From: "Joshua 'Gargoyle' Trujillo" <gargoyle4@hotmail.com>

Hate it when I forget stuff...

***

Disclaimer:
Evangelion doesn't belong to me or anyone else on this list. Live
with it.
I've borrowed the characters with situations to make a grand story
of love
and betrayal and men in skirts...Er...Togas...Live with it.

C&C, as always, is wanted and welcomed;
gargoyle@glasscity.net
gargoyle9@hotmail.com
or
gargoyle4@hotmail.com
Flames will be sacrificed in the name of Caesar!

Many thanks to me prereaders...Adrian Forest and Dave Menard and
David Anez (sorry about the tilde)...Thanks! ^_^

So...Sit back and enjoy!
Salud!

***

Snow was falling quietly around him. He shrugged against the
mild cold, but really cold, but not really comfortable. He looked
down at the old lady selling her wares. The old lady looked back at
him. The little bazaar where the old woman had her stand was
situated on the northeastern side of the small town. Caeles felt
sorry for the old woman, who sat in the cold air in front of him.
She was guarded against the weather by several layers of material.
The colors had once been bright and cheery, but like the old
woman, faded well past their prime. She muttered something
unintelligible and worked the items around her stand with her
gnarled, bone-white hands. There was worry in her eyes that
Caeles didn't understand. Was she afraid of him? He thought that
he wasn't that intimidating. Perhaps she had caught wind from the
locals about his father. His father, the calm serenity that makes
others fear. The quiet in the night of Rome. The real power behind
the Emperor. Maybe that was why he had been sent to Germania.
To be quietly gotten rid of? But, how had he angered his father?
What did he do-Caeles closed his brown eyes.

...I shall not fear him...

Opening his eyes, he saw that the old lady had turned from him
and looked out across the town to the hills nearby. Caeles followed
her line of sight. A slight chill ran up his spine as he thought he
heard drumbeats. Caeles adjusted the furs that he wore against the
chill in the air of the new year. His tutor had told him that
Germania grew cold quite early and stayed cold late. The old lady
turned back to Caeles quickly and gestured to the display in front
of him. Caeles simply shook his head. The woman probably
wouldn't understand him anyway. Caeles shivered as a slight
breeze picked up. He longed quietly for the warm, wet winters of
his foster home in Campania.

There. In the distance. It was a drumbeat. And another. And
another. A thin column of smoke rose across that same hill. The
old woman let out a small squeak and hurriedly closed down her
little stand. Caeles was startled as hoof beats pounded down
around him with seemingly no warning. He turned and watched as
a Centurion galloped past. The red and bronze of his armor shined
dully in the overcast day, the plume on his helmet bouncing gaily
as he rode along. The horse was similarly arraigned in the red of
the Germanic legions.

"All take cover-All take cover! Barbarians at the pass-Barbarians
at the pass!" he shouted from horseback.

Caeles watched him ride past. He went off towards the column of
smoke and drove his horse faster as he dug his heels in.

"Barbarians?" Caeles asked to himself.

He turned to ask the old woman about it, but she was gone. Her
stand little more than a wooden table, she had taken everything
with her. All around him, the people of the small town in which his
carriage had left him had all taken their leave of him. He wondered
why...Caeles reached into the little leather pouch at his waist. He
withdrew a scrap of parchment that his driver had given him before
leaving. It read -Hope to see you soon, Mistura-. What kind of a
name was that? Mistura? As he had been told, Mistura Kalendis
was a great general in the Northern Legions, almost as great as
Caesar himself. It sounded like a woman's name to Caeles.

Faint sounds began to drift to his ears. Sounds he'd never heard
before. Caeles watched the far hill as several units of the Legion
appeared on the crest. They were the sounds of blood and fire and
hate. They fell before the onslaught of a mass of earthen colored
men, all attired in browns and greens and the black mud of
Germania. Caeles watched as they swarmed over the hill, ever
faster toward the small town. They were the sounds of war.

***

The Fate of Hearts:
An Elsetimes Fanfic of Neon Genesis Evangelion
By
Joshua Trujillo

I - Another World / The Test

***

Caeles watched the hill as the mass of humanity, if you could call
them that, spilled into the narrow valley. They moved so quickly;
it
amazed him to think that they weren't something more like water.
The way they flowed down the hillside and around the trees, it was
quite hypnotic. Caeles began to back away as he realized that the
living mass of barbarians would most likely not hesitate to kill
any
Roman son, much less the son of the Imperial Proconsul. But, it
would be so easy to just watch them as they rolled on. It would be
easy to just give up.

He watched as the horde grew closer. Something in him screamed
at him to run. As the fear began to grow in him, Caeles half turned
and fell, his foot twisted in a root from a nearby tree. The pain
that
shot up through his leg was immediately worse than the thought of
barbarians taking his life. Caeles whimpered impotently. He pulled
himself to his feet and backed away as best he could. The
barbarians were at the end of the village, killing those that they
flushed out of their houses, lighting the rest to the torch. One
crazed creature, hair matted yellow and brown, spotted Caeles and
screamed something in his disgusting native tongue. When he saw
that Caeles was dressed as a Roman, he ran towards the boy. The
brute raised his crude sword high and Caeles closed his own eyes
against the killing blow.

Which never came. There was only a strange gurgling sound.
Caeles cautiously opened his eyes and stared in fascination at the
arrow that was stuck through the massive barbarian. The blood that
trickled slightly out of his mouth was the same color as the plume
on the shaft of the arrow. Red. Roman Red.

The huge man fell dead at Caeles' feet. His own blood was
pounding in his ears and Caeles didn't even hear the hoof-beats as
he was picked deftly up onto a horse, and placed behind the rider.
The riding lessons that his tutor gave him paid off as Caeles
instinctively grabbed hold of the person commanding the horse.
The horse galloped hard for a few minutes and Caeles held on, not
knowing who his savior had been, nor where exactly they were
going, but when he did open his eyes again, he saw the forest
around him ablaze. Arrows of fire rained down around the
galloping steed as they raced to wherever they were racing.

Barbarians fell to the wayside, sometimes crunching under the
hooves; sometimes the person controlling the horse would swing a
sword through his line of sight, which would cleave easily the head
of the barbarian they were passing. Caeles wondered at that. He
thought that he should feel nauseous or at least disgusted by the
horrific sights around him, but he couldn't bring himself to worry
about these creatures. They attacked first, did they not? They
refused to be led under the glorious banner of Rome, so they must
be the traitorous savages that he'd always been taught about. And,
as if to satisfy his own mind, one of them would most definitely
have killed him, had it not been for this brave fellow on
horseback.
Caeles held on tight, closed his eyes and tried not to imagine the
horrors on the other side of his eyelids.

The bounce of the horse was enough to keep Caeles' attention, as
the land seemed to sometimes drop out from underneath them. He
tried to hang on, but the horse was wet with blood, or sweat or
something else and while Caeles tried not to think about it, his
grip
around the waist of the warrior in the saddle remained firm. The
sounds of the battle around him grew more and more quiet, fast
fading into the background. The speed of the animal didn't seem to
slow, but around them the quiet of the forest came back. The
sounds of the trees whipping past them, along with the undulating
horse under him combined to lull Caeles into a state of semi-
consciousness.

Images. They were images that he knew. His foster parents,
provincial governors in Campania, always too busy to be bothered
with someone else's child. But, he reminded himself, they were
kind in their own ways. They provided him with everything he
wanted and he had a great time learning all about the glory of
Rome and her people and her past and...Other things. The other
children didn't understand, they were too busy pretending that they
were Julius Caesar, while Caeles was learning about what made
Caesar the man he was. He did have a friend though, who enjoyed
learning about all the old military campaigns as much as Caeles.
He missed him.

Caeles was jolted back to the present as the horse slowed. A
female voice brought the horse up and he fully stopped. Caeles
opened his eyes and looked around the warrior. A woman with
kind eyes took the reigns from the warrior and smiled as she saw
Caeles. She was quite pretty, actually. He blushed and returned a
shy smile. He looked around the compound. Many tents of
different colors held a general row of about thirty-five or so.
Legionnaires and Centurions walked to and fro, some led horses,
and some led dogs. He could hear the sounds of iron on an anvil in
the distance somewhere. Caeles was impressed for the size of the
camp. A tap on his wrist brought his attention back and he let the
soldier his hands were around help him from the horse.

The soldier dismounted after and walked into a large tent before
Caeles could thank him. He quietly supposed that the man had
things he needed to report and Caeles supposed that his thanks to
the man could wait. Caeles turned back to the woman. About the
same height as the soldier, but with short brown hair that fell
about
her face, making her blue eyes quite round.

"If you would, please?" she said, gesturing to a nearby tent, "My
name is Certus Penator. I am the personal adjutant to the general."

"Caeles Soter," he replied.

The pain in his foot began to grow, but Caeles tried to ignore it
as
he stepped through the folds of the brownish tent to the darkness
on the other side. The center was cleared away and at the far end
of
the tent was a large table. On the table rested perhaps hundreds of
parchments of all types and sizes. Caeles was quiet as the man
standing over them stopped writing and looked up. He wore his
gray hair flat and close to his scalp, like an old soldier and he
had
the look about him that he'd spent too many winters in Germania.
He sighed out, his gaunt features looking older than when Caeles
had entered the tent. He motioned Caeles to the table and pointed
to the map nearest the middle of the table.

"Look at them."

Caeles started at the sudden intrusion to the quiet. The man's
voice
belied his apparent age, hiding a force that Caeles hadn't heard
all
that often. The only source of light was the flickering of an oil
lamp nestled somewhere on the table. He pointed to the maps again
and Caeles examined them. The map in the center of the table,
nearest the lamp, showed a pair of hills situated in the midst of a
small valley. Marks on the map along both hillsides were that of
Roman legions holding earthworks. A large area of blue to the
north of the hills seemed to mark the adversary. The lines of the
valley swept up and while Caeles hadn't seen that very often, it
normally meant that the walls of the valley were impassable.

"Well?" the man asked again, "What do you make of them?"

"Kopos neck."

"Hm?"

"Something I learned from the campaigns of Caesar in Gaul,"
Caeles replied as he continued to wonder about the placing of the
soldiers along the hills.

"Very well," the man said, "What would you do then?"

Caeles looked up from the map. The man had folded his long arms
across his chest and waited expectantly. Was he asking for advice?
He looked like a general or some other higher up in the military,
why would he need the advice of a schoolboy? Caeles thought for
a minute. Something came to him...

"Assuming that the army here can keep the battlements on the
hills," he began, unsteadily, "Take a cavalry charge down the other
end of the valley and drive the enemy down between the hills and
into the arms of the Legions below."

"The foxes to the hunters," a voice said from the darkness to
Caeles' right.

The voice! It sent shivers up his spine. So smooth...Like thunder
over the sea on a summer's night. Caeles strained in the darkness
of the tent to see the owner of that voice, but whoever it was
faded
just as quickly back into the blackness. The old soldier cleared
his
throat, which brought Caeles's attention back around. Caeles
gulped.

"And if we can't hold those hills?" he asked.

Caeles thought for a moment.

"Then set a line of catapults here, here," Caeles said, pointing to
places on the map, "And here."

The old man looked at the places to which Caeles pointed and
nodded slowly.

"Thank you, my young friend," he smiled, "Certus?"

She stepped out of the shadow near the entrance to the tent to
stand
beside Caeles. Certus nodded back to the entrance and ushered a
confused Caeles out. The flap thudded dully as the tent was folded
into the dark once more; only the flame from the lamp on the table
provided any illumination. The old man stared at the entrance for
another minute.

"He acts like his father," the female voice said again.

The old man turned to his right. Into the small lamplight stepped a
woman. Skin smooth and light like milk, her arms bare and the
collar of the cloak she wore flirting with the skin above her
breasts.
Her blue eyes shined brightly from under brown locks that seemed
to be too plain for her, like she should have been born of another
hair color. She folded one arm under the other and stared into the
goblet he hadn't even noticed. More wine, probably. She was not
one to be without it these days. The old man straightened and
thought more on the child of Soter.

"His mind is sharp and uncluttered," he said flatly, "He'll work
fine."

A bright sliver of laughter erupted from the woman.

"Will he now?" she chirped, "We'll see..."

She wandered back into the darkness of the tent and the old man
snorted. He dipped a small, worn stylus into the ink and scribbled
down a couple of his thoughts on a scrap of parchment. Looking
around the table a moment, he picked up a small bell and gave it
three sharp rings. Not half an instant later, the tent flap flipped
up
and a young man entered and bowed quickly.

"To General Kalendis," the old man said, handing the courier the
scrap of parchment.

The man bowed again and took off running. The tent flap smacked
shut again and the old man sat into his chair. He felt heavy, worn
down. And the young man he saw today made him feel old. A tear
fell for the boy, Caeles, for what he must endure. And the tear
fell
for his own role in it all.

"Why Effero?" he asked of the air, "Why does it have to be your
own son?"

***

Joshua "Gargoyle" Trujillo
"Stone Cold Protector of the Righteous"
"Owner of The Anime Bar & Grille - Type without Pants!"

Come visit The Anime Bar & Grille!
Now with two locations!
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/1509
and
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/museum/1275