You leap awake in the grey hour before dawn to the sound of your daughter's voice: "Mummy. Mum. Wake up."

You are sweating and shaking, exhaling in shuddering gasps, blinking in confusion at the beams above your head that support the thatch of the roof above you.

"Mummy. You were having another nightmare."

You turn to look at her, your Christina, where she kneels on the floor beside the slightly raised platform where you sleep. If you close your eyes, you know you'll feel the residual sting of your dream across your back. If you speak, you'll feel the hoarseness of your voice slipping from your throat, tired from days of screaming that happened close to three years ago, now, but feel fresh in your mind as the echoes of your dream fade away.

"Yes, darling," you say softly. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."

"I know," Christina says. "It's okay." She tips her head to one side, eyes gazing unflinchingly into yours. The nightmares never haunted you at the ludus, nor for the first weeks after you fled Rome and began your trek to the northern edge of unconquered Gaul. It seems, in retrospect, that your psyche waited for your body to feel safe before beginning to torment you with the trauma to your mind. Christina's disappearance, your crime, your beatings, your long hours spent in darkness, your fear for Myka, your terrifying temptation confronted with a trident—all of these memories began to revisit you in your sleeping hours.

The first time, on a cold evening in your tent, you woke yourself up shouting, and then broke into sobbing like an infant as your waking mind tried to parse dream from reality. Christina had begun to cry beside you, frightened by your unconscious outburst, and Myka, blessed Myka, had done all she could to soothe both of you. Your cries had woken your travelling companions, too, who descended upon your tent in mere moments.

"Nightmare," Myka had said to them, you remember, even as she clutched you close and stroked Christina's hair. Claudia had crawled in with you and lifted Christina into her lap as you had found yourself devastatingly unable, in that moment, to behave as a mother should.

The following day Pete had taken you aside and explained that he had them, too—that his army training had taught him to find ways to sleep in silence but that he had nightmares of war, of the arena, of the dungeon where you'd both been held, awaiting your doom. "If you need to talk about it," he'd said, "well… maybe we can help each other."

Christina is seven, now, and growing up faster than you can keep up. She is no longer frightened by your nightmares when you have them. She is too accustomed to them for that. Your pride stings from how often this happens: that she, your daughter, must soothe you from your bad dreams, when those duties should certainly be reversed.

Still, when she wordlessly lifts the edge of your fur and climbs into bed with you, wrapping her arms around your waist and tucking her head under your chin, you drop a kiss onto her crown and breathe a soft sigh of relieved thanks. You got used to sleeping with Myka pressed against you, and now it's hard to sleep alone.

In the grey pre-dawn, you let your eyes slip shut and find a modicum of peaceful rest until daylight.

\\

The journey had been hard on Myka, as you had known it would be.

Her heart and intentions were pure, but she was still an upper-class Roman woman, accustomed to houses heated by hypocaust and to daily warmed baths. She had a taste for wine and fine foods, and had lived most of her life with days built around leisure more than work.

In the first few weeks of travel, she would find herself making casual demands of Claudia – "Fix the tear in this dress, please," or "I'm going to bathe in that creek; come and help me." Sometimes, she would catch herself and rephrase the order as a friendly request, but sometimes you would, as gently as possible, need to remind her that Claudia was her friend and equal now, and no longer her handmaiden.

Claudia, of course, was also too deeply entrenched in her own history of servitude—and too undyingly faithful to Myka—to be able to resist the commands when she received them.

"I'm sorry," Myka would say sheepishly, following your reminders. "Habits die hard. I'm trying."

But the endless traveling, the changes in behavior and relationships and quality of life, wore on her. She became irritable and frustrated. Pete was the only one who could reach her in those moments, because he was the only one who could relate to the experience of losing the luxuries of Roman life.

It tore at your heart, during those days, to watch her as she struggled, so clearly unhappy. You tried to reach out to her more than once, but she refused to discuss her frustrations with you.

"She feels guilty about it," Pete explained to you, eventually. "Like she shouldn't have the right to be having such a hard time with this, compared to everything you went through after you left your homeland."

Late that night in your tent, in quiet whispers, you told her that you respected everything she felt, and begged her to share it with you.

"I don't know if I can," she'd replied, quietly.

The following day, you had passed a fork in the road marked with a sign that pointed to Genua, and you noticed Myka's eyes lingering on it.

With a deep breath, you had pulled your horse alongside hers and said, "If… if you want, we could take you there. Claudia, or Leena, or Steve, one of them might stay with you, if you asked. I would… I would understand."

You couldn't offer yourself, of course. Pete couldn't, either. You are both still wanted for murder, and could never be safe inside the empire's borders.

Myka had looked at you for a long moment, and then back at the sign. Then closed her eyes, and dropped her head forward, exhausted.

\\

The morning greets you with a rare display of winter sun between the habitual days of rain. You brace yourself against the crisp chill as you get up and begin to build the morning's fire in your hearth; you send Christina to visit Leena to fetch milk for your breakfast.

A few months after you arrived in this village, Leena became close to a young cattle-herder. They eventually married and now live together in a house on the edge of town; you visit one another almost daily.

When Christina comes back, she bursts through the doorway like a bolt of lightning, clutching the jug with two hands while bouncing on the balls of her feet.

"They're coming!" she exclaims happily. "Leena saw their campfire on the horizon when she let the herd out this morning. They'll be home later today!"

Your smile pulls across your face and through your eyes. "That's wonderful, darling. Let's eat quickly—we have much to do before she gets home!"

\\

Because Myka didn't leave you, of course. Much later, she would tell you, with some embarrassment, just how close she had come—as though you couldn't tell from the look on her face in that long moment by the signpost.

But once you found your way to Joshua Donovan's village, a remote Gaulish outpost on the edge of Germanic territory near the ocean to the north, things became easier for her.

As soon as you felt safe, like the community had accepted you, you selected a plot of land and began to build a house from stones and logs and cow pat. Pete took the plot of land beside yours and you worked together, helping each other at every stage, from the foundation to the thatching of the roofs. You built sleeping platforms—one for you and Myka, one for Christina—and stocked them with warm, soft furs. You built a low table for eating and gathering, and a set of shelves where you could store pots, cups, and plates. It's all one room, small enough that the hearth in one end heats the whole space easily. It's rough compared to the polished marble villa where Myka has always lived, but it's warm and solid and filled with the trappings of your small family's life together.

You picked the location strategically, as it was near the small river where the village got its water. Once the house was built, you began to make plans to improve it for your beloved Roman, to bring her some of the comforts of her home.

Claudia, as it turned out, had a brilliant knack for precisely this kind of engineering. Together, you built miniature wooden aqueducts that could siphon water directly into your homes. And then, in the corner of your house nearest the hearth, you used stones and sand and straw to build a small bath with a very small hypocaust in its foundation.

Myka would, slowly but surely, find a place for herself, here in Gaul. She began to teach Christina to read and write Latin, and they lamuse one another by leaving each other notes scrawled with a scrap of coal on a flat stone that you keep near the fireplace. Myka has offered to teach you, too, but you decline every time; you do prefer the spoken word, it's true, but more than that you like that Myka and Christina can have that to share just between the two of them. They are kindred spirits, Myka and Christina: quiet, thoughtful intellectuals, both.

Myka, over time, had discovered she had both a fondness and an aptitude for hunting. As she began to learn the local language, she made friends who invited her on short trips for wild game. She accepted, initially, just to be friendly, but eventually grew so fond of the adventure that sometimes she and Pete would go off on their own with their horses for a day or two in the hope of bringing home venison.

They have been gone for two days, but now they're coming home, and you have much to prepare before they arrive.

"Go tell Kelly while I prepare our breakfast," you say to Christina. The woman, a healer, has become quite fond of Pete, and he clearly returns her affections. She'll want to know that he's almost home, you suspect.

Christina grins and bolts back out the door.

Several hours later, your preparations are complete. The house is clean, the bath is filled, a stew is simmering over the fire. You are crouched to stoke the flames in the firebox for the hypocaust, just outside the house, when you feel familiar hands slip over your shoulders.

"I shall have to put a bell on you, darling," you say, smiling. "With all of this practice you get stalking wild game, you've become far too good at sneaking up on me."

"Mmm," Myka murmurs as she crouches behind you, pressing up against your back, "But where would be the fun in that?"

You cock an eyebrow and slowly turn in her arms. "Any luck in the hunt?"

Myka shakes her head a little and shrugs. "Not really, I'm afraid. A few pheasants, that's it."

"Better luck next time, I suppose, though I do enjoy a pheasant dinner."

"I know you do," Myka says, smiling, her arms fitting snugly around your waist. "But unless I'm much mistaken, I can smell something cooking from in there, and I think there's a hot bath waiting for me in the house."

"Indeed," you reply. Then you lean closer, until your lips brush her ear: "Christina is spending the evening at Steve's. Liam has promised to begin to teach her to do metalwork."

"Lucky girl," Myka whispers back, a little breathlessly.

"Indeed she is," you say as you stand up, tugging her hands to pull her with you. But then, quick as a stag she spins you around and presses you against the back wall of the house, her body flush against yours and her lips wrapped around your earlobe.

"I wasn't talking about Christina," she murmurs lasciviously, as her thigh slips between yours.

"Is that – is that so. Well," you gasp, "lucky me, then."

\\

You won't tell her that when she leaves on these hunting trips, you, too, take smithing lessons from Liam.

You'll keep it a perfect secret until, a year later, you will have managed to forge her a new sword, its wooden hilt similar to the one on Sam's gladius with one important difference: on its smooth wooden pommel, you will have Christina use coal to trace out the letters that spell Myka's name. Then you will use a small chisel to follow her lines exactly, engraving them into the wood, labeling the sword as hers.

You will present it to Myka as a gift from you and Christina together. Myka will cover her mouth in surprise, her eyes will well up with tears and she will wrap her arms gratefully around both of you.

You will continue to build your life here. People throughout the village will ask for their own heated baths, and you will begin to earn a decent amount of coin from building them, together with Claudia.

You will think, from time to time, of the game you and Myka used to play, on the floor in your cell in the ludus. Sometimes, you will contemplate making a board so you can play again. But your interest for the game, with its rigid rules for movement and goal of defeating an opponent, has waned.

You will look, as you are looking right now, at the nude body of a breathtaking Roman woman, one whose father had owned you as his slave, as it slips into a warm bath in the corner of the small Gaulish home you share with her.

You will watch her teach your daughter basic sword-fighting skills, using sticks instead of swords so that nobody will get hurt.

You will feel the reverence of her touch as her fingertips trace the scars, thick but sensitive, that lace your back—scars from a beating that will always haunt you, but that you cannot truly regret because it delivered you, ultimately, into her arms.

You have lost interest, you realize, in little black and white pieces on a board of squares.

"Join me, love?" she asks, from the bath, extending a hand toward you, palm up.

With a small smile and no words, you undress, and you do.

So this "brief epilogue" ended up being longer than my shortest chapter. Uh, whoops? But as I was planning it I realized that nobody would get through the crap I've put Helena through without some level of lingering trauma, so I wanted to pay that some attention.

Particular thanks to tantedrago for giving me some insight into the climate and landscape of the part of the world where I've imagined the crew has ended up. I didn't end up using it in quite the level of detail I'd originally planned, but it was extremely helpful nonetheless. Also, thanks to her for squeeing at me via PM-very little beats knowing that people are getting excited over the stuff I've been writing.

Shout-out to hermitstull (over on AO3) as well for all the positive feedback along the way, and to Jess82x for chasing me on updates.

Thanks again to everyone who's come along on this ride with me. It's been fun (between the blood and guts and angst, anyway!).