The Centurion's Woman

Chapter 31

CW - more NSFW in this chapter.

ALEX TRIED TO digest the torrent of information she'd finally managed to coax out of her husband once they'd gotten dressed and snuggled back into their cloaks again. Ixillius had confessed, nearly word for word she guessed, the letter that he'd sent to her gigno on top of the litany of over-thinking he'd been doing the past week specifically, and since she'd been sent to Verus in general. She'd been surprised at the frank honesty he'd put into the letter, but figured her gigno would appreciate the bluntness. Sertor was a man who demanded open communication, and had no fear of providing his thoughts on any topic at any time, whether the listener wanted to hear those thoughts or not.

        It was something that Alex had learned to do at a young age, which had gotten her into trouble more than once. Oddly, speaking her mind created tension in her first marriage because Jeremy would have preferred her not to think so much. In her own time, the blunt conversations Alex would have with anyone left her labeled as being brutal and rude. Here and now, curled up in a burrow in the snow with the horses resting nearby, Ixillius had just been refreshingly harsh with what was going on in his thoughts. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed solid conversation.

        He was still waiting for her to reply to his questions and worries, his arms tightening slowly the longer she was thinking. She didn't want to answer quickly, though. She would need to be careful with some of her replies or he would catch that she knew more than she was saying, and then there would be a lot of uncomfortable questions that she didn't know how to answer in a language that he understood, or that she even wanted to answer right now. Actually she didn't want to answer them ever, but figured at some point during the rest of their lives that they would have to talk about the time travel stuff without her switching to Russian or English as she'd been forced to do back at Chlodochar's village. Hopefully with her gigno there as backup so she wouldn't sound crazy.

        First and foremost she needed to reassure Ixillius that she wanted to be with him specifically, and Minerva's 1st in general, as they marched for Illyria. Meeting Lothar and being at the village, that had all been great, but a huge defeat of the Romans was looming closer and closer in the time period she was currently living, and she didn't want to be in that war – the outcome was that her side all died. The fact that Lothar had been returned to his family so young, even more loaded up with Roman military intelligence and training than she'd been at that age, was hard confirmation from her gigno that they all needed to get away from the area as quickly as possible. As well, despite what Ixillius said right now about being fine with deserting and being banished from Rome – totally lying through his teeth, she assumed – Alex figured he would have a very, very hard time living in the village after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest happened. If the two of them weren't simply killed out of association with Rome, he'd be miserable. Alex didn't really care where they were living, to be honest, she just wanted him, and his place was with the Legion.

        Secondly, and the hardest thing in her opinion, she needed her husband to understand that her gigno wasn't going to lay eyes on him and then slaughter him. Alongside Ixillius's name and rank at his retirement, the inscription on his tomb stated 'Chosen Son and Heir of his Wife's Father'. Who the 'Wife's Father' was had been conveniently vandalized off around the same time their longest lived child died. Alex didn't know when the adoption happened, but apparently her gigno accepted her choice of husband well enough to adopt him. Getting Ixillius to believe he would be accepted prior to meeting her gigno was probably going to be impossible without having her momma's report in hand because of all the boogey-man stories about her gigno and grandfather, and believing his own status as below a slave since being disowned. And again, anything she could use as facts to help settle his mind would go back into that time travel conversation that she didn't want to, or know how to, have.