Dominus

I was a gladiator when you found me.

I was living in close quarters day after day, smelling the stink of others' unwashed bodies- fighting them for space. Each day we were sent out to struggle for our lives while the nobility watched. We glistened with the fear-sweat of adrenaline as the cheers rolled over us from on high. Our pain was their pleasure. But I don't think it was ever yours. You'd known too much of pain to take pleasure in anyone else’s.

I'd been a servant twice before I came to you. Once for manual labor so intense falling asleep was like blacking out after too much drink, and another time as a 'companion' to the man who owned me. Everything was for his pleasure, and his pleasure was edged with sadism like the blade on a wicked knife.

There is no honor in killing as sport, but I will admit I preferred the ring to a life in the house or the fields. Something in my nature cleaved to the direct brutality of it. Perhaps my mother had an inkling of this when she gave me my name. Perhaps names are destiny, as some of the philosophers say. Brutus, after all, is not a poet's name, or that of an academic or scholar. It is a blunt, violent name, as obtrusive and hulking as I was at twenty when I joined the Games.

I knew they would throw me to the wolves the second their favor turned and yet, when I walked into the arena and took my weapon in hand, the sound of their cheers, the feel of their eyes on me- it gave me something I'd never had before, a kind of illusory control. I fought with all my spirit, and my spirit had no master.

I won, again and again. I was heralded as the youngest hero the ring had seen, until they put me up against the lion. The thing's rancid breath overpowered me as I managed to wrestle it to submission, but not before it took my arm in its jaws and wrenched it from the socket.

Just like that, I became useless. Someone came calling for me- they wanted a house slave, and a wounded gladiator who'd won brief stardom in the ring was quite a talking point. I stood by the referee's side in chains as he bowed and scraped before your carriage.

The finery of your clothing made me grit my teeth. My handlers showed me to you, turning my head this way and that, remarking on my qualities and flaws. I saw your hands come together, slim, effeminate, decorated with silver, and heard your voice, high and tremulous. When they let go of me, my eyes connected for the first moment with yours.

Their color struck me first, a pale lavender I'd never seen before. Your immaculately groomed hair fell in long loose curls over your shoulders. You looked in your forties, but that hair was already a premature gray, and this combined with the dark circles under your eyes caused me to wonder if you were ill. All of this together with your overall delicate frame and short stature, made me think of one word most of all: Weak. I felt nothing but contempt for you then.

.

Your house was a marble dream of colonnades and fractured white light, sprawling just on the outside of the city walls, presiding over sprawling golden fields on which men and women toiled.

My duties were primarily to bring you your meals and to make trips into the city to do your errands. It was through these trips that I picked up information about you.

‘We call him Crazy Nero,” one craftsman said. "He's downright queer. Used to work at the Senate. Doesn't leave his house anymore. Had some kind of nervous breakdown. He always picks handsome boys like you." He said the last bit with a knowing look in his eye.

It wasn’t a surprise. From the moment I saw you I guessed your proclivities. Most men of your kind at least pretended at normalcy- had a wife and fathered sons, in addition to whatever other exploits they wanted to have in their free time. It was normal, even expected, to indulge in variety when it came to pleasures of the flesh. But to remain unmarried as you were, to present yourself as you did, was seen as indecent and worthy of derision.

When that same night I was ordered to bath and go to your rooms, I automatically went to the bed and knelt at your knees. You seemed to take a moment to realize what I was doing, but when you did, you drew your robe more tightly around your bony frame, flustered.

"No," you said. "Oh, no, you don't need to- please-“

I was surprised by your horror. You ordered me, flushed, to fetch you a tea and we didn’t speak of it again.

.

As I healed, I grew restless. I found that it was only too easy to get under your skin if I wanted to. If I touched something I wasn't supposed to, or if I knocked something down, you would snap at me, your voice becoming shrill and panicked. I began to defy you. I would not complete tasks, or I would complete them wrong. I would speak out of turn, I would track dirt on the floors.

"Brutus!" you'd cry. You'd wring your hands on the edge of hysteria, you'd pull at your hair until your scalp bled. You'd shake; at many events, I brought you to tears. "Please," you would say, your voice strained. "Brutus, please stop this. Brutus, enough. Please."

You never hit me, never allowed your men to intervene, to hurt me. You didn't sentence me to death or drop me from your service. This only made me more angry.

You had a brother who was everything you were not- tall, strong, and above all else, mean. Time after time you allowed him to stay at your home, to borrow money he would not pay back. He snapped at me one day in the hall.

"You! Former Brutus the Bold is it?"

I'd frozen, anger coursing through me, and made the conscious choice to ignore him.

His fist shot out of nowhere, knocking me back. I struck back immediately, catching him in the side of the face. His dark eyes narrowed to hollow points and he fell on me, beating at every inch of my body he could reach with his hard fists. He took my injured shoulder and twisted it behind my back, pinning me to the floor. The nervy pain left me immobilized as he continued to rain blows on my face.

"Marcus, stop this instant!"

“Just because you let your servants walk all over you doesn't mean I have to," Marcus snarled at you.

You did not cave like you typically did with him. "This is my house," you said. Your voice trembled slightly, but it was firm. "If you will not conduct yourself properly I will have you removed."

Marcus scoffed, but in the end he left me there on the floor, sweeping angrily from the room.

"I'm sorry," you said, kneeling beside me. Up close, I was surprised by how gaunt and exhausted you looked, and I felt a quiver of guilt: my constant defiance had taken its toll. You took my chin in your delicate hands and brought a soft cloth to my face, blotting gently at the places I bled. "He should not have done that," you said quietly. "I hold myself responsible."

At this close range I looked into your tired face, your gentle eyes, and had a new kind of urge, an urge to pull you closer still and press my lips to yours, to run my hands through your silvery hair and feel its softness.

"I'm fine," I said instead, struggling to my feet, terrified by the impulse.

.

The next few weeks, I quit acting out. You began to relax, to speak to me at the end of the day, asking how I was, what I'd seen in town. Sometimes you'd be writing letters when I came in, and upon noticing my interest, you asked if I could write. "Would you like to learn?" you asked when I shook my head.

As a teacher, as in everything else, you were consummately gentle and patient. I became easily impatient with my own failings, but always you urged me to continue. A slave had no business learning letters, but the longer I spent in your employ, the more I suspected you didn't see me as a slave at all. You seemed genuinely interested in my life, my previous exploits and my stories of the ring.

I learned about you too, how your father had never approved of you growing up, how you used to ride horses when you weren't so badly off. How the last man you'd loved had broken your heart. How you blamed yourself for his leaving.

The one thing you'd never speak about was the thing that lingered over everything, casting its long shadow over every minute of your daily life. At night you'd pace and mutter and straighten items, lock and unlock doors, run your hands over your face, wring your hands together, caught in some life-or-death ritual in your own mind, for hours.

Crazy Nero, the townspeople had said, but you were far from crazy. There was a knowledge in your weary eyes that went deeper than any of their fool minds could imagine. My first impression of you couldn't have been more wrong. I'd thought you weak, but you were stronger than I'd ever had need to be. I didn't need to understand the weight you carried on your thin shoulders to see how it was crushing you. Whatever you battled was as real as the lion I'd taken on in the ring. As dangerous. Perhaps more so, because how did you fight something you couldn't see?

.

I woke this morning without knowing. I only realized something was off when I found your room empty. It was then that I heard the stillness in the air, that I was filled with a choking fear no fight had ever instilled in me. I went to the adjoining washroom, and for a moment my mind refused to translate the sight before me.

You lay in the tub, your wrists open in long vertical gashes, red everywhere- the water, the floor, the wall beside you. I cried out, knelt by your side; you were warm still, just slightly. I only realized I was shouting when guards showed up, crowding the doorway.

"No, no, no," I was saying as I pulled you close, right before they lifted you as easily as a child to bear you away. "Don't go. Please don't go. I love you."

.

Now I sit in your empty room. I’ve found the fine paper you kept for correspondence. It does not escape me that I am using the skill you taught me to save myself from fully drowning in my pain. I owe so much to you. A dull, patronizing man came only moments ago to inform me that your will leaves me a significant amount of money. It also grants me my freedom.

I don’t care. I don't want to be free, not if this is the cost. I need to know if you're going to live. They've bandaged you up but you’ve lost a lot of blood, perhaps too much. This is not the first attempt, they say. It makes me feel cold.

They may have called me Brutus the Bold, but I am a coward. I couldn't say these words to you until now. Please don't let it be too late. My spirit may be a free man’s but my heart is chained, and calls out for you. I hope, through the darkness, that you hear it:

Dominus.

Master.