Chapter Text
When he stirs, he’s being jostled faintly by repetitive movement.
“I’m still rather cross with you.”
Even half-awake, he can recognize the one-eyed gladiator’s voice. The faint groan nearby, something creaking its remorse, is harder to place at first.
“Either of them could have hurt the other.” He feels her shift his weight, and realizes in that moment, he’s draped over her back- he can feel her gorget under his arms.
“…Why?”
She pauses, in speech if not in stride.
“…Why are you keeping me alive?”
Silence greets his words. He can see the timbers passing over him; it seems they’re in a different section of the same area.
Then,
“If you’re waiting for a reason to live from me, you’ve chosen poorly, stubborn fool. I only live because I fear death. If not, I’d have disappeared into the ash of this place a long time ago.”
A croon arose from the shape rustling along behind them. He doesn’t have the energy to turn his head, but he thinks he knows what it is now.
“I suppose I thought you weren’t the same as me, in that regard.” Her empty voice carries well in the lonely space. “You always seem to want to live, whether or not you have the means to do so.”
They travel in silence. His shield, he realizes, is hanging on his back, even if it was on his arm when he lost consciousness.
He feels horrible. But he’s got a spark left, and it grasps the one thing he can hold.
“…Tiso.”
He feels her attention shift, more than hears a response.
“My name. Use it. I’m not a fool anything. And I don’t care what you say about your damn god.”
She makes a noise of small amusement, that, for the life of him, he’s not sure is actually contemptuous.
“Tiso. I’ll commit it to memory.”
Having been awaiting some sort of returned barb, he’s left blinking. In the meantime, she slides down a ledge fairly easily, her feet kicking up small pebbles and ash. Orisio visibly struggles down the same ledge, trotting to keep up with her. It makes mournful noises as it does, but she does not look back.
“He’s sulking,” she says, idly, as if picking up the angle Tiso is looking at. (She can probably feel him turn his head, he realizes) “He knows I’m angry, so he’s making a show of being pitiful. He shouldn’t have taken you here.”
She’s angry at the beast, but not him?
What a weird perspective she has. He’d have assumed she would’ve been outraged at him over her precious pet, considering how fond of it she seems. “Where’s here? Your training ground?”
Silence.
He is left with the feeling that he has asked a harsher question than he is allowed.
Instead, he backs off, changes subject. “Surprised you didn’t just put me up on the thing’s back again. That’s most of how I got here.”
A small reward, a huff of amusement. “Worried after me? You’re not that much heavier than my lance.”
“What?”
She halts. “Quiet.”
Peering over her shoulder, he can see they’ve moved to less abandoned places. The ash here is crushed underfoot, discolored to a sludge to leave a nearly open path. Something jingles as it moves, a hunched shape. Larger than either of them, prodding at the ground with a broom.
Tiso’s shell crawls slightly. Even in the low light of flickering torches, the shape of this figure and the tool they wield are familiar to him. As the gladiator approaches, slowly, it is even the same empty stare it turns down at the two of them.
The larger bug makes a slightly clumsy bow. It is wearing a set of four thick, heavy chains, chains Tiso wouldn’t have put on an oreback, but it lifts them effortlessly as it stands. “God-Tamer. You bring an other. Is it meat, or servant?”
“He is mine,” she says, sharply in the silence, and Tiso takes pause at her tone. “His fate is mine to decide. I needn’t speak it to you.”
Tiso cannot read that expression, but something in the bug’s eyes seems contemplative. “Speaker decides all fates, God-Tamer. Surely you know this.”
A tinny scoff echoed from the gladiator’s helmet. “You’re truly not insinuating the Speaker sully her shell and waste my time, merely to tell you to stand aside? You will move, Path-Sweeper, or I will be cross, having to set down my burden merely to run you through. If you yearn for a death above your station, place a mark with the others.”
“…Mrr,” the larger bug grunts to itself, plodding unevenly to the side.
They are most of the way past it, before it speaks again. “…Speaker has not evaluated this one, then, God-Tamer.”
“Neither you nor my beast are kept for conversation. I am carrying a burden. The beast is not, if you care to prattle further, Path-Sweeper.”
She proceeds onward in certain strides. Her grip on his legs does not relax. Were they not already beaten senseless by the mountains he’d climbed to get here, he expects it would have begun to hurt after a while.
These halls are everything the land outside is not. They are warm, and filled with chattering and sounds. Some doors are open, and lead to other hallways or chambers; a sweltering blast of heat interrupts them as they pass a kitchen. Others are cells, filled with bug and beast alike.
They are strewn with bodies, creating a center thoroughfare that is just barely large enough for Orisio to move through. Some seem to be sleeping, or watching what goes on; they pull back as the party passes through. Others are languishing in injury; a few may well be dead. The gladiator carrying him steps over a body, sprawled on its back; one of the shield-bearers he saw in his own trial. Orange ichor weeps openly from the holes in its helmet; its chest rises and falls as if yet alive, but it does not seem to notice that vermin are gnawing on an open wound in its shoulder; they scatter, hissing, as her foot plants close to their meal, but regroup in her wake without fear.
Even if they weren’t surrounded by potentially hostile ears, Tiso isn’t feeling very much like opening his mouth. Both because of a nausea that has very little to do with the wound in his stomach, and that he would like to breathe in as little of the way this place smells as possible.
There’s a hiss, a screech, and a thunk- a body tumbles forward, evidently having been thrown back. Orisio chatters, picking up his pace and moving closer behind the gladiator. For her part, she does not flinch or slow her pace at all.
They progress upward. Slowly, the paths become cleaner. While there are still wounded here, they are off the floor, and most of their wounds are tied off. Some gladiators are without their helmets, leaving them resting beside or under their arm; it reveals their expressions- some sour, some entertained, some simply curious- as their eyes follow the party. He tries to make sense of the route they’ve traversed this far, but the Colosseum is a maze. He can only guess at its size. Larger than he’d expected, certainly. There are no cells at this level, but, they are also sparsely populated. The numbers dwindle further as they go, until they pass entire hallways without seeing a soul.
He could probably break the silence now, but he does not want to, he finds.
When they approach a familiar door, he feels the gladiator relax slightly under him. She hums, and clicks her fingers; Orisio comes expectantly to her side, lets her pluck her lance from his back before he proceeds to a different entrance and inside.
She follows, herself, pausing to close the door behind her and secure a rather heavy latch across it. She leans the lance against the wall, and then sets him on the cot.
For a moment, they face each other in silence, her expression unreadable behind the shield of her helmet.
“Will you take that thing off, if you’re going to talk to me?” It seems the easiest thing to target at the moment.
A silence. Then, with a sigh that seems only somewhat resigned, she tips the visor up. “Most don’t want to see a face like mine.”
“If the alternative is no face at all, I prefer it.” He leans back against the wall; his shield twitches and springs under him, the blade extending. He scrabbles at it for a moment, brings it in front of him where he can work the mechanisms and retract the blade in frustration. Damn it. So it doesn’t get stuck, it’s just on a hair-trigger now. That, or it’s gotten worse.
She’s turned her head away from him when he looks up, and her good eye is lowered in some sort of sullen look. “…Tiso.”
“What?”
“Regarding that place beyond these rooms, and anything you may have seen there…”
“Oh, sorry, is your feral maniac private?”
He can tell he’s said the wrong thing simply by the way the air shifts, but, in the off-chance he hadn’t, that her lance has been removed from the wall and is now resting point first just above the collar of his armor is a subtle sign.
He recalls, not all that long ago, their positions were switched. At the moment, his request to see her face seems absurd; the way her expression has closed, there might as well still be the helmet in the way.
He had balked, then- for reasons, he supposes; no honor in gutting some gladiator you caught off-guard, in his state killing the one person who’d tended to him, much as he hated to need her help, was a bad idea- but he has no idea, really, who she is. That bug had called her ‘God-Tamer’, much as she had called them ‘Path-Sweeper’, a utilitarian title that was not a name, however much power it suggested.
He knows why he hesitated.
The spear at his throat doesn’t move. Not to drive deeper, or to withdraw.
Then, her grip shifts on the weapon’s haft, and she withdraws it, slings it over her shoulder, pulling her visor back down over her features with a single brisk gesture. “Breathe a word of it to anyone else within this structure, and I’ll complete the strike, stubborn fool.”
She stalks out of sight, keeping her weapon with her.
She doesn’t come back.
From the enclosure, Orisio is watching him sidelong. Just like before, there is a certain disdain in the beast’s eyes.
Unlike before, Tiso is no longer sure if this is mere imagining.
He puts his back to those eyes, and tries to sleep.