by the powerful defense mechanisms that her mind employed, but the evidence was undeniable. It had happened.

Another human…

Never before has she desired to kill another human – under that hot-blooded passion that Achilles had felt when Patrocles was killed, and the rage that followed afterward. Until now, she has analyzed that passion of others' to no end, has dissected it, determined it to be interesting, but senseless nonetheless. Even now, she cannot say that she hates Aurelius. Even now, she is trying to understand how he thinks, what would've led him to leading such an existence. Instead, she hates what he made her do, hates that he gave her a choice, most of all.

It had been either eating what he gave her, or her tongue. She'd chosen the former, and now she dwelt on the workings of it. Was her tongue worth it? He could not damage her more severely than that, he'd told her, or the wrath of Caesar would be upon them both. It was sensible, she'd reassured herself, to keep her tongue, because the meat he'd cooked would've gone to waste anyhow. It was already dead, but her tongue was not. An easy decision, it had been.

Although, if she had chosen her tongue to be taken instead, she could've written about the damage done. But with her tongue intact, she will never be able to speak about the damage that was done. How ironic.

On the dock, she waited, with two legionaries, for Lucullus, who would take them to the Fort. She could not be left alone while here, Aurelius had implied, but she was sure that even if she had been left alone with the Cursor, she'd not have been capable of doing any damage. Beyond that long, torturous moment he'd inflicted on her earlier, she could not see. It played over, and over, and over, in her mind, a shock, for usually, she had discipline only over her own mind.

Aurelius barked commands at his men, keeping a tight foothold over the Cove, which was being fortified under the orders of Caesar, after the debacle that had happened the night before. Every so often, his gaze caught hers, and if she were not momentarily broken by shock, she would have sneered at the cold sweep of his eyes, which irritated her because he was not smug in anyway whatsoever. Smug, she was accustomed to, looked forward to, even. But his stuff was that of someone who was not human, and the only comfort it gave her, was that it reinforced her own humanity.

The hot sun beat down on her shoulders, which were covered in little more than the slave rags provided to her before she was to be sent to the Fort. Why she was being sent to the Fort, took little brain power to ascertain. Caesar would want her closer, to have her close when she's so broken that she can pass information about the Strip that the Frumentarii could extract from her. But that's one thing they'll never know, she's decided. That's the only card she's got, and she'll hold it as close as possible to her heart, if she truly has one, after all. In addition to her being an arguably 'important' person, she can't be trusted on the other side of the river, in a camp that could potentially be won by the NCR. Thinking about logistics along with everything else is turning her brain to mush.

Summer will be insufferable, beneath the tents of a tribal camp, cramped into a space with thousands of others underneath the blistering heat of the Mojave desert. Even with this in mind, she cannot make herself care enough to be fearful. The absolute worst that could happen, had probably already happened – even if her flexible mind screamed that so many more atrocious things could happen. Cursor Lucullus arrives at midday, when the sun shines the brightest, but somehow, even under the sunlight, everything is dim. From a clinical perspective, she is amazed how much of the mind there is to explore.

Onto the boat, she is callously pulled by the manacles keeping her wrists bound, and is relieved when they remove her explosive collar, though she knows that will only last as long as they are on the barge. Certainly, there must be more efficient ways to move slaves, this cannot be the only way. She stops herself from following that line of thought as immediately as it begins, recognizing the absurdity of constructive criticism for her captors. She's sure it won't last, by tomorrow, she'll probably be pondering the wood used for the crosses. Impractical.

To say it is uncomfortable, would be the understatement of the century. Like the legionaries, she is standing, her wrists secured by those behind her. They speak in hushed Latin behind her, and she tries not to think about how surreal it is to be on this ride once again, in all the wrong ways. Never again, did she ever predict she would be on another boat to Fortification Hill, and she reminded herself that this time, as she'd thought to herself before, she did not have the Mark of Caesar. What awaited her at the Fort was a jumbled mess of differing outcomes to make her sink to an even newer low.

She wondered if that was even possible, yet despite the war raging in her head, she is remarkably calm among the legionaries stationed with her, and listens to the repetitive sound of a long paddle swooshing across the Colorado River, with an efficiency that must have developed through a routine that Lucullus created. He was as stoic as ever, as boring as ever, though for once she is thankful – she has nothing to say.

Surprises never stop happening. For instance, she is surprised that she could sink to an even lower form of life after the fiasco nearly a week ago now, but the grand mover is making sure she's reminded that the ride never ends.

As with before, so many months ago now, the ride was hours long, and unlike then, she didn't have to pee at all, she assumed because the meager water she's given is being prioritized by her body. One of the slaves at Cottonwood Cove had given her a rudimentary bath – her hair had been soaked and her body scrubbed from all the excrement and grime that had built up lying in a puddle of her own making for days. The problem was, water didn't clean hair, and while not as oily and itchy as it had been before on her scalp, she could still feel the excess grime behind her ears, and throughout the underside of her hair. She wasn't fool enough to think they would bathe her for her own comfort. She was going to be seeing Caesar, and that's the only reason she's been made presentable in the most perfunctory manner possible.

The Fort is within sight now, and it looks no different than when first she saw it, but it is. The junk walls protecting it take on a new, and threatening meaning in the forefront of her mind, and if Aurelius hadn't… done what he'd done, maybe she'd be coming up with some cunning, social experiment to get these three to unlock her chains and let her swim up to the NCR's fortifications at Hoover Dam, but as it is, she's sapped entirely of cunning thought. Instead, all she can think of is what awaits her, though on the outside, she could probably pass for a sack of rocks. But at this point, even a sack of rocks has more sense than she does.

On the shore waiting for her, was a contingent of legionaries, and her breath quickened to be likened to hyperventilating. Shame and humiliation was a potent tool to any dictator's toolbox, methods that were used both by the Legion and the Legion's enemies. So frightened was she, that she was able, for a moment, to discard this morning's happening, and compartmentalize it into a little box to be viewed later.

There were probably one-hundred of them all lining the shore, perhaps to humiliate her, or perhaps to ensure she doesn't jump into the water before a collar can be fastened to her neck. The legionaries behind her push her forcefully off of the barge, and she nearly lands headfirst into the sand, but by some miracle, she regains her balance. Legionaries are jeering at her from the distance, and she avoids eye contact with them, hoping that she can keep up a front of nonchalance. Though she is one-part dissociated entirely, she is unwilling to bring even further loss to herself. So this is self-preservation? She wonders.

She has sense enough not to shove back when one of them shoves her forward, jeering at her in Latin, though she does catch 'profligate', and 'whore', two colorful words that have almost no effect on her by now, and so early in the game, too. Were they mad that she had ticked off some of their comrades from the face of the earth, or was this standard procedure for prisoners of war? She has no idea of some of the subtleties of Legion culture, but with a sinking feeling of detached acceptance, she thinks she's about to find out.

On the slow walk of shame up the hill, she is met with the desperate, sunken faces of crucified persons, unwilling to speak or even mumble their agony aloud – the delirium of exposure and dehydration having depleted every ounce of their former humanity. It is different this time, to look at them, and not see them as some kind of twisted addition to the locale. Crows pluck at their eyes, noses, and open mouths, still open from their last cries of agony.

And the smell…

The smell is horrendous, definitively worse this time around, because it is more real. Finally, at the entrance to the gates, she can breathe again, and she is now aware that she'd been holding the breath from her nose that entire time. But she does breathe once more, as some kind of gesture that will undoubtedly go unnoticed by the universe. She smells them, because she didn't care about smelling them last time. She smells them, because they were once human, and acknowledgment of that is all she can do.

It is Inculta waiting for her at the entrance, not that she's surprised. From the time she saw him in Freeside that one night months ago, she considered that he might be a frumentarius who has been assigned to her dog-eared, disorganized mess of a case. He is a familiar face among a sea of unfamiliarity, a sea that, at one point, she'd be ecstatic to swim in. But then, she'd swam without her toes ever reaching the floor, always floating, never touching.

He is severe looking, even now, in the face of her fall, and if she were paying better attention to what was going on around and behind her, she'd be more afraid, because all the legionaries were flanking her, giving her a sense of the futility of trying to escape. Little did they know, she was feeling confined enough. Inculta looks like an angel, perhaps because she knows that underneath his cold, robotic movements and platitudes, he is more human than the rest. She is now sure that he is aware of many of the contradictions within Legion law, and is not brainwashed, but truly does believe in the ideals that the Legion upholds. It is comforting, but nowhere near enough.

If she were not driven silent by the events of this morning, she would tell him what had happened, and perhaps, because of his moral righteousness, he would have Aurelius scourged for breaking an integral Legion law. Eris would be a fool to think there is any sanctuary to be had in him, though. She wonders why Caesar would send him, because appearance wise, it only made her look important, and that was antithetical to many of Caesar's tenants. Perhaps it is because Inculta is the only one who knows her, and he is under the impression that his handsome frumentarius can talk her into submitting.

Too late. She already felt her resolve slipping, for the time. Undoubtedly, she'd be hatching some new, daring escape plan within the week, but for now, she wanted to wallow and sulk. It was underrated. To have one's will stripped away could be deceptively euphoric – the appeal of many a collectivist state. How long would it take for her to become like one of them? To surrender one's sovereignty to the greater collective for a morsel of irresponsible ecstasy?

Inculta says nothing, and neither does she – there is a first time for everything, even her own speechlessness. The two legionaries who guarded her on her journey here keep a tight hold on her manacles, even though they are surrounded and an escape right now wasn't feasible. Through the massive encampment he leads her, and faced with no alternative, she follows.

The sunken, emaciated faces of slaves meet her, along with the few plump ones who are more favored. This time, they maintain eye contact, but there is no understanding shared between them. It is hostile – the kind of hostility shared between a dog with another who dares to take a scrap from their master. Many of the women are likely young, but they have aged a decade in the things they have seen, and where there should be smoothness, there were the beginnings of wrinkles in twenty-something's. The Legion's men slaved away on the battlefield, and the Legion's women slaved away in the kitchens.

Caesar's tent is imposing this time, and definitely not a laughable attempt at prestige. While not prestigious, it is emblematic of how far down the hole she's fallen, except this is not Alice in Wonderland. Though it may as well be, she chose this, and got herself into it, had fallen headfirst of her own volition. She pauses in front of the tent, breathes deeply, trying not to flinch at the smell of rot, blood, and the miscellaneous things associated with death.

The only thing I know is that I know nothing. She rolls that cliché around in her mind, trying to convince herself not to snark off to Caesar, and not to drive her circumstance even farther into the ground. Caesar is reasonable, that had been her first intuition regarding him. He was not dim, and he was not given to pointless acts of cruelty by his hand. Though like with Inculta, just because he wasn't a dolt, didn't mean he offered her a chance at redemption. A voice that sounded a little like her employer told her that he was the enemy, and until now, Eris didn't think she had any enemies.

How foolish! How foolish was it, to think that everyone operated under her own rules of ambivalence.

She was pushed into the tent, a completely unnecessary move from the soldiers behind her, because she'd already been moving. Caesar waited for her, guarded by his praetorians.

The master of the Legion watches her without amusement, because that is not his way. Caesar is a puppeteer, a master of many games including the clever spinning of rhetoric that usually supported his enemy. She thought of Hegel, of course, whose treatises were clear but not so concise that Caesar could not use them for his own, admittedly brilliant, ends.

But he is an old man, a thinker underneath that veneer of command. This, they both know, and perhaps she is the only person in the room aside from Inculta who does know. She doesn't think her begrudging respect for Caesar can be diminished, but she's grown better at criticizing the Legion's many weaknesses in the past couple of months, not that it helped anything.

On her knees, she is made to kneel, but Eris has never been good at pretending to be respectful. She is only good at pretending to be disrespectful when she does, in fact, respect. Mr. House was proof of that. She does know that she respects him, but she doesn't know the true depth of her respect for the ancient genius who is so far from her now. If she was not here, perhaps, she might divulge to him said depth. Perhaps even get on her knees in front of one of his monitors and thank him for not being a bastard. Many months ago, she may have called him a bastard in thought, but now that she is faced with the prospect of living under such a crude regime, she knows that Mr. House is at the lowest tier of bastardom that exists.

How ironic that it's taken genocide, imprisonment, and forced cannibalization to make her see how good she'd had it. Bravo, she could imagine him saying in that dry, high-born inflection of his. The worst that came of his disappointment and retribution was a verbal lashing. He was too civilized, and too big-pictured, to lose himself to the state of human cruelty. And perhaps, he had more humanity than anyone else she's met, despite her doubts that he is still altogether human.

"You come before me once again, this time in chains." Caesar began, his voice sounding oddly misplaced among a tent of brutish men. "I wonder if you even know how much you've cost me in this war. It's a war I'll win, but I fucking hate being postponed. First, you subvert my will by refusing the order I gave you to destroy Mr. House's bunker. Then, you foil my frumentarii's plan for the Omertas. You released prisoners intended for slavery, slaves of Caesar's army. But I'll give you some credit. You did a fine job with the Brotherhood of Steel. Vulpes tells me that you're clever, but naturally, I have my reservations about that. Anyone who refuses my will and dances close to my legionaries, is asking to be reprimanded."

"Tell me what you have to say for yourself, because I want to know. I want to know what went through your mind when you took actions against my Legion and expected to walk away a free woman. Tell me now, for it might just be the last time I give you the opportunity."

Eris is unashamed to be kneeling before him. It's just a gesture, like any other. Useless to her, meaningful to everyone else in this tent. Speaking with Caesar the first time came easy to her, at that time, it had been a prestigious opportunity to explore, and to learn. Now? She's not so sure if the gain she will get from learning will be worth the things she will experience.

"There wasn't much that went through my mind, something that shouldn't surprise you, seeing as you've decided I'm not half as clever as Vulpes yields to you." Eris regrets the tangent that had begun immediately. She is a showman at heart, and someone with a mind like Caesar's was enough fuel for the fire. He scoffs at her, and she knows that he is amazed by how little credit she gives herself. If he's surprised at that, then he's in for one. "And you'd be right, Caesar. There were no substantial designs to anything I did against you. There was no personal animosity involved. But it would be a lie to say I didn't take pleasure in defying your orders. They're not easy to defy, and everyone who knows me, knows I like to learn the hard way."

In a rare moment of mercy, Caesar laughed and sent his guard away, though they looked concerned for their leader, as they should be, considering her reputation. Lucius remained, as did Inculta, perhaps the only two who were privy to the real law of the Legion, which was the dream of a philosopher, not a military man.

"You should count your fortunes that I'm entertained by your tongue. But I'm not entertained enough to give you privilege among any of my men." Caesar continues then, his fingers drumming against the arms of his throne in contemplation. "You will be a slave, just as any other profligate woman. It would be beyond foolish to torture you into a shell of your former self, when you still have a use elsewhere. In my Legion, nothing goes to waste. Again, you're lucky that Caesar is shrewd enough to spare you, despite all you've done to thwart me."

"And what of my duties, Caesar?" She asked, more like fished – desperately. To be a woman in the Legion had many implications.

"I haven't decided yet. Vulpes will decide, in the meantime." He gestured for his men to drag her up from her kneel on the carpet, and he turned to address her once more, stunning her that he wasn't going on a longer diatribe. "And if you ever try to escape again, I will have you crucified."

A slave showed her to a tent, a poorly ventilated area underneath a canopy where she would share cots with twelve other slave women. They watched her like an intruder, as they had when she first made that walk up to Caesar's tent.

Fortification Hill was loud, and the labor never ceased. The eldest of the slave women was instructed, she surmised, to teach her the ways expected of her as a slave. The laws of these people were crude, meant to accommodate former tribals who were incapable of operating under a society whose customs were laced with nuance and interpretation. She expected that very little in the Legion was subject to subjective interpretation. Caesar was too concise.

"You will learn Latin. Many of our men do not speak the common tongue of the dissolute, and we are expected to cater to their needs." She explained, folding cloths that were shared between them.

"Has Vulpes told you what my duties will be?" Eris asked, full of questions though unsure if it was wise to ask them all. Not everyone was willing to stomach her veracious need to ask questions.

"Dominus has told me that you will serve meals to the men. He has not chosen to reveal more than that." Came the woman's disappointing answer.

Eris felt like a stranger here. Nearly everyone looked opposite of her in looks alone, carrying a swarthier complexion that belonged to the tribals of the south and east, who were descendants of Hispanic populations of vault dwellers. Although Caesar had been correct in one point of his about her luck, but it was a misnomer. Her name was already Latin, and could not be ground to dust and changed, therefore her admittedly shaky identity could remain intact.

There were no books, nor anything to write on, and her Pip-Boy was far, far away, maybe still sitting in Cottonwood Cove somewhere, being perused by Aurelius. Rarely did she record anything in it that was integral to her work with House, however, so his secrets were safe. She barely took it with her to any function she visited in Vegas anyhow, and it was more of a decoration on her arm than anything. Though she hadn't been without it on a travel as far as she could remember, and the familiar feeling of it being fastened to her arm was a mundane detail that she missed.

What was to be done to pass the time, when there was no one to serve? That, however, labored under the illusion that there would be a time when serving was not needed. There were thousands of legionaries in this camp, and hundreds of slaves to do their bidding and the bidding of Caesar.

Furthermore, why had Vulpes given her such a menial job? She could not shake the feeling that he was up to something, whatever it may be. The most likely course was that he'd hatched a scheme for he and his frumentarii to collect information from her, but the other design could be that he was being reasonable, which was always probable. He'd never struck her as unreasonable, much like Caesar.

She thought of these things alongside just what she could occupy herself with during the rare moments of downtime. There was nothing academical for her to learn, and she doubted she'd ever catch a peek into Caesar's personal library, which, she assumed must exist. Suicide was always an option, she thought with a cynical indifference. But then, how could she ever learn? Further, how could she ever make sure that Mr. House achieved his dream for the benefit of humanity?

That vision of his weighed on her mind more and more, lately. It had taken an impressive skill at mental gymnastics to have convinced herself that she didn't believe in his rhetoric. Repeatedly, she had told herself that because he was not concise or straightforward with his aspirations, she could not ever be sure of the validity or potential success of what he wanted. Unlike Caesar, he was not candid and despotic. Rather he was perplexing, and his ambition was equivocal, a gift for a mind such as hers, who liked to explore alternatives that she was unsure he even knew he provided.

Already, she thought of swimming across the Colorado, but without the river in sight, she could do no more than rely on her defective spatial memory. She knows that she should be fearing more immediate things, such as the unrestrained liberty that most legionaries now had over her person, but she found that those things were minimal. That, or she was repressing her trepidation. This was probably more likely, now that she thought about it.

Freud would have a field day with her, she reckons. How far the 'mighty' fall, when the cliff they fall from is high. And this time, it was literally high. The Lucky 38 was a gargantuan building, taller than any others in the Strip or indeed the Mojave. Thinking of it made her grind her teeth in silent frustration, wishing that she could appreciate anything for its essence rather than its novelty.