Can you write a fanfic about Italy and Romano post Ancient Rome's death? That pain, state of grief and feeling of loneliness they had before being conquered by other nations?
I'm not sure what follows is really what you asked for anon, but here is a fic about the death of Rome and how his sons cope with that.
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titanomachy
The titan is born a wolf-pup. As the Roman Empire he has two shadows. After his death, he leaves behind two heirs.
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Joppolo, 480 AD
The titankiller is much smaller than Romano anticipated.
Romano had imagined Rome’s end to be wrought by someone equally vast and terrible. Romano had imagined a giant with one-hundred arms and eyes like galaxies rising from the sea on his hippocampus mount, uprooting olive trees to swing like great clubs.
Or maybe the titankiller would have disguised himself as a cupbearer, slipping poison into Rome’s wine to make him double over and disgorge all the disparate conquered lands and wealth he had swallowed, dirt and gold pouring from his mouth. And when Rome’s stomach was empty the titankiller would have stuck him through. [1] He knows that the people who sacked the city of Rome kept their hair long, and Romano had expected the titankiller to drag a train of golden tresses behind him. [2]
But the supposed titankiller is shorter than him, with a short crop of coppery brown hair and a faint smear of dry snot under his nose. The general next to him nudges him and the titankiller stumbles forward a step out of the gloom of the house, twisting his hands together.
“Go on, he won’t bite,” the man prompts.
Reluctantly, the titankiller approaches him, sniffing and wiping his nose on the back of his hand. He looks around at the houses and beyond at the sea, and the broken shells scattered across the tilled earth of the garden, as if he has not seen Romano. He stops in front of him and fiddles with the hem of his tunic.
“Hello,” he says. His accent is northern and Germanic leaning, but very clearly Latinate.
“Hello,” Romano mumbles.
“They said to say hello.”
“Ok.”
The titankiller scuffs the dirt with his shoe.
“What do you represent?” He asks.
Romano shrugs and gestures at the houses behind him. “The people here, I think.” He had been living in the small town of Joppolo for a while now, at least two generations. Rome had told him to stay in Calabria and to be good until he returned, ruffling his hair and leaving him with an armful of gold solidi which he’d pulled from the strings of his calf.
“I’ll be back soon to hear about your studies, ok? You must learn how to run a household Romano” Rome’s strong hands leave his field of vision as he stands.
Romano sniffs miserably, looking at the ground. “How long will you be this time?”
Above him Rome sighs, a great gust of wind borne down from the mountains. “I don’t know, not long though. You must pray to God that it will not be long.”
“I will,” Romano promises viciously. He will ask God every day to send a plague to the barbarians so that Rome can come back and free him from calculus and laundry and take him back to the city of Rome, back to heated baths and personal attendants to wash him and a litter to carry him around the streets. Back to the colosseum to watch Rome rip apart captured barbarian gladiators with his bare hands and eat their hearts.
As Rome leaves the sunlight seems to bend and follow him, and his two shadows dance and tumble and strike at invisible enemies across the walls like painted ceramic figures. The last Romano sees of him is his broad silhouette against the midday sun.
Rome never comes back. Romano receives the news by a missive sent to the patrician of the house he is staying in that Rome is dead. No details are given, nothing but Romano’s imagination to fill in the gaps. He sits in the walled garden and waits to feel anguish, despair, remorse, and whatever the tragedies proscribed for the death of a father. But he feels nothing. And then he feels angry about feeling nothing. He rubs his eyes until they are red and daubs water from the garden onto his cheeks before returning to the house, and the patrician pets his blotchy face and murmurs words of sympathy. He pulls Romano into his embrace and feeds him a honey cake when Romano asks for it. Later Romano overhears him advising the governors of Joppolo to keep paying taxes and obedience to the new barbarian in Ravenna.
“Yes, you’re from here,” the titankiller says impatiently. “But what are you?” His voice pitches up petulantly at the end of the question.
Romano shrugs self-consciously.
The titankiller draws himself up and puffs out his skinny chest in a show of confidence like the generals. “Well, I am the Kingdom of Italy.” [3]
Romano frowns. “What, all of it?”
“That’s what my king says.”
Romano isn’t sure how much weight that carries, given the tribes seem to fall out with each other every decade.
The titankiller reaches out his hand. “Would you like to kiss it?”
Romano’s jaw grits instantly because he recognises the titankiller’s signet ring. It is Rome’s signet; a wolf’s head wrought in burnished gold. It has been sized down to fit the other’s spindly fingers, and the seal is absurdly large against his bony knuckle. He is struck by a sudden pang of strong jealousy. But the titankiller is looking at him expectantly so he dutifully presses his lips to the cold lifeless metal.
Pleased, the titankiller closes his eyes and clasps his hands in front of himself in prayer. “I pray for his glory in Heaven,” he says in a flat, monotone voice, as if repeating a taught passage. “The empire lives on in my heart and in the heart of my king. Rome is eternal, and his kingdom passes onto the son of the father. He will be remembered as Romulus the martyr. Amen.” [4]
“Amen,” Romano echoes distantly. Rome never mentioned a son to him.
The titankiller opens his eyes and smiles brightly. “I will look after you like he did, I promise!”
Romano is fairly certain the other is younger than him. “Aren’t you too small to be the New Rome?”
The titankiller visibly deflates. “I’ll get bigger.”
Romano gnaws on his lip. “And what will I be?”
The other ruminates for a moment. “Maybe you could be Italy too?”
“Really?” Romano likes the thought of being Italy and he brightens, Rome forgotten.
“You could be the south of my kingdom; I could share it?” The titankiller offers, which seems remarkably generous given the circumstances.
“Would we be brothers?” Romano asks hopefully, because it’s very lonely to be a boy who doesn’t age like the humans do.
The titankiller smiles brightly. “Yes, I suppose so.” He hesitates for a second and then rests one hand on Romano’s shoulder. He must stretch a little to reach.
Romano matches him and he’s smiling widely, happy to have a new brother. Like Romulus and Remus, he thinks. The titankiller giggles and its infectious, and they end up laughing together at nothing.
He has two wooden swords in his room, and he’d like to share them with his new brother. “Do you want to play Trojans and Greeks?” Romano grins.
Milan, 1 May 1945
“I didn’t kill him.”
Romano finally lights the cigarette and inhales with a grunt. “Yeah, I know you didn’t. They strung him upside down after they shot him.” [5]
Feliciano huffs. “I wasn’t talking about him.”
Romano blows out a big gust of air. “Who then?”
“Rome.”
The night suddenly feels much colder and quieter, despite the distant sound of music and revelry. There is a young man singing operatically somewhere in the distance. He frowns, looking across at his brother who is propped against a wall. “Rome?”
Feliciano is looking skywards, as if waiting for the titans to descend again. “Yeah. It wasn’t me. I thought…since it’s all going to change now…you should know.”
Romano waits to feel something. Relief, solace, anger, or whatever the mysteries proscribed for the revelation of hidden truth. But he feels nothing. Perhaps he’d known, deep down all along, that Feliciano wasn’t a titankiller. He’d always had the softer heart of them both.
He taps his cigarette and takes another drag. “Who was it then? Austria?” There aren’t many nations in Europe old enough to have killed Rome, but Austria is one of the oldest of them. Romano has caught him lost in memories a couple of times, staring blankly into the middle distance at something that isn’t there anymore, his skin shifting and losing form like he’s about to melt back into the ground. The imperial eagle is still his badge. [6]
Feliciano shrugs self-consciously. “Don’t think so. I don’t know if anyone did kill him.”
Romano frowns. “What he just keeled over? Had a bad oyster? Twenty-three knives to the back?”
The joke lands flat between them. A dog barks across the town.
“I never met him,” Feliciano admits quietly.
“What? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you did,” Romano snorts. Any suggestion to the contrary is laughable.
“No, I didn’t.”
Romano gapes at him.
“You…You were the Kingdom of Italy. In his image. You fashioned yourself after him in perfect replica for centuries. You were his heir!” He straightens his stance. “What do you mean you never met him?”
“I mean. I never met him,” Feliciano’s eyes flash in the dark. “He was gone before I crawled out of the ground at Ravenna.”
“What, and they just crowned you Rome reincarnate?” Romano snaps.
“I didn’t ask for that!” Feliciano snaps back, finally meeting his gaze and they are so alike in so many ways that even after all these centuries it is still a little uncanny to look into his own face. “I didn’t ask for that inheritance.”
“But…” Romano is lost for words, but he has to object. He must. “Why claim it then. Why say for all these years…that was…” Romano growls and turns away.
Centuries of brothers and sisters have come and gone. City-states, duchies, Benevento, Sicily, Venice. All of them parts of Italy but none of them truly Rome’s sons and daughters. He and Feliciano are the first and the last. And Feliciano has always been Rome’s real heir. Has worn his lupine signet ring for centuries. Has conquered and been conquered in the name of the imperium. That was supposed to be me!
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I would!” he explodes. “I actually met him! I shared bread with him! I was…” Romano throws his hands in the air in aggravation. “What do you mean you never met him!?”
“I. Never. Met him!” Feliciano’s voice raises in aggravation, and he jerks his head away, looking out across the harbour to the sea with wetness in his eyes. “I was born from his death.”
Silence settles because how is he supposed to respond to that? Centuries of preconceptions are crumbling around him like the very ruins of Rome’s material legacy embedded in their shared cities.
Romano shudders and takes another drag of his cigarette to occupy his trembling hands. “I thought…”
“I’m sorry,” Feliciano whispers and his lip trembles too. The silence resettles oppressively.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” He pleads. The Kingdom of Italy is a second-rate great power and his brother’s reputation as the titankiller is the only thing that has guaranteed him respect over the centuries.
Romano breathes out heavily. “How did you do it? I mean…you fooled me and I knew him.”
“It wasn’t hard.”
He bristles.
“Be honest, could you describe his face?” Feliciano looks back, his tone earnest and insistent. “I mean really describe him. Did you ever dare to even look up?”
“Feli.” He warns.
“You couldn’t, could you? How could you? He was barely one of us, let alone human. I heard enough stories. He was part dirt and fire, part star and sunlight, part olive tree and grape vine. He could eat enough for one hundred men and not feel full. He could march for forty days and forty nights without tiring. He could pull gold from his skin. He had two shadows!” Feliciano’s voice trembles as he describes Rome exactly as Romano remembers him, hands gesturing in front of his face.
“Rome was more than the person. He was a myth. A titan who fell out of the sky! There was no story I could have told or face I could have invented that people wouldn’t have believed. And I told the stories so many times that I felt like I really did know him myself.”
He slumps, as if exhausted. “Because everyone thinks they know Rome. Even though most of us never met him. Except…” he points at Romano. “You.”
There’s a lump in his throat and he tries to take another drag of the cigarette to break it up which only makes him cough.
“Yeah, well. I didn’t really know him either,” he mutters gruffly. He remembers a pair of broad hands over his gently teaching him how to plant grape vines.
He flicks the end of the cigarette and grinds it under his boot.
“Do you miss him?”
“No,” Romano answers quickly.
Feliciano hesitates, and in a very small voice asks. “Did you kill him?”
The question should make him angry, but it doesn’t. “No.”
And that’s it.
With the cigarette finished Feliciano peels himself off the wall and they walk back towards the open bar and drunken celebrations.
Between them they have two shadows.
Ravenna, 476 AD [7]
Imperial Rome steps out of the garrison into the afternoon sunlight. The heat is warm, soothing, like being dipped in a heated bath. His two shadows are short, close to his heels, curling lethargically like old faithful dogs. He stretches out a hand and one of his shadows sleepily slinks up his side to twine between his fingers, leaving a cast of dust and sand over his skin. He walks out into the surrounding grounds, and ahead of him rolling hills and vineyards tumble over each other dotted with cypress and a herd of horses grazing placidly. Beyond them the wild pine forest glows orange in the afternoon haze, ancient and eternal.
Behind him a row of olive trees quivers, turning towards him devotedly. The nearest stretches out a branch and pets his hair, and the back of Rome’s neck aches for the comforting rasp of a wolf’s tongue.
The longing makes his bones ache and he can feel his form tremble, parts of his titan body disintegrating into dust and flecks of gold and olive stones. He sinks to his knees in the soft earth, and the grass welcomes him with like a mother. Strands grow and twine around his ankles. Something compels him to pull his tunic over his head, leaving him bare to the golden sunlight. He also casts off his signet ring, dropping it carelessly at his side. Heat prickles at his skin, but the grassy earth is so cool, and the olive branches are cradling his head, and his two shadows are wrapping around him like a swaddle. His slippery mind clings to the memory, for a moment, of a young boy, barely up to his knee, waiting for him in Joppolo, and he wonders whether he should fight the urge to disappear into the earth.
But Romulus is so tired.
He misses Remus. He misses his brother. He aches for the comfort of home in a dark hollow and the comforting warmth of a mother against his downy pup coat, black as shadow. He aches for the peace of spending his first waking hours alive watching the stars emerge in a glittering spray across the heavens.
From the direction of the forest there is the faint cry of a wolf, a sonorous howl guiding him home. He lets his hands drop into the earth—it smells like it will rain—and he lets go.
A few hours later King Odoacer finds a boy covered in dirt plucking olives from the low hanging branches of the garden and gorging on them. He has a short crop of coppery brown hair and a bloody wolf pelt wrapped around his shoulders.
Historical notes
[1] There are a lot of mythological references in here. In short, Jupiter (Zeus) frees the hundred-handed giants from Tartarus and revolts against his father, the titan god of the universe Saturn (Cronus). Saturn ate Jupiter’s brothers and sisters (Pluto (Hades), Neptune (Poseidon), Juno (Hera), Ceres (Demeter), and Vesta (Hestia)) as godlings, fearing they would take his power from him, and Jupiter only survived by the trickery of his mother the earth goddess Gaia who fed Saturn a swaddled stone instead.
Jupiter sneaks an emetic into Saturn’s drink which makes him disgorge the fully grown godlings, and Saturn is defeated which ushers in the new Olympian age of the pantheon of Gods familiar to most readers from Greek and Roman mythology. The war between these gods is called the Titanomachy, hence the title of this fic. The repeated theme is the defeat of the father at the hands of the son.
[2] The Germanic people of late antique Europe kept their hair longer than their Roman counterparts.
[3] Again, far too much to unpack here, but essentially the Roman empire starts splintering in the 5th century. The city of Rome was sacked in 410 AD and again in 455 AD by Germanic tribes including the Visigoths, Vandals, and Ostrogoths, and this really marks the beginning of the end. The eastern and western portions of the Roman empire survive as separate administrative entities until 476 AD. In this year the Germanic officer and statesman Odoacer coups and deposes Romulus Augustulus, the last ‘true’ emperor of the Western Roman Empire. Odoacer styles himself king of Italy, subordinate to the Eastern Roman emperor (which is better known later as the Byzantine empire), and the Roman power structures and culture are maintained very much the same as they had been before. This ‘Kingdom of Italy’ is a short-lived entity, and by the end of the 6th century it’s been splintered again, partly under Byzantine control, and a lot of it gets conquered by the Lombards into individual duchies and kingdoms, splitting Veneziano and Romano up into separate entities at either end of the Italian peninsula.
Romano represents the people of Calabria (later an official duchy and eventually the kingdom of Naples), and Feliciano I think has to represent something like ‘the spirit of unified Italy’ borne from the death of Rome at Ravenna at the beginning of his life for the chronology to work. He is under Byzantine rule for a bit, then Lombard and Frankish rule, and gradually his identity solidifies as the city-state/duchy of Milan, and other younger personifications pop up around the peninsula representing the smaller states and duchies.
Milan is a very prosperous duchy under various forms of control until the nineteenth century and is kind of ground zero for the rebellion against Habsburg rule that results in the recreated unified Kingdom of Italy on 17 March 1861. It is also in Milan where Mussolini is strung up towards the end of World War 2, which is a poignant round circle moment for the death of the second Italian Empire. See note [5]. This strays from canon because Hima has sort of implied that Feli was Venice, but this just doesn’t make a lot of sense when you go back as far as Ancient Rome (to me at least) and hey I can do what I want.
[4] Just to briefly note that the later Roman Empire is a Christian entity, and it converts from paganism in the mid-4th century.
[5] The fascist dictator of Italy during World War 2, Benito Mussolini, was captured and executed by partisans on 28 April 1945. They took his body back to Milan and strung him upside down in front of an angry crowd. Milan was characterised in the days that followed by spontaneous street parties and revelry celebrating the fall of fascism. I’m treading fairly lightly here given the historical context, so you can choose to interpret Feliciano and Romano’s role in all this however you like.
[6] Still feeling out my interpretation of Austria, but if I go with my idea of him representing roughly the lands and people around the Danube then he is one of the oldest (potentially the oldest) in Europe.
[7] Ravenna is where King Odoacer was formally made King of Italy in 476 AD (See note [3]), marking the traditional ‘end’ of the Western Roman Empire. It’s nowhere near the alleged birthplace of Romulus and Remus near Rome, but hey let the narrative live. Romulus and Remus were mythical human-twin figures suckled by a she-wolf who went on to found Rome, but the sources are so old that it’s hard to say where the story comes from. Romulus is the one to found Rome, and he kills his brother because they disagree over where the city should be (the Palatine or the Aventine hill).
I’ve diverged from the myth and imagined a Rome origin story where his first body was an actual wolf, embodying some kind of primordial titan soul of the earth and sky that predates the nations.
I managed to get SOME free time finally but I'm still trying to get out of art block so I only have a simple reference drawing :9 (i still love her smm)
