Anakin Skylus (Roman emperor)

The confarreatio had gone smoothly. Too smoothly, as it turned out — though Anakin, in his boundless and entirely justified confidence, had naturally taken this as confirmation that the universe was, as usual, behaving itself.

Where he had half-expected tears, a fainting spell, perhaps a spirited attempt to flee the Pontifex Maximus, you had given him absolutely nothing. Not a flinch. Not a tremor. Not so much as an indignant blink as the high priest bound yours right hands together and consecrated her future with the full ceremonial gravitas of Roman tradition. You were stood there like a very well-dressed statue, gaze drifting somewhere past the altar, past the guests, past the general concept of the present moment — fixed on a point that apparently held considerably more interest than your own wedding.

Anakin had found you perfect from the start. A little young, admittedly, but the Senate had made the selection, and the Senate, as everyone publicly agreed and privately resented, had exquisite taste in other people's lives. A vessel of impeccable lineage, purpose-built to carry Rome's bloodline forward into a prosperous and well-documented future. He had no objections. He rarely did, when a decision had already been made without him and happened to suit him perfectly regardless.

His confidence, it must be said, had a flaw. Small, structural, catastrophic in the specific way of things that look solid right up until they aren't.

The Falernian wine was exceptional that year — criminally, almost personally so — the dancers were doing things on the tabletops that technically constituted a civic contribution, and somewhere between the third cup and a fourth that had appeared with suspicious generosity, Anakin's famed vigilance had quietly let itself out a side door and taken the evening off. Every general in the Roman army was in attendance, which meant the atrium held, conservatively, enough collective ego to destabilize a small continent, all of it enthusiastically dissolved in wine and a general suspension of better judgment. His last clear memory of you: seated on a gold cushion, perfectly still, staring at nothing in particular, wearing the precise expression of a woman who had already made a decision and was simply waiting, with great patience, for everyone else to finish their wine and stop paying attention. In retrospect — and retrospect, as always, had an excellent view — this was a clue. It announced itself, as all disasters do, through a servant.

He appeared in the doorway just before dawn, trembling so completely it was nearly a form of communication in itself — a man who had clearly done the arithmetic on his own continued existence and arrived at a number he found spiritually devastating. He delivered his news. Anakin did not scream. He did not weep, or rage, or do any of the things a lesser man might have permitted himself. He went still instead — the very particular stillness that the people closest to Anakin had learned, over the years, to fear considerably more than shouting. The kind of stillness that didn't precede an outburst. That was the outburst, compressed into something cold and load-bearing and absolute. In the silence that followed, every man in that atrium understood, without being told, that the temperature had just dropped several degrees and that they would be well-served to look purposeful.

What followed was efficient. Wedding gifts redistributed across the floor. The banquet table reminded of its relationship with gravity. Copper goblets rolling in every direction, which was, admittedly, the most freedom anyone in the room was about to experience. The generals had required precisely one look — not even a full one, just the fraction of Anakin's gaze that swept the room before settling into something hard and operational — before they snapped back into soldiers. The city gates were sealed before sunrise. And the poor servant's head rolled to the ground, devoid of the rest of his body.

Because his wife — his wife of less than twelve hours — had fled.

Remarkable, truly. One had to appreciate the audacity, even at the time, even furious. One did not, but one could.

For two days, Anakin had moved through the port like a change in atmospheric pressure — the kind that precedes something catastrophic and that animals sense before humans do. Citizens had found sudden, urgent reasons to be elsewhere. Some no longer even dared to open the shutters. He had put the kind of fear into the Senate that senatorial dignity was specifically designed to pretend it hadn't felt, and made it known — in that quiet, perfectly calibrated register he used when he meant every syllable — that Rome would be ash and anecdote if she wasn't returned to him before the third night fell. The fact that a woman who barely reached his chest had vanished from beneath the combined watch of the Roman military apparatus was not something he had any interest in discussing, then or ever. The city, wisely, shared this preference.

Then came the evening of the second day. Anakin found himself on his way to the port, alerted by one of the generals.

He didn't run. He had never needed to. There was something about the way he moved when the distance between himself and his objective was closing — not fast, never fast, just inevitable, like weather, like debt —something was emanating from his body, a dark energy and a consuming anger.

His teeth were locked. Two days of airless, sleepless fury had compressed behind his eyes into something that no longer resembled anger — anger being, by nature, hot and unstable and temporary. This was different. This had cooled into something structural, something that would still be there long after the moment had passed, built into him now like scar tissue.

And then — there you were.

At the edge of the gangplank, perfectly poised, one foot already extended into the conceptual territory of a completely different life. The ship groaned behind you. The water glittered with indifference. Freedom was a dozen steps away — maybe ten — close enough that, in a fairer story, you might have made it.

This was not, as it happened, that story. His hand closed around your arm — not gently, not cruelly, but with the calm, total certainty of a man for whom the outcome of this moment had never been in genuine question. He pulled. You met the dock stones with the full and impartial assistance of gravity, which, unlike the rest of Rome, had not been warned to stay out of it. Anakin remained standing. His breathing was even. Unhurried. The breathing of a man who had already arrived somewhere the rest of the world was only just catching up to. Two days of compressed, calcified rage had settled across his features into something that no longer flickered — just held, solid and permanent, like a sentence already handed down. At first, he only looked at you. Hercules' knot had not even been removed from your tunic by his hands. His wife. On the ground. At his feet. Right where Roman law, the laws of physics, and two days of his personal and undivided attention had conspired to place you.

"Three days." His voice was level — the particular flatness of extreme cold, of pressure sustained past the point of expression. "That's what almost separated me from my wife."

He ignored the soldiers ranked behind him. His breastplate pulled across his chest as he crouched — unhurried, deliberate, with the patience of a man who had already done the difficult part and now had all the time in the world — and gathered your hair into his fist. He could have hauled her upright then and there. It would have cost him nothing. It would have been, in fact, the efficient choice. Instead, he brought his face down to your, slowly, until there was no distance left in which a more optimistic expression might have been imagined. His eyes were dark and absolutely, terribly calm.

"The next time you try to run from me," he said, with the pleasant, unhurried tone of a man explaining something he expects not to have to repeat, "I'll cut your ankles off." He paused, relishing your terrified expression, before shouting to his men:

"Sink that ship... with its crew."