in which an immortal boy confesses his love for a mortal girl, many times over
NOTE: this story is currently being rewritten to be indie published
☾shortlisted for wattys 2021
☾featured on Wattpad: Teen Fiction → quick fix
☾ featured on Wattpad: His...
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It was 127 years later, and I was still mourning your death. Still remembering the brush of your lips upon my jaw, the pressure of your nimble fingers in my hair. No matter where I went, there you were in my mind. You were with me in every breath.
I won't lie to you. Lots of women came and went.
To be fair, my main hope was that I would find someone who would be able to give me what you did, make me feel how you made me feel. To feel the charged air, tension heightening around us, whispering our hopes into the wide expanse of the thickening night sky.
I felt none of it. Nothing came even close to making me feel the way I did when you were in my arms. I regretted every single one of them, both for their sake and for yours.
I know, I know, my sweet. You wouldn't have wanted me to live with no one for company. You were always the kind of person that expected me to move on from you if you ever left me. And though there was nothing for me on this earth, I wanted to be a better man for you. Be the man who would wait until you came back to me.
But how was I to know you would be back, my love? I had no idea that I would ever lay eyes on you again. So, the women continued their coming and going. Because of this, I felt guilt in the pit of my stomach constantly, eating away at my insides, making me sick. I felt as though I was cheating on you in some capacity, though I recognized that made no sense. You no longer existed. You were alive only in my memory, and even that had become shaky. Every day I remembered less and less of you, and every day it made me more and more upset.
That guilt manifested itself into frustrated rage, and so I lived an angry life, passing from city to city with a sour expression coating my features and a hurricane brewing within. I was out for blood. I wanted everyone who had played a role in your downfall to pay for what they had done. But at this point, they were likely all dead. So my sights turned elsewhere, upon another, even stronger Roman empire.
I decided I was going to hunt down the first Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus. Though I suppose you knew him as Octavian. I had already hated the Roman republic from the moment they had taken you from me. Then I heard how he had forced Cleopatra's children to walk down the streets of Rome like his trophies, parading them up and down the dirt roads in golden chains far too heavy for their small bodies, before pawning them off on his sister, Octavia Minor.
I can't imagine she was much better than him.
To my understanding, Octavian ruled as Roman Consul when Mark Antony declared that the young teen son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Ceasarion, was the King of all Kings, as well as the King of Egypt. This infuriated Octavian greatly, as he felt the title of King of Kings fell to him when his adoptive father and great uncle, Julius Caesar himself, named him his heir.
Octavian began undermining Egyptian rule when he pointed out that Mark Antony's foreign affair with Cleopatra was adulterous, considering his union with Octavian's sister, Octavia. He then declared war on Egypt, defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra's armies and taking their children captive.
