A/N: This was a collaboration between myself (thisisforyou) and my flatmate, now Mr_CSI on AO3. He teaches Classical Studies at a high school, so most of this is historically accurate - in as much as you can ever do with a Sherlock AU. 30/8/13: Just removing typos, author notes and fixing a few inconsistencies and Latin errors.

Rome, 134CE

The noise was overwhelming.

The first round had not yet begun, and still the walls of the stadium shook with screams and cheers; it had quickly become impossible to distinguish the jeers of the young men at the front from the calls and worried screams of the women further towards the back and the babble of excited citizens attempting to be heard over the rest of the noise. The excited atmosphere was so thick one could almost reach out and pluck it from the air.

In the cage below the stands, John Watson bowed his head. It was difficult to clear one's mind in such an atmosphere, but that was often how he worked best. His head hummed with adrenaline until he could barely think of anything but what awaited him outside.

"You nervous, Watson?" one of the others asked, jerking their shoulder forwards to bump his viciously.

John smiled benignly at them. "What have I got to be nervous about?" he replied.

The man smirked cruelly at him; from what John had heard in the pit beforehand, amid sniggers and half-baked insinuations that he himself would not last, he was the most experienced gladiator out there. He was cocky and overconfident, and John had noticed him on the walk to the cages favouring his left ankle. "Sherlock Holmes is out there."

John's heartbeat picked up. Sherlock Holmes. What was he doing here? John was not the only new face on the program today, and the Emperor did not usually make an appearance at any but the greatest, most experienced bouts. And yet – Sherlock Holmes had been Emperor for seven years now, since his father died and his elder brother abdicated, and he had never seemed to take the traditional route in anything. That was a part of why the people loved him.

Even so, John had not heard of him attending the weekly bouts of sparring unless the games had been designed specifically for him; especially not without grand pomp and ceremony announcing his attendance. Something else must have been going on, and John didn't want to be a part of any of it.

"Fine," he said instead, in a tone that plainly meant we're done here. The other man snorted a fragment of mucus from his nose and shifted from foot to foot. It was evident that he had more to say, but John had denied him the opportunity. He let one corner of his thin lips slide upwards in a smirk.

John Watson shook his head and tried to move away, but the bigger man threw out a hand that caught him on the shoulder, the left one, already thick with knotted tissue from a long-ago wound. "He will hate you," the bulky man spat, gobbets of saliva landing at John's feet. "They will all hate you. You used to be one of them, but you chose to be nothing. All because someone put paid to your whore of a wife."

John's mind wandered with startling speed.

Mary, dressed in white and blazing orange like the setting of a thousand suns, none so radiant as the light welling in her eyes framed by painfully scraped-back braids and the ceremonial flammeum flowing in the breeze. Their wedding night, and she so mirthful, so open. Her father's laugh as the priest stumbled over a word. Her own clear, certain voice. Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia. As you are my man, so too am I your woman. The candlelight in the main room of the house they would share, flickering over her face as he reached up to let her braids tumble about her cheekbones, that thick auburn hair he had desired from the day he set eyes upon her and now was his to run his fingers through, to pull her to his chest and relish the sigh and the smile as she leaned against him.

Mary, her delicate hands buried in flour and egg and sesame, white smudged across her cheekbones as she looked up at him; cheeks browned by the sun and reddened by the fire in the hearth, small lips plump from where they had been bitten in exertion and widening into a smile as she saw him in the doorway, shaking the dough from her fingernails as she ran to embrace him, an urge that had become a tradition after many months of happy marriage. John had never wanted anything else.

Mary, her freckly face tinged with tears, her gorgeous curls sticking to her forehead and dark with sweat as the midwife removed the body of their stillborn child. The feel of her body, the heaving of her sobs as he pulled her to him.

Mary, Mary, Mary.

Mary, her blue eyes wide and unseeing, the new sun casting unhealthy shadows on the waxy skin of her once-luxurious cheekbones as it rose above the houses piled on either side of her body, the stench and slip of her blood, so much blood, dark against the filthy dust of the road, the one responsible nowhere to be seen. The sound of his scream as it bounced around the tiny alleyway with nowhere to go.

Mary, the feeling of having betrayed her when the last man who had stood by him stared at him with deep dark eyes and told him to give up, to start a new life.

John Watson raised his eyes at the hulking, muscled gladiator before him and turned away. The man expelled a noise of outrage and disappointment, but he seemed to understand the unspoken message. Save it for the pit.

He knew that this was not what the man had meant, those months ago, when he had spoken of a new life. That the suggestion of beginning anew was not meant to cause him to shrug off the remains of his family and his very rights as a citizen of Rome. But he needed this. The seven months since Mary was murdered and he applied to the district lanista to become a gladiator cleansed his mind and worked his body until it sweated and ached. The infamia that followed men who rescinded their citizenship in such a manner hardly mattered to him when he had nothing left to live for except this: the call of battle, the blood of fallen men. Let the city despise him. Let Sherlock Holmes and all his noblemen spit on him.

And yet…

John had had his own encounters with the Emperor already. Sherlock Holmes was nothing like his father.

The lanista had spoken of man's inherent need to do well, to impress, to better oneself and one's circumstances, all the while staring at John out of the corner of his eyes like he was a perversion of the very fabric of nature.

And yet. He had thought it would not matter whether he did well in the pits, but he did not want to die in front of Sherlock Holmes. In front of Sherlock Holmes, he wanted to do well, to impress. To make an impression on the man, the way his Emperor had made an impression upon him.

Mary, just a child, sobbing in the street; John, barely a man, watching in awe as a dark-haired youth dressed in rich purple lowered a pale hand to stroke her cheek in comfort.

He looked up sharply as the lanista rattled the bars of the cage to call for quiet before stepping in himself, folding his arms until he had ensured that he possessed everyone's attention. Dimmock was small for a lanista, his dark eyes severe as they swept over the fighting men, his bare torso whip-corded with muscle.

"Yes," he said finally, his voice clear and cutting. "The Emperor is in the audience. Show him the respect he is to be afforded, or you may find your dance in the arena shorter than even some of you expected." He lowered his sharp eyes until they found John's. A few of the others sniggered.

The bulky man who had challenged John earlier scuffed his feet against the sand. "Why is his Excellency gracing us with his presence?"

Dimmock's eyes snapped to him. "I have not been informed," he said quietly. "But I believe he is looking to recruit new arenarii for his court. I do not need to tell any of you how much glory this would afford you."

John could not quite stop the thrill from racing down his spine. To be a gladiator in the Emperor's court would mean fighting with men who really understood what they were doing, not men like these, who had survived the pits thus far on instinct and a strong shield arm. He looked back up at the lanista, his hazel eyes burning with determination.

A horn sounded outside the cage.

Shoulders bumped and jostled him as he turned to make his way out into the pit; John's eyes flickered across the men's bodies, highlighting pressure points and major arteries and weak points from rigorous training.

They weren't going to know what hit them.