The Kiss of Rome

Marcus Tullius had always believed the Empire eternal. Marble gleamed beneath the sun, aqueducts sang with water, and senators spoke of Rome’s destiny as though Jupiter himself had carved it into stone. Yet beneath the Senate’s grandeur, Marcus carried a hunger that no feast could sate, a hunger for a kiss, for something human and fragile amid the Empire’s iron perfection.

One evening, wandering the catacombs beneath the Palatine, he discovered a sealed chamber. Dust choked the air, scrolls lay stacked like bones. He lit a torch and read. The texts spoke of famine, of rebellions crushed, of wealth siphoned from provinces until they bled dry. The prosperity of Rome was not divine providence, it was theft, concealed by centuries of propaganda.

The words burned him. His ambition, his speeches, his loyalty, all built on a lie. He staggered back into the moonlit forum, heart pounding. And there, waiting in the shadows, was Livia, the scribe whose eyes had lingered on him during debates, whose lips he had imagined but never dared approach.

She saw the scroll clutched in his hand. “You know,” she whispered.

Marcus trembled. “If I speak, I am ruined. If I stay silent, I am complicit.”

Her hand brushed his cheek, soft as parchment. “Truth is heavier than empire. But even emperors cannot forbid a kiss.”

The hunger surged. He bent toward her, desperate, not for power or glory, but for the fleeting rebellion of lips meeting lips. In that moment, the Empire’s lie dissolved, and Marcus tasted something purer than Rome’s marble: the fragile truth of desire.

Above them, the eternal city glittered, unaware that its foundations had cracked. Marcus knew the kiss could not topple Rome, but it could topple him, and perhaps that was enough.