“Et tu, Brute?” You want to say to keep the timeline intact, but the echoing voices of a hundred men steal the breath from your lips.
Not that you understand anything they say, they are uncoordinated and very obviously not practiced in their chanting, but the point comes across nonetheless.
Brutus, meanwhile, has already pocketed his dagger and looks like the very personification of confusion. He stares with eyes as wide as the fig plate resting on the low table between you, mouth agape, shoulders creeping up toward his ears.
Behind him, the chamber has dissolved into chaos.
The chanting crowd surges forward. They do not move like soldiers, and they certainly do not move like Romans. Some stumble over their togas, and you see more than one who has to wrestle a dagger out of its sheathe before remembering which end is supposed to go into a man.
“Maybe,” you half-scream to make Brutus hear you over the stabbing and screaming, “we should have considered that there are other time travelers.”
Brutus, still trapped in his stupor, can only jerk his head in the universal 'yes' motion. You pat the protective layer of armor covering your upper body, concealed by your white toga, and sigh. You had planned for a lot of options today, trying to stage your killing, maybe possibly even getting killed, but this?
The chanting stops at one point, and you realize faintly that the council members are all dead. You wonder if the timeline will accept this stabbing as a substitute for the stabbing of, well, yourself, that should have happened today.
The chanting dies down at last. The crowd waits expectantly. You clear your throat.
“Et tu, Brute?” you say and look at your son, who tries very hard not to look at the blood puddle making its way toward him.
“Ista quidem vis est,” Brutus answers hoarsely.
Somewhere in the back, one of the time travelers groans.
And you cannot help wondering whether any of those words are ever going to make it into the history books again.
