The Lion Started Baring His Claws

Lepidus sat alone in the villa's hortus now.

There was a white marble bench beside him but he chose to sit on the earth.

'Old habits die hard,' he thought bitterly.

A warm breeze still lingered from the day.

The late afternoon sun should have been hot, but it wasn't.

He didn't feel it, too occupied to care.

He was half-watching the olive trees sway in the breeze.

The familiar marble lion fountain gurgled behind him, but even its sound felt ghostly, like a whisper from another life.

Then came the memory, not of Caligula this time—but of Marcus.

The night before Lepidus was sent off, wearing military garb that didn't quite fit yet.

He heard a whistle, two tones.

It was their implicit signal when calling each other.

It caught Lepidus off guard.

He stopped moving.

He was packing the few remaining clean tunics he had.

He had never told Marcus and Lucius where he lived or anything about his lineage, even though they had been friends for so long.

So Lepidus was quite shocked when he heard the whistle.

He thought hard on what to do.

Exhaling, 'Well, ain't this perfect? I'll have to say my goodbye to them now..'

He went out of his small cubiculum.

He was greeted with the silence of the night.

The moon shone above them.

He saw shadows moving and heard the soft rustle of leaves.

He waited.

Then the sounds and the shadows started to get nearer.

It was Marcus, serious as always, with his shaggy brown hair, and Lucius with his silly grin and freckled face, scratching his neck.

Lepidus's brows lifted.

Marcus motioned for him to come closer.

The pale moonlight caught on his face.

"How did you know where I live?" Lepidus asked, half-curious.

Lucius made a sound and looked at him, but Marcus answered, "It's not important."

His voice was a whisper.

Lepidus stood with his arms folded across his chest. "Really?"

Silence stretched on. 

Then Lucius, unable to keep it in like always, stepped ahead of Marcus.

"Yes, really," Lucius snorted, rolling his eyes. "Well, we knew you.."

His eyes narrowing.

"We've been friends for eight years. You weren't going to say goodbye.."

Then he stopped in front of Lepidus.

Feeling brave.

"Just like how you never told us about your family."

Then he whispered, "You never plan to."

Lepidus and Lucius stared each other down.

"Enough," Marcus snapped. "We didn't come here to argue with each other."

But Lucius did not stop, letting out his own frustrations on their 'friend'.

"It doesn't matter how we knew! We knew! Rome has eyes and ears in the shadows, my friend!"

"Shut up, Lucius," Marcus finally scolded, pulling him behind him.

Then, in gritted teeth, he whispered, "Cool off, will you?"

Still grumbling, Lucius obeyed this time.

Seeing that Lucius walked away and sulkily sat on the ground, Marcus pinched the bridge of his nose and turned to Lepidus.

"Listen…" Marcus continued.

And what followed had cleaved open everything Lepidus thought he understood.

His mother—the soft-spoken woman who smelled of lavender and iron, who told bedtime tales of noble houses and dreams—had not been what she seemed.

"She has Cornelii blood, yes," Marcus had said. "It's the time where people are recruiting those victims of..." he trailed off.

"To be an informant.. a spy," Marcus swallowed.

"But more than that. She worked for us. The Taberna Aureii."

Lepidus blinked. "The what?"

"An organization. A shadow network. We work beneath the senate, beneath the emperor's nose. We keep Rome from eating itself."

He had laughed loudly—hollow—thinking it was a jest, but Marcus hadn't smiled.

"Hold on.. so you already knew me before I knew you?"

He paused.

"Then are you telling me it's not a coincidence that we met? That we became friends?" Lepidus snorted.

"That's..."

Then he stopped moving. His eyes widened.

Remembering how he became friends with Lucius and Marcus.

They have that guilty expression on their face.

"No way..."

Lucius darted his eyes. Marcus closed his.

"Tell me!" Lepidus demanded.

Marcus exaggeratedly inhaled and exhaled.

Then after a while he answered. Opening his eyes.

A strong gust of wind flicked their hairs.

Making it sway.

"Yes.." Marcus finally said. His voice was low.

"How? The slave? Is the slave your doing? You had me purposely robbed? Then save me after?"

Lucius winces. "Not really a great strategy to make friends, but..." he trailed off. 

Discomfort is evident on his face.

Lepidus' laugh even more. But sound empty of joy.

"And you dare spit nonsense Lucius? When we both keep secrets..."

Lucius avoided his eyes.

Tension arose. And the silence stretches on.. 

"You owe me," then Lepidus added. "Big time."

Nerves are showing in his head.

It shows how hard he is suppressing his anger.

"Tell me more about my mother..."

Marcus gulped and in a quiet voice he continued.

"Your mother was the best of us. She's a ghost. She could enter a villa as a servant, a noblewoman, a midwife—no one ever saw the same face twice."

"W-what…" his mind was suddenly racing. Rage half forgotten.

And suddenly, pieces clicked.

Memories flooded back: the strange hours, the perfume masking sweat, the times she came home with a limp she brushed off, a gash on her thigh she blamed on a fall.

That's why he always hugged her tighter, trying to alleviate her pain.

The way she kissed his forehead just a little longer and said she had just come back from the fountain, washing her face.

He'd asked once, as a boy, "Mama, why are you always out at night?"

She'd said, smiling, "I chase the truth, my little lion."

And then she fell ill, too quickly, too violently.

No fever, no cough—just sudden bleeding, bile, confusion.

He had knelt before the matronae and his father, begging them to send for a physician.

"She was poisoned. Same strain they used on Germanicus, that's what father said. They've seen the symptoms before." Marcus continued, there was a hint of pity on his eyes.

He clenched his fist.

Lepidus had carried that like a shard in his chest.

Suddenly one day all her strength was drained from her, leaving her bedridden for months.

He remembered how he buried her, with no ceremony, no name.

Now, eight years later, he clenched his jaw.

Marcus said his mother was not just a half-slave or concubine.

She was an architect of whispers, a guardian of the Roman Republic's soul.

And someone—someone with the power to poison Germanicus had silenced her—had feared her, just as they would have feared Germanicus had he become the emperor.

He was the son of a spy, the half-blood who'd come back.

Laughter from the other side of the gardens pulled Lepidus's mind back from the past.

The sounds were soft, as if preparing for nightfall.

He put his hands over his face and breathed in, as if trying to erase everything he had learned about his mother, his innocent mother.

It eats at him for years.

But she wasn't innocent, not in the way he once believed.

Even though he had learned about her past and her true identity, still—she was his mother.

And in his eyes, that made her innocent enough.

'Why would you do that, Mother? What were you trying to do?'

He suddenly stood up, his steps sure.

He left his father's villa.

The estate cemetery lay quiet beneath the darkening sky, tucked behind olive groves and low stone walls mottled with moss.

The markers were simple—no grand statues here, only worn names chiseled into limestone.

Many were unmarked.

Most were forgotten.

Lepidus stood before a grave with no name, just a small terracotta oil lamp sunk into the soil.

His breath caught as he knelt, fingers grazing the cracked rim.

"Mother," he whispered, voice hoarse.

"It's me. I'm back… your little lion…"

The breeze carried the scent of cypress and old ash.

Somewhere, a bird chirped. It felt blasphemous.

Remembering what Marcus told him about his mother—

'It was during an infiltration. The antidotes did not work. It's a different type of poison.'

He only remembered his mother in fragments now, a quiet woman who moved like a shadow, who came home with dust on her stola and sometimes, blood under her fingernails.

She'd laugh softly when he asked where she went.

"It's nothing," she'd say.

"Just keeping Rome together, for your future."

He hadn't understood then.

He had been too young, too busy pitying himself, too distracted to notice that something was not right with her death.

"I thought you were tired," he murmured, eyes stinging.

"I thought you were weak. But you weren't. You were brave. You were a spy."

He pressed his forehead to the earth.

"Marcus said you gathered secrets like others gathered coins, that you kept peace in this empire of blood and liars. I didn't even know your real name. You only told me to call you 'Mama'."

He thought of her voice—low, calm, unshakable—of how she'd tuck a blade into her belt when she thought he wasn't looking.

On the night she staggered in, coughing black, he'd thought it was a cold.

He hadn't asked.

Guilt twisted in his gut.

"I left. For the army. I didn't want to, but I thought—I thought if I obeyed Father, he'd recognize you, that he'd strip the slave-mark from my name and yours. He said I had to rise through the ranks, that you'd be proud of."

He laughed bitterly.

"Would you be?"

The silence answered.

A tear hit the dry soil.

"I wanted to build a boat to Capri, you know that?" he said.

"To follow someone I care for, someone I want to protect with all I have. I failed. Every one of them sank. Gods, I was stupid."

He sat back, wiping his face with the edge of his cloak.

"You died for Rome," he said.

"But no one remembers. They never will. But I will."

The wind stirred.

He rose slowly, brushing dirt from his knees.

He lingered a moment longer, then turned, shoulders squared.

Something cold and molten had hardened in him.

Lepidus the half-ling, the shadow-son, walked away from the nameless grave with the fire of a legacy under his ribs.

The dust of the road clung to Lepidus's travel-worn sandals as he approached his father's estate.

Four years.

It had been four years since he'd left this place.

Four years since he'd left Rome a grief-stricken sixteen-year-old, forced to confront a world that had suddenly turned monochrome.

He could still feel the hollow ache in his chest..

Then he found himself whispering a name, like a prayer..

"Caligula..."

**